A Little Fifth Birthday Surprise, Pt. 2
The Dot and Line would have been five today. So we're sending you writing some of our former writers and editors thought you might like to see in your inbox.
Hey, y’all! Miss us? Because we missed you. So we decided to put together an off-the-cuff newsletter for our fifth anniversary. Two, actually—as usual, we wrote too many words, so this is the second of a pair of missives. Thanks for reading!
Lick Your Lips for Over the Garden Redwall
A menu for a forthcoming harvest feast.
By John Maher
Lovers of the fantastic and strange and anthropomorphic, rejoice! Raise your mugs o’ strawberry cordial and cups o’ health tea, ye befurred or befated travelers! A lit lantern shines o’er the Mossflower Woods and chittering of woodland creatures great and (mostly) small rings out o’er the Unknown, for Patrick McHale is on his way to Redwall Abbey as a seer o’ old mayhaps did foretell! So queue up the olden tales and get ye to the kitchen. We’re plannin’ a menu for the feast day, whene’er that day may come!
Starters
Sweet potato fritters drizzled with sugar beet molasses
Clay-baked frogs’ legs marinated in meadowcream
Soup and Salad
Dandelion greens and chopped hazelnut and celery salad with shaved pale gold nutcheese and a raspberry reduction
Wild leek and beetroot soup
Main Course
Fisher fish (or, fine, grayling) à la Redwall: pan-fried in edelwood oil (or another kind of oil if you, like many of Redwall Abbey’s inhabitants, are a pescatarian) and braised in white elderberry wine with rosemary, thyme, beechnuts, and garlic, then slathered in fresh honeyed cream with mint leaves
Desserts and Cheeses
Pumpkin pudding tart
Sugared chestnuts and walnuts
Candied cherries, ginger, and citron peels
Soft white and hard yellow nutcheeses both
Beverages
October Ale and nutbrown beer
Gooseberry and elderberry wines
Strawberry, buttercup and honey, and dandelion and burdock cordials
Wild plum brandy
Black tea oiled with bergamot rind
Teas of peppermint and chamomile and other healthful herbs
Living Through The Last Unicorn
The Rankin/Bass classic reads as a gender journey.
By Katie Bohri
When I try to get someone to watch The Last Unicorn with me, I pitch it as the single most important film I have ever seen. A movie that’s charming and funny and beautiful and heartbreaking; one that you can watch as if you were a little kid simply enjoying a fairy tale or analyze closely, squeezing deeper meaning from each frame. Understandably, these friends are confused and underwhelmed by the time the credits roll, and so I have learned that I should only speak to my own relationship to it.
Repeated viewings of the 1982 Rankin/Bass cult classic etched its 90 minutes of animation into my brain like screen burn-in on the old Zenith TV in my childhood living room. The Topcraft animation varies in quality from scene to scene, with some scenes janky and sketchy and others sparklingly detailed and smooth in a way that prefigures the work of Studio Ghibli, which members of Topcraft would go on to form. But that doesn’t matter one bit to me, to whom it is perfect.
We rented it many times from the Schnecksville IGA, which dedicated a modest corner of its footprint to VHS rentals, and paid enough overdue fines that my mom finally purchased the store copy so that I could watch it, rewind it, and watch it again as many times as I wanted. On nights when I could not fall asleep, I would tell myself the story, scene by scene, until drowsiness overcame my overactive brain and fear of the dark.
I’ve since owned the movie in many formats, revisiting it whenever I felt the need to be around something comforting and familiar. It always feels relevant to the very thing I’m experiencing in the moment, revealing new lessons to me like a religious text. Peter S. Beagle, author of the original novella and adapted screenplay, has said that it was a fairy tale that was also a spoof on fairy tales—not a grand allegory for women’s suffering, for puberty, for navigating the harsh realities of an unjust world ruled by greed, or for living through environmental collapse.
Now, in 2021, as the pandemic has put me in closer acquaintance with my own reflection than with a society that polices my gender performance, my most recent rewatch has turned it into a remarkable work concerning gender identity.
