hi folks. i haven't been feeling so well. that's why i've decided to analyze every single george miller movie i've seen thus far for autistic themes.
i have been a lover of george miller's movies for as long as i can remember. it all started with babe: pig in the city; that was the first movie i remember loving so much, i decided it was worth watching every single day for months, unless something stopped me. it was hypnotic, compelling, heartwarming--and, in retrospect, i feel like i see some very particular themes that make my draw to it make perfect sense: every one of his movies i've seen so far, whether obvious or subtle, even intentional or not, generally tend to be about autism in some way or another.
much as i'd like to, i can't start this off with babe. there's another movie that makes this theme far more textually a part of the protagonist's character and conflict: happy feet.
happy feet came around at a time in my life where i was growing avoidant of kid's movies, especially if they looked like they had that very soulless, in-your-face, "we totally know what kids like!!!" sort of tone and style many kid's movies tend to have. the trailers for happy feet, i feel, absolutely did not do the movie itself justice; i refused to watch it until i was in my early 20's.
folks, i tell you, i was NOT fucking prepared for what happy feet really is. seriously, if you haven't seen it because the above paragraph describes your impression of it, i heavily recommend you take some time to go check it out. chances are, it may blow your mind. i'll be right here when you're done :)
for those of you who haven't and still don't intend to watch it, though, happy feet is a kid's movie directed by miller about an emperor penguin named mumble, born without the ability to sing--instead, he dances! this is considered a major problem among the other emperor penguins; their entire community and how they connect to each other (and, most importantly, find a mate) revolves around singing. they believe that they each have something inside them referred to as a "heart song"; it's a song that represents who you are at your core--so, to them, love is when two penguins resonate with each other's heart songs. not being able to sing implies, to everyone else at least, that mumble will never find love. it isolates him from his peers; he sits at the back of class (in penguin school. for penguins), unable to engage with lessons that only remind him he's different and isolate him further. and, curiously, when all his other classmates shed their baby feathers, most of his don't go away--partway up his body, his adult feathers just stop, making way to an entire head and torso of adorable fluff.
there is a theory presented to us for why this is at the very beginning of the movie--his dad, memphis, believes his son's differences are his fault, because he dropped his egg in the middle of a freezing winter storm. fueled by guilt (and a suspicious terror of standing out after the outburst of dancing that made him drop his egg), memphis becomes the most devout believer of emperor penguin religion in mumble's life, short of the actual religious leaders in emperor land.
this becomes the entire basis of the conflict between mumble and memphis; the religious leaders of emperor land assert that for them to survive the food scarcity they're currently facing, they must please the great 'guin, "who puts songs in [their] hearts and food in [their] bellies". their cultural and natural ways are tied up into the laws of their religion; mumble's inability to sing comes across as a great omen for their community, much less what he does instead…
the very first thing mumble does upon hatching is start tapping his feet really fast. memphis asks what he's doing; mumble, who of course can speak in full sentences right away why do you ask?? says simply, "i'm happy!" memphis presses it further, asking what he's doing with his feet. mumble just looks down, turns back to his dad, and says innocently, "they're happy, too!"
(awww look how cute he is :3 he's so happy!)
mumble's adorable dancing isn't received so warmly, though. other penguins can be heard commenting--"little wobbly in the knees…" "is he okay?"
at this, memphis clearly becomes uncomfortable. he tells mumble not to do it around others, because it "just ain't penguin". this will not be the last time someone tells him not to dance; mumble clearly puts in an effort to stand still when asked, but at this point, basically any provocation will start him back up again--even just the first time memphis tells him to stop, he complies for all of two seconds before memphis invites him to sit under his pouch, and mumble dances his way in enthusiastically.
neurodivergent people, more than likely, would recognize this scene and many others for what they are immediately: mumble is being asked, over and over again, not to stim. i'm sure anybody reading this here and now doesn't need me to tell them the sheer amount of ass this sucks to experience, both in childhood and adulthood; i can think of plenty of moments during my own formative years where it was made clear to me that, all too often, the way my body naturally wants to move and express itself is considered Weird and Bad enough to even be outright punished. if you think about it, too, isn't "happy feet" (not just the title of the movie, but the way they describe mumble's dancing) just an inversion of the term "quiet hands", to remind autistic children not to flap?? and for mumble, like countless others in real life, not only is it incredibly difficult for him to control at this point, but it represents something good--he's happy!!! this is how he expresses joy!!! he might as well be asked not to smile or laugh! being asked not to dance, however unintentionally, is inherently asking him to repress his feelings of joy, excitement, love, and later, even sexuality. (the finding a mate thing is a major plot point in this movie, and they do not shy away from the implications of it, lol--at least, as much as they could get away with)
after his first failure to sing in (penguin) school, mumble's parents take him to a private singing tutor recommended by his teacher. this is where it's strongly asserted that although everyone, even his far more accepting mom, believes mumble's inability to sing means an inability to express himself, he IS expressing himself! he's asked to look deep inside for a feeling--ANY feeling--and "let it out". without clearer instruction, mumble does just that; only not by singing like expected, but by dancing. his tutor becomes irritated and asks again: "look inside soul. feel the feeling, enormous feeling, so enormous, it fills whole body. it must escape, or you explode!" she corrects his posture, asks him to open his beak--and all at once, mumble breaks out into a long and energetic dance. his mom, norma jean, laughs as memphis watches in dismay; his tutor bursts into tears at her perceived failure.
