Mr. Fox » ALI SHAW

A List for 2010 – Obake

A List for 2010, Mr. Fox, Recommendations Comments Off

Dec 212010

I’ve only just discovered a gem of an exhibition, Japanese Ghosts and Demons, which fills but one small room of Oxford’s giant Ashmolean museum. Nevertheless, its seventeen prints contain such a fantastic mix of the grotesque, the cute and the comic that I’ve decided to squeeze the creatures they depict into my list for 2010.

This is an exhibition about obake, which are a diverse group of beings from Japan unified by a single characteristic: they are all transformative, beings who have broken the laws of constancy to shift or metamorphose into something else. The Japanese culture and language magazine, Mangajin, carries an engaging article about obake on its website which, despite being unrelated to this exhibition and written several years ago, could comfortably appear alongside the prints in the gallery. I’d also strongly recommend the section of it which touches on foxes.

The Mangajin article’s author, Tim Screech (professor of Japanese Art History at the University of London), explains obake far better than I ever could.

Obake, the Japanese “ghost,” is exactly what its name suggests: o is an honorific prefix, while bake is a noun from bakeru, the verb meaning “undergo change.” Japanese ghosts, then, are essentially transformations. They are one sort of thing that mutates into another, one phenomenon that experiences shift and alteration, one meaning that becomes unstuck and twisted into something else. Obake undermine the certainties of life as we usually understand it.

You might have guessed that I find transformations and metamorphoses endlessly fascinating. My favourite one on show in the Ashmolean exhibition can be seen in the wonderfully titled Nikushi the Frog Spirit Conjures up a Magical Battle of Frogs at Tateyama in Etch? Province. The fighting frogs in question are stones transformed by Nikushi into battle-hardened amphibeans, armed to the teeth with bulrushes and lily stalks.

Clicking either of the above images will take you to the relevant pages of the Ashmolean’s site, where you can zoom in and explore the rest of the prints in the exhibition to your heart’s content. This link will take you to the exhibition’s contents page. There is much to admire, but make sure you don’t miss a landscape haunted by the ghosts of a warlord’s victims.

If you like the look of all this, then there are more obake haunting the Internet. Wikipedia has some digitised illustrations from the 1776 bestiary Gazu Hyakki Yak?, or The Illustrated Night Parade of A Hundred Demons. This was Toriyama Sekien’s definitive catalogue of obake and other wondrous creatures. Here’s a close-up of the Yamabiko, an echo monster from the mountains.

And here’s the Tenome, an obake with eyes in its hands. It reminds me of the second scariest monster from Guillermo Del Toro’s astounding Pan’s Labyrinth, the Pale Man.

I’m sure some of the creatures from Gazu Hyakki Yak? will be reappearing on the blog in the New Year. To coincide with the release of the US paperback, January’s blog posts are going to be devoted to The Girl with Glass Feet, but come February I hope to begin a new project on this site: a bestiary of my very own. It’ll be a tribute of sorts to Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings along with, I hope, all of the multimedia razzmatazz that the internet offers. But more of that in 2011. Until then, watch out for obake under your bed tonight…

Tweet This Post

Beautiful Hazards

Mr. Fox 4 Responses »

Dec 022010

The UK is covered in snow at the moment, bringing all the usual travel chaos and outraged claims that we should by now have learned how to command the weather to our bidding. On the morning it started I was lucky enough to not have to be anywhere in a hurry, then lucky enough to see a fox padding along the stream bank behind our flat. He looked especially red against all that white. After that I turned on the television to find out what the roads were like. The first thing that appeared on the screen was the forest god from Princess Mononoke. In an inspired piece of scheduling, that film was being shown as the sun came up. It was the scene where the forest god stands in the pool and stretches his neck towards the canopy. My favourite part of the entire film, which in turn is my favourite Ghibli animation.

I can assure you that my day usually starts with no such enchantment. Indeed, I normally get things going with a whole lot of clumsy stumbling, swearing and toe-stubbing. This snowy morning being far from the norm, I thought it only right to share here a recommendation of Princess Mononoke for those who haven’t seen it, as well as the following pair of YouTube marvels.

Princess Mononoke is a straightforward love story and eco-fable that reminds us that smashing the natural world to bits is in nobody’s long term interests. The art is jaw-droppingly beautiful and by turns cutesy (there’s a chorus of gorgeous bubble-headed forest folk) and savage (there’s gore in some places – especially when the wolves get involved).

Somebody going by the name of head6of6metal6 had the great idea of setting some clips from the film to Glósóli by Sigur Rós. As an aside, I remember that I was listening to this song when I wrote the last sentences of The Girl with Glass Feet.

And here’s another video that I rather like, this time by choppopclaymation. If you’re caught in the snow, I hope you’re safe and warm enough to enjoy some of it.

Tweet This Post

Old Man Coyote and Old Man Badger

Mr. Fox 3 Responses »

Nov 232010

I had one of those rare moments of quiet synchronicity the other day when I was doing the recycling. In a pile of newspapers I noticed an old article from the New York Times, which stood out because of this amazing accompanying art by Jason Holley.

The article is about the tenacity of Coyote, about how he’s breeding with wolves to make meaner, fitter pups and about – and this is the thing I wanted to share with you – how he works with Badger to feast on poor Ground Squirrel and his family. In a nutshell, Coyote’s not so good at digging, so he lets Badger delve into Ground Squirrel’s burrows. When Ground Squirrel breaks cover, Coyote chases him down at a speed Badger couldn’t hope to match. The pair share the carcass, even though in other circumstances Coyote and Badger might be the ones fighting each other. This incredibly jaunty video best demonstrates what goes on.