The film’s plot centers around the titular unicorn, who learns from hunters passing through her enchanted forest that she is the last of her kind. Unable to believe this or to bear the loneliness of it, she leaves the safety of her forest to find the rest of the unicorns. She learns from a butterfly that they passed down all the roads long ago, and that she can find them if she is brave. Along the journey she is captured, transformed into a human, and told who she is and is not by the characters she encounters.
The unicorn/Lady Amalthea is a nesting doll of gender performance. When a farmer tries to catch her, he calls her a “pretty old mare,” making her conclude that “if men no longer know what they're looking at, there may well be other unicorns in the world yet—unknown—and glad of it.” When captured and caged in Mommy Fortuna’s Midnight Carnival, a magic spell forces her to wear a fake horn that anyone can see, whether they truly believe in unicorns or not. Later, when she is transformed into a human, she cries that she can feel the human body dying around her.
The unicorn remains human for so long that the contradictions of her performance become deeply burdensome. She begins to lose sight of her quest to find and free the unicorns, wishing she could stay a woman and marry the human Lir and forget that unicorns ever existed. She knows that, once she is free and has liberated all the other unicorns, she will forever be different from them.
I wonder if Beagle really didn’t know he was writing something about trans identity, especially when he writes lines like this one that King Haggard shouts at the Lady Amalthea while a boiling sea crashes around them: “There is no movement of yours that has not betrayed you! A pace, a glance, a turn of the head, the flash of your throat as you breathe... even your way of standing perfectly still—they were all my spies!”
Finding out I wasn’t alone in my shifting gender identity has made me lonelier—surely, there are others like me out there. Perhaps I can find them, if I am brave.
In Form and Moving
A love letter to animation.
By Marley Crusch
The last thing I wrote for D+L was a series of love letters. This is another, to animation itself.
I realize how this sounds. Oh, a writer for an ANIMATION site loves ANIMATION? Shocker, I know! But personally, I feel like I've found a new appreciation for the medium lately.
Between reading The Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt, which brilliantly explores the stories (and sexism) that helped shape the industry, and descending back into my webcomic obsession to find that Tracy Butler and Iron Spike have teamed up to create an animated Lackadaisy short (completely justifying the amount of time I've spent obsessing over both creators), I've found new depths to my love of cartoons past, present, and future.
This reinvigorated passion has inspired me to try my hand at animating myself. I’m not good at it yet, but even the simple sequences I can create blow my mind. Creating motion from still pictures feels like magic. Not only does it allow me to fully appreciate the craft, but it confirms for me that the animated works I love so much are true masterpieces.
Isn't this what we've been talking about the whole time? In form and moving, how express and admirable! And what better way to capture that than with cartoons? They take the world we know and make it realer than real, with exaggerated movements and expressions that result from squash and stretch. They spur the invention of brand new technologies, like the multiplane camera, solely to lend scenes more depth, and techniques, like “the blend,” to diffuse a blush over a character’s cheek. They breath vibrant life into this all too often dull and colorless world.
It’s the closest thing we have to alchemy. Through careful effort, even the simplest dots and lines can beautifully transform into, in the words of Aaron Blaise, “a caricature of life itself.”
The stories are the reason these shows and movies exist, but the brilliance of the medium should never be underestimated. Even if I’m watching something I’m not a fan of (and, for the sake of reviewing, that does happen), I still find myself dazzled by the fluidity of movement.
Exploring the history and technique of animation has let me rewatch old favorites with a renewed sense of wonder. It’s also made me that much more impressed by new works—like my latest obsession, Long Gone Gulch—and excited about the technicolor future of toons.
But most importantly, during these tough times, it’s served as a reminder that there’s always beauty to be found—so long as you know where to look.
Aaaaand…that’s all, folks! (One more time.)
Thanks so much for reading our surprise reunion newsletter. Be in touch.
Love,
The Dot and Line