placed back into the (penguin) school that others him, that refuses to work with his disability, that sends him to the back of the class to be forgotten, mumble obviously does not graduate. as he stands back with his parents in the audience, he watches the rest of his peers enjoy a ceremony celebrating their first steps into adulthood. and, as mentioned before, mumble stands out against his peers even further, now--he hasn't shed most of his baby feathers, yet. this represents his inability to grow and develop in the same way as his peers, as he's been ignored by his teachers and asked to repress the thing that marks their passage into adulthood--his own weird sort of heart song.
this scene, and everything to do with his school tbh, really seriously stung to me. obviously i was not a student of penguin school, but the education system i was funneled into didn't treat me much better than mumble's did. to the vast, vast majority of my teachers, just like mumble's tutor, my struggle with their lessons represented their own failure to teach me. asking for help, time and time again, was met by punishment or being outright ignored; so i learned to stop asking for help altogether. i was kept inside for recess and isolated from class activities--and, consequently, from my peers--throughout what at least felt like the majority of entire school years because i couldn't finish my math sheets, or i couldn't memorize multiplication tables.
in fourth grade, every time a student failed a brutally timed multiplication test, my teacher would brilliantly assign you to write out the entire table a certain amount of times: 3x1=3 (repeat), 3x2=6 (repeat), etc etc. and if you either failed to turn in that extra assignment or failed the test yet again, she'd double the amount of times you had to write them out. starting from two and going up to twelve, i failed every single one of those tests, over and over again. the workload dumped onto me at the end of every school day grew exponentially. the amount of times i had to write most tables out, aside from 2s and 5s eventually, literally reached the hundreds. and dear sweet mrs. beacraft, the single worst bully of my entire life short of someone committing literal domestic abuse, saw absolutely NO problem with this. even the school administration saw no problem with this, and only made it "manageable" by rounding off how many times i had to write them out to please my mom when she raised a complaint, by the time she finally found out how bad it was getting; i don't even remember how she found out, i just remember expecting her to get mad at ME if she ever found out about it. i think the cap was decided to be somewhere between a hundred and two hundred times each; the stack of papers i had to hand in was truly fucking insane. i remember spending long hours after school sitting at the dinner table as the sun slowly vanished, leaving me alone in the mostly-dark kitchen as the rest of my family watched movies, played games, made art, talked to each other--you know, exactly the sorts of experiences i missed out on in school. over and over, i wrote out equations that straight up did not make any sense to me, the numbers just becoming more and more mushy and meaningless in my head through repetition, until finally it was time to go bed; the exact same punishment for my autism dished out to me in school had only followed me home.
this is only one of many stories that represents the way i was punished for being autistic in school; and still, i count myself lucky i didn't end up in special ed or ABA therapy @_@ i had my own fair share of "back of the class" experiences, with being deliberately isolated from my peers and severely impacting my (irl) social, intellectual, and emotional development. i struggled with learning, and this threatened my underpaid and overworked teachers' jobs--more often than not, they turned to outright bullying me, slamming their fists on my desk to scare me, threatening me, making an example out of me in front of the rest of the class, becoming irritated or sometimes aggressive each time i cried until i finally learned to suppress that urge on a dime--so, ultimately, learning became synonymous with pain and failure to me. i'd already been taught from a very early age that the education system was not built for someone like me, and every time, no matter how hard i tried, even in subjects that i liked or just sort of came naturally to me, i just wouldn't be able to keep up with everyone else, and i would be punished and humiliated for it. much like mumble was supposedly missing a heart song, i thought i was missing something that literally everyone else around me had--in my case, i felt like i didn't even have a brain. i honestly began to believe, ONLY UNTIL RECENTLY, that i was inherently stupid and literally incapable of learning in any meaningful way, even against well-meaning encouragement and evidence to the contrary. i'm still working on it....