Now here’s the thing: I’d just been reading a Hopi folk story called Coyote and Badger. It’s a neat expression of the uneasy relationship between the two animals, because after going out hunting for food together, Badger dupes Coyote into killing himself. Coyote’s a really interesting character in these Native American stories. He’s like the fox in European folklore, a trickster figure who can be both crafty and a buffoon. You can read a version of the story online here.

If you like Coyote, I’d heartily recommend an excellent essay by Terri Windling. Here’s a snippet that sums up the dynamic at the heart of trickster stories.

In the oral tradition, Coyote stories are marked by their combination of outrageous (sometimes X–rated) humor and elements of great profundity; they are stories in which the sacred and profane are tied ineluctably together. “They are funny stories,” a Navajo friend tells me, “but they are also sacred and serious. Trickster reminds us not to be too simplistically dualistic in our thinking; that good can come out of bad and vice versa; and that right and wrong are not always poles apart.”

Windling’s is an entertaining and comprehensive look at trickster figures from around the world, from Coyote to Anansi to Shakespeare’s Puck. Her closing remarks about 21st century tricksters and the eventual emergence of female trickster figures are fascinating: I would suggest that this is one such example.

And this one is slightly less controversial…

Tweet This Post

Flying Foxes

Bestiaries, Mr. Fox 4 Responses »

Aug 262009

Bad news today for the large flying fox, which has just been given an extinction warning. Apparently it could be flapping its way to the land of Dodos and Tasmanian Wolves in as little as six years. I think it’s easy for people in places like the UK to overlook the human and economic factors involved in the hunting of such animals, but it’s always depressing to think the world might be parting ways with a species as dramatic as this.

The heads of these things look more like those of wolves or bears than the bats we get in this part of the world. The (quite incredible) ARKive website has some pictures here, and although there are no videos of this species, it’s worth exploring their footage of similar flying foxes, such as this

Black flying fox in flightABC Natural History Unit, Australia

I’m a big fan of medieval bestiaries. In future posts I’m hoping to link to a few (there are some incredible digitised manuscripts available to read online), and pick out some of the things medieval scholars penned about animals both real and fictional. Also, Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings, which is something I love flicking through. But these are digressions – for now here’s The Aberdeen Bestiary’s beautiful thoughts on the bat (from the birds section of the manuscript, naturally)…

“The bat, a lowly animal, gets its name from vesper, the evening, when it emerges. It is a winged creature but also a four-footed one, and it has teeth, which you would not usually find in birds. It gives birth like a quadruped, not to eggs but to live young.

It flies, but not on wings; it supports itself by making a rowing motion with its skin, and, suspended just as on wings, it darts around.

There is one thing which these mean creatures do, however: they cling to each other and hang together from one place looking like a cluster of grapes, and if the last lets go, the whole group disintegrate; it is a kind of act of love, of a sort which is difficult to find among men.”

Tweet This Post

Scrapefoot

Drawings for Fairy Stories, Mr. Fox 3 Responses »

Aug 132009

Check this out… sound familiar?

Once upon a time there was a mummy bear, a daddy bear and a baby bear, right? Not really. Once upon a time there was a fox…

I’ve never really been a fan of Goldilocks. It always seemed as sickly as Mummy Bear’s porridge. Goldilocks herself was the problem. She was too much the spoiled Victorian brat. Even as a morality tale it seemed a bit flat – Goldilocks escaped unscathed at the end of her trip to the bears’ cottage. There were vague threats about not stealing and tresspassing, but they weren’t backed up at the end of the story. Because of these things I never really investigated the tale’s history. Then I had the urge to draw some quasi-human bears, and it made me look a little deeper.

As you might expect, Goldilocks herself is a reasonably recent invention, her gold hair the most recent tweak of all. Not so long ago she was Silverlocks, and not so long before that she wasn’t even a little girl. She was a hideous and foul old hag, who the bears would have been quite right to tear limb-from-limb. The bears themselves were not a family, but three pals of differing sizes and appetites. This earliest version of the story was apparently recorded (perhaps even authored) by a Victorian gent called Robert Southey. In this version, the central character of the story (the hag) is undoubtedly bad. Bears good, hag bad.

But there’s an older version, Scrapefoot, which is different still. The central character is a fox, and he isn’t a bad fox, he’s just a folklore fox. Folklore foxes are the classic trickster figures, maybe a bit like Coyote in Native American traditions, not bad or good but charmingly mischevious. The French stories about Reynard the Fox are a good example of this kind of character. In Reynard the Fox, the eponymous hero generally causes trouble for kings and barons, pinching their money and so on. This might seem incredibly tangential, but there’s an argument that the Robin Hood legends are an offshoot of Reynard the Fox: the woodland trickster hero of the poor folk, outsmarting and upsetting the rich landowners.

I think it’s important that the bears in Scrapefoot don’t live in a cottage, but a castle. They’re big and powerful creatures with wealth as well as physical power. Simply because of these changes to the way we picture the story, Scrapefoot becomes the underdog (I apologise for the terrible half-pun there) and the bears are no longer honest humble folk but an elite. It’s an interesting counterpoint to the popular version we’ve ended up with on our children’s bookshelves.

As a treat to yourself, take a look at these two clips of Ladislas Starevitch’s stop-motion verson of Reynard the Fox. Le Roman de Renard, one of the first ever animated films. I would kill to get the whole thing on DVD, but I’m afraid it seems to be out of print. Enjoy!

Tweet This Post