Animation is an amazing range, but every once in a while, the cartoon finds a way to push the boundaries to the limit. Duncan Trussell & Pendleton Ward & # 39; s The Gospel of the Night you're one of those cartoons. The new Netflix series settles into conversations about awareness, death, spirituality, and other possible personal issues from the episodes of Trussell's podcast, Duncan Trussell Happy Hour of a vivid visual connection to the abyss of another psychedelic experience by Ward and his animation team. It is unassuming and deep in equal measure. It also disappears, without losing any of its wonder, by one of the most arresting symbols of the loss of motherhood in the history of Medi.
At the end of it, the “Silver Mouse,” The Gospel of the Night it is like an almost unbreakable thing Steven Universe, The World Before Time and Neon Genesis Evangelion in a bad show of sadness. The episode finds its mover, Clancy Gilroy, a spacecaster (something podcaster, but with video, and space), entering a fantasy world looking for someone who can relate to her spacecast and find herself in her own space. Except she's not really her mom – she's Trussell, and if there's any doubt, she calls Duncan as soon as he arrives. Trussell's deceased mother, Deneen Fendig, recorded the audio on Trussell's podcast in 2013, three weeks before his death.
In many cartoons, the death or disappearance of a parent is the calling of a character. It is a trope of classic stories taken from mythology, lore fks, and myths. It may never happen right at the beginning of a show or series, but it usually happens near it, or at least it serves as a visual event. In the first episode of Trussell and Ward, it is obvious, and reconciliation. Instead of stopping by the side of the journey, back home. The whole point.
Over 36 minutes, Clancy-Duncan and her mother discuss her birth, her health, and her impending death through a combination of compassion and intelligence that is almost impossible to take, the fourth wall to be discarded. Behind them, as they wander through the ship, the crew of the polar bears perform a series of scientific studies on human interaction and the inevitable death. About a third of the episode's entry, Clancy-Duncan, having been briefly in the conversation, is claiming her now elderly mother in bed, where she dies. Shortly thereafter, she becomes pregnant, and gives birth, and their conversation turns to where they left off. Trussell tells Polygon that the incident is a sign of a cycle he knows after becoming a parent.
"For me, one of the weird things about losing a mother is that we don't do it," Trussell told Polygon. “Their bodies are gone, but I'm still with my mother. Don't belong to me. You are in my DNA, and you are in me. ”
They both continue their conversation about death, the son of a mother's consolation by acknowledging that we, and those we love, will all die. "It breaks your heart," she said about the third sign. “Our hearts are closed, because we shut them up and protect ourselves from pain. And this opens them up. At that moment, the two were released once in space, the mother of Clancy-Duncan born to a sensible planet and becoming a moon, traveling both quickly and quickly into space and into a growing black hole. With tears in her eyes, the month Clancy-Duncan says, "I love you so much." His mother, on the planet, responds: “I love you too. And Duncan, that kind of love goes nowhere. And it's another thing you get – that I can leave this plane, soon, but love is going nowhere. I'm as true to that as I am. ”
The struggle for humanity over a short period of life is at the center The Gospel of the Night, and this episode is the climax of it. In many episodes, Clancy's conversational tone with her guests is a combination of astonishment and an open-mindedness of open-mindedness, whether in conversation, or in confrontation, with the possibility of death. In fact, in the best episode of the show, a spacecast guest of his it is Death, voiced by the diviner and the deceased Caitlin Doughty, cleverly provides the set to be followed without exposing his hand. You thought the real discussion of death and death was to turn it around, huh? Yes, try this.
The combination of meaningless emotional power in a real conversation between a dying mother and her miserable son and the richness of metaphor, the inclusion of the subconscious mind, prominent in the sublime beauty found among the real evil, is almost impossible. It is an almost guaranteed effort to make all its viewers cry while also asking them to read: that your heart must be broken to truly open, that we must accept that we will die but not like it, and that no one in death can truly be lost. Some things surpass even the inevitable.
"My grandmother says everything is going well," Trussell said. "And it's one of the biggest teachings that maybe takes a lifetime to understand. Something I don't understand, but that's true, and that we were trying to get through that episode is happening. it is he is perfect. It it is she is beautiful. But it can also be a disaster at the same time. And maybe human life runs through those channels, until we finally start learning how to choose which one we want to follow. ”
My birth mother died before my eyes when I was five – years old, as Clancy-Duncan's mother said in the episode, where she believed someone would be there as they grew up – and I've been watching a cartoon about the loss of my mother almost ever since. Many have touched me deeply, as it did, but here, it was different. It's not like watching The World Before Time, where death is a reminder of how tough the road will be, either Neon Genesis Evangelion, which shows a fear of trusting people in its wake, or Steven Universe, who finds his conveyor in agreement with his mother's estate, and how it changed and shaped him after he left.
Instead, the "Silver Mouse" brings the opportunity to say, and understand what it means to say, if at all, as if you were in real time and for those we lost or wanted. It is an opportunity to accept perfection, however painful, or painful, how hard it can be, and of the love that makes it unbearable and unbearable at the same time. And those opportunities don't come up very often. Not in a trinitarian.