so, like mumble, i did not graduate from school--at least not by traditional means. before getting my GED by myself with an outdated study guide and khan academy (THANK YOU KHAN), i have my own memory of sitting in the audience with my parents, watching all my peers, my friends, even my twin graduate without me. in my case, i had people telling me the ceremony wasn't all that great, and that i dodged a bullet by dropping out; i do believe them, and to this day, i don't regret my choice to drop out--honestly, it was the only choice i could've made. still, seeing mumble watch his peers graduate hurts like hell. i know how it feels to be pulled aside yet again, faced with the ultimate consequences of your failure, and every ounce of otherness and isolation that comes with it.
after one particularly humiliating reminder of his difference--a soft rejection of his overwhelming, natural urge to match his crush's freak song in front of the entire graduating class by dancing and squawking--mumble stands at a distance on a floating chunk of ice so as not to bother everyone else with his "annoying" autistic traits; he falls asleep, and floats away into unknown territory. this starts a slow segue into another large part of the movie's overarching plot that i'm obsessed with: aliens.
well, not aliens, exactly--humans! it's overfishing that's causing the fish scarcity they face, not mumble's dancing, like the religious leaders of emperor land choose to assert. i won't get into all of it, fun+compelling as it is, because it's not all totally related to autism. but, mumble returns to try and make his feelings known to his crush, gloria; and when she realizes how good it feels to sing to the rhythmic tapping of his dance, and even to try dancing for herself, a whole bunch of penguins suddenly break out into dance, too--to boogie wonderland, no less, lol. the religious figures call for everyone to stop, lest they upset the great 'guin; mumble protests, telling them that happy feet can't cause a famine, but they quickly rebuke this--"if thy kind of pagan display did not cause it, then what did?" (PAGAN…..HMM!) so, mumble tells them his underdeveloped theory: aliens.
the religious leaders immediately call mumble insane for this, reasserting that it's HIS fault there's no fish, and move to exile him. some, like norma jean, argue against this, but mumble's resolve to stay is quickly crushed when even his own father asks him to renounce his "strange ways" in order to stay. he even reveals that he was once a "backslider", and that his dancing caused him to drop his egg. norma jean immediately fawns over her poor little mumble; mumble, dejected and confused, points out there's nothing really wrong with him. memphis pleads with him, though: "you can [stop this freakiness with the feet]. it ain't so hard."
to this, mumble says the line that crushes me every time: "don't ask me to change, pa, because i can't."
after this, mumble leaves emperor land somewhat voluntarily, but he doesn't go without a promise to find the aliens and prove it's not happy feet that's causing the famine. as much as i love everything to do with this part of the story, again, it's not all about autism; still, something happens with them that DOES relate in a way that ties immaculately into my point about another movie:
after exile from emperor land and a long journey to find the aliens and appeal to their better nature, mumble is eventually placed in a zoo in florida (i think).
mumble is the only emperor penguin in this enclosure. there's a mix of different penguin types here, and every single one of them has succumb to zoochosis--or at least, something resembling it without showing some of the more gruesome symptoms that can manifest. the first penguin mumble speaks to here calls it "heaven", telling him that it's anywhere they want it to be as he stares contentedly into space.
finally met with the aliens he's traveled across the world to find, mumble starts to plead with the zoo's patrons to stop stealing their fish. he tries being polite, first--"i'm sure you don't mean to, but…"--until he realizes he's going entirely unheard, despite speaking "plain penguin". he starts screaming for them to listen, interspersed with scenes on the other side of the glass to show us what he sounds like to them: a noisy, squawking penguin. he screams like this for three days, until he loses his voice; after that, he, too, succumbs to zoochosis, hand-fed the fish he wants to take back to his friends and family, and eventually even running repeatedly into the wall when he hallucinates them on the other side of its landscape painting. (side note: they didn't even animate the humans--they're all live action! and it works really well actually; the penguins are obviously stylized to some extent, but there's still very much a commitment to realism with them wherever they can get it (well, the boys, anyway...), not to mention the sheer amount of loving detail that went into the environments and the humans' structures and vehicles we'd seen before. live action humans, surprisingly, really don't stand out in the movie's visual style imo. it's not autism related i just thought it was neat)
in a way, this brings us back to the exactly the problem mumble faced in emperor land in the first place: for one reason or another, and to varying extents, these are two different environments where he is othered and cannot express himself; that is, until a little girl starts tapping on the glass.
at first, mumble ignores it. when she keeps doing it, though, he looks down to realize that he's started tapping his feet--even better, the kid seems to like it! she runs off and drags her mom back to look, too, and a crowd quickly forms around the penguin enclosure as mumble breaks out into a full-out dance. finally, without words, and by using the art form that stems from the stimming that got him othered and exiled from his home, mumble made it through to the aliens! his reward comes in the form of them sending him home; but not without sticking a tracker on his back to see where he goes.
