I grew up in the 90s, and one of the most frequent ‘movie day’ VHS tapes at my elementary school was The Neverending Story. Up until a month ago, when I watched it again, all I remembered was a dead horse, a demonic wolf, and a stone giant who rode on an impractical bike (Steamroller? Tricycle? Rolling pin?).
When I watched The Neverending Story this time, I was on the lookout for similarities to Team ICO games, since so many people seem to agree that the giant Torico monster looks like Falkor, the Luck Dragon.
So take this with a grain of salt: it’s an exercise in comparison, not proof that Ueda is ‘ripping off’ The Neverending Story or anything of that nature.
I haven’t seen the movie & I haven’t played the game, but the similarities between the two are obvious. Are fans of the games upset by this? This reminds me of a T.S. Eliot quote, “good poets borrow, great poets steal” which Picasso stole and said, “good artists copy, great artists steal.” I think the all the bad COD clones & FPS elements thrown into genres for the sake of it are examples of copying. How hard is it to copy an idea, a style, someone’s homework, or anything? How hard is it to steal a car, someone’s wife, money, etc.
Because I haven’t played the games or watched the movie I can’t comment on whether this is stealing or copying, but the reputations of the games seem to trump that of the movie.
We internalize the grand tropes, and reply in sweeping gestures and broad strokes. No codified design vocabulary but the ones we learn or team to words, in our journals and in our heads, to express the symbolics encoded, in the hope of emotion conveyed. Here a lonely pillar, and there a sentient promont of stone – a boy and his companion, forlorn and alone. Some of the parallels are there; others appear to be the result of artists thinking like other artists. Let’s communicate travel: [mountains depthed, a tiny figure, a minute's run].
Damn, I hadn’t seen this yet. That was an excellent video. I really liked how you didn’t bother talking about the similarities in most of it, you just showed them. A picture is worth a thousand words.