Poliglocia

These notes are a little old by now. When I watched Guillermo del Toro's highly praised film, I was writing about the concept of the fairy tale body, its grotesque flux as found in the old tales and taken up again by Gaiman and Henson. For carreer reasons, that research is unlikely to continue as such, but here's how I found its tropes in this particular movie.  1. An off voice, announcing a narration, is heard framing the entire film. The fact of using a narrative voice is in itself already a resource commonly used to distance the action from reality, as a subjective an hypermedial narration. The voice in SoW also clearly quotes fairytale tropes: "The reign of the good prince", "a faraway place" and "an endless love" refer both to an dislocation of the action in time and space, which is unspecific but distant from the narrator's current position. (Cfr. Antonsen) It also constructs the narrated space as a compensatory heterotopia (Cfr. Fo...

I know I'm late to the party, and probably most of what I'm saying has already been said anyways. I just want to get it off my chest. I think it is only fair to judge a work by the goals it declares itself to have. Pacific Rim declares through the voices of its narrators and heroes, to attempt to unite the different peoples of the earth against the disasters that are threatening to destroy its planet. Disasters that take the shape of giant monsters, but which are a product of pollution and environmental destruction. The first half hour of the film also seems to step towards its goal in a qu ite exciting way. The very fact that characteristically Japanese genres as kaiju, mecha and tokusatsu is being respawned by a Mexican director in Hollywood into such a self-conscious tribute is already of notice. Whereas other productions would turn it into a cheap parody, Del Toro treats the topic with unusual detail. Even in Japan tokusatsu and kaiju have always had a certain "B-S...