when mumble returns, the religious leaders are mortified that mumble has led the aliens back to emperor land, while simultaneously, clumsily trying to deny their existence at all, implying that--like a skua from the beginning, for instance--one of their own had been caught and released once before, and many of their practices secretly stem from a knowledge and fear of the humans that once occupied the land, as demonstrated by an abandoned town some distance from emperor land. (KILLER DETAIL: the first structure they see in this town is a church with an overfilled graveyard. i just thought that was neat too.)
but, even as the religious leaders and their more devout followers call out for everyone to stop and begin to sing in protest (resulting in a GREAT song might i add), most other penguins decide to try it mumble's way, and break out into their own dances. mumble is reunited with norma jean and his friends, but memphis is nowhere to be seen.
norma jean takes him to a cave, where memphis has presumably been hiding in a depression for all those months mumble was gone, blaming himself once the community became sure he'd died out there. mumble steps inside the cave to confront him, and straight away, memphis tells him: "there ain't been one day that i done right by you." norma jean implores him to dance with mumble, and in a scene that makes me cry every time, mumble takes him through it again, step by step, and reignites his love for dancing!
memphis, surely, would be familiar to countless other autistic people--textually, with his love of dancing established from the very beginning, seen even as an aspect of his heart song that won over norma jean in the first place, it's made clear that memphis is autistic, too. when he looks at mumble, not only does he see his failure in dropping his egg, but he sees himself, too; and, surely, all the grief that would've come from learning to suppress his stimming. he's so hard on mumble and keeps pushing and pushing for him to act "normal" in an incredibly misguided attempt to protect him; but in the end, his efforts only hurt them both, and pushed mumble away. it was only by learning to accept this part of himself that he could really, meaningfully repair his relationship with his son.
it's after this where, finally, the aliens track mumble to emperor land. they show up in a helicopter and land at a high vantage point to film and observe them. after a long pause, every single penguin, even the ones devout to the great 'guin, break out into a coordinated dance to appease the aliens--and, of course, the humans absolutely love it, and start dancing back at them, too. this kickstarts a lovably corny montage of people coming together out of a love of their dancing, even dancing themselves, and the long political battle that eventually comes to ban fishing in the area. ("i don't wanna live in a world without penguins!!")
this is where we find our segue into another movie: happy feet, for our purposes, establishes the loneliness of being othered for your autism, the frustration at a lack of ability to communicate, and how art can be used to bridge those gaps.
if you made it this far, thank you for checking out my ramblings! this one ended up so long that i'm going to break this all up into a series, possibly 1 movie per post. maybe the next few will be shorter; there's just. so much to look at in happy feet. you have to understand my situation.
i thought i already had my next spotlight subject lined up--and then something else came along! even better, it sure does match the theme of this post!! i got a handful of webcomics when i asked some friends for rss feed recommendations, and one of them was a webcomic i've definitely heard about/seen around before:
preeny has to repeat sixth grade by momodriller is a delightful furry webcomic about a 12-year-old cat on a mission. it is the most sincere, most heartwarming love letter to the bright and wild, unique, and often uninhibited sort of creativity in young furry artists; in fact, most characters you see were bought as adoptables from kids on deviantart! these are reoccurring characters, too, including characters preeny spends the most time with! it's not a "haha, that was fun--now to the REAL stuff" or background-only sort of gimmick; this artist is all in. the style and design choices give me an immense sort of nostalgia for the sort of art i used to look at on deviantart that, personally, i hadn't really entertained in a long time. momo notes in the comic's description that many of the themes are based on growing up autistic; in a way, this comic couldn't have come at a better time for me.
they really manage to capture a certain feeling--or a certain Bunch of feelings--of autistic childhood that i'd pushed down for the longest time. no matter what happens, the tone of the comic itself gives so much love and justice to preeny's feelings at every turn, never downplaying her for the simple fact that she's "too young" or "too immature" to understand what's going on or problem solve on her own. on top of all that, WOW, the amount of thought put into the worldbuilding!!!!! i can't not mention it!!!!!! there's so much thought put into the world of furth and what it is exactly that makes each character so beautiful and unique, and how they move through the world! a world of bipedal and quadrupedal furries, and all manners in between, some who live in cities and others who live in the woods--i love it!!!!!!!!!!
i wish i could say more, but i honestly have a hard time describing the feeling this comic gives me. for those who are already caught up, or those who don't care about (mild) spoilers, this absolutely beautiful page perfectly describes the feeling i got reading this comic, where words have failed me:
anyway, thanks again for checking out my site! see u next time!!