#AND SHE WAS BROUGHT TO LIFE BY A RABBIT IN A TOP HAT NAMED LEWIS | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

kelyon · 3 years ago

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Golden Rings 23: A Hat

The Storybrooke sequel to Golden Cuffs

Jefferson tries to get help

Read on AO3

Inside a cramped little cottage in a cramped little town in the mountains of a flat planet that flies through space on the back of four elephants on top of a turtle, he is having dinner with his family.

Technically, they are Leo’s family, but technicalities have never troubled him. These people have welcomed him into their lives. This smoke-filled, boisterous cottage is more home to him than the solemn rock quarry where Jefferson spent the first few miserable decades of his life.

The meal is mostly over, but everyone lingers over pudding and conversation and beer. A few of his sisters-in-law have gathered up the dishes and are headed back to the kitchen for the washing up.

His daughter sits on his lap. She is almost too big for the gesture and maybe that’s why she wants it so much. It’s certainly why he lets her do it. How much longer will he have with his little girl? Even if they have escaped from the Queen’s curse, they cannot escape time. There will only be a few more years before Grace is more a woman than a baby. She’ll be as pretty as her mother, and just as smart, winding her way through the hearts of everyone who meets her.

But for now, his girl sits on his lap and listens to her family. Beside him, Leo squeezes his arm.

She leans into him. “No matter where we go, it’s never better than being home.”

He smiles at her, his wife, his life. Her face is ruddy from drink and smoke. Her blonde hair curls in the heat, teasing wisps escape from her bun. Her plump curves fill out her dress like bursting sausage. She has a shine of bacon grease around her mouth and a touch of beer foam on the tip of her nose. In all the lands in all the worlds, he has never seen anyone more beautiful.

Somewhere down the table, a baby cries. One of his many sisters-in-law is trying to soothe one of Grace’s many cousins, without much success. The infant has been fussing all night, and now the poor thing’s wails have drowned out the riotous conversation.

“‘Ere now!” Leona’s mother calls down from the head of the table. “Are you going to help that poor babby or do I ‘ave to?”

His sister-in-law--a washed out, nervous looking woman whose name no one can remember--looks gratefully up at Nanny Ogg. “Can you?”

Nanny Ogg snorts. This grande dame--which she translates as “big woman”--is the matriarch of the Ogg clan and the second-most powerful witch in the Ramptops Mountains, though she doesn’t try as hard. She’s had five husbands (and married three of them), fifteen children, and more grandchildren and great-grandchildren than anyone in Lancre can count.

The baby is passed from hand to hand down the table, squalling all the way. When it finally gets to the head of the table, it is placed into the very solid arms of a round old woman dressed in black. She has a pipe, a pint, and a black pointy hat. (There’s nothing magic about a pointy hat, except that it says that the person underneath it is a witch.) She also has lively dark eyes--like Leo’s, like Grace’s--and the widest grin most people have ever seen.

The current occupant of the old woman’s lap is a mangy ball of fur and claws named Greebo. Though known to pick fights with bears (and not lose), he’s nothing but an old softy to Nanny Ogg. Still, the cat is smart enough to know that he is always second place to any child. As soon as the baby is in the witch’s arms, he scampers out of the way.

Jefferson’s life would have been hell if Nanny Ogg hadn’t given him her approval to marry Leo. They would have married anyway--Leo wouldn’t have let anything stop them--but coming home like this would have been… difficult. There are a dozen tiny ways an Ogg can tell you they don’t like you--and a hundred large and painful ones. But Nanny Ogg’s welcoming nature--and Jefferson’s endless potential to bring her presents from far-off lands--had ensured that they were welcome any time.

Within a minute of entering Nanny Ogg’s embrace, the screaming baby quiets. Within another minute, it sleeps peacefully, despite the raucous conversation around the table.

Perched on his knees, Grace looks curious. “Was that magic, Gran?”

“Coo-ee, no, my duck!” Nanny Ogg chuckles. “The day I needs magic to calm a babe is the day you lot can put me in the ground!”

“But you did it so fast!” Grace persists.

“Coz I been doing it so long,” Nanny Ogg explains. “Ever since your Uncle Jason was a wee thing! There’s a knack to it, but it ain’t magic.”

Grace ponders this for a moment. Children are allowed to speak freely around Nanny Ogg’s table--provided they keep the conversation interesting. “Papa knows a man who does magic.”

Jefferson thinks about explaining, but clearly this is a private conversation.

Nanny Ogg nods sagely. “I imagine your dad knows all kinds of people, the work he does.”

“He was a funny little man,” Grace says. “He has a funny voice and he’s all green.”

“Takes all sorts, luv. We can’t help the way we’re made.”

“He gave me a yellow dress, to match Mama’s pink one. He pulled it out of the air! We were there for--why were we there, Papa?”

“A wedding,” Jefferson answers. “The Dark One and Belle wanted us to be there for their wedding.”

“It was a lovely day,” Leo smiles at him while stroking their daughter’s hair. “Do you remember dancing in that big ballroom, Grace? Remember how he made the instruments play themselves?”

Nanny Ogg snorts. “Sounds like a show-off, if you ask me.”

“Oh he is,” Jefferson agrees. “I don’t know if you’d like him, and Mistress Weatherwax would hate him.”

“Well, there’s not many I don’t like, and there’s not many Esme Weatherwax don’t hate, at least at first.”

They laugh at that, as they laugh at everything. The conversation moves on to other topics. Later the lot of them move away from the table and into the parlor. Around a fire and more beer, Nanny Ogg brings out her banjo, but the evening still manages to end happily.

He puts Grace to bed in a room with her cousins, a group of girls near her age. He kisses her and makes sure she has her stuffed rabbit. Then he goes up to the bedroom where Leo is waiting.

His wife is a dream, all satiny pink. All soft and warm and round. Like a sunset cloud with grasping arms. Like candy floss with a libido. She is everything. All the happiness he has now is because of her. This family, this life, their daughter. Everything in his past led to her, everything in the present comes from her, everything in the future will be theirs together.

They make love, full of food and clumsy with drink. Their lips are loose and sloppy. They giggle and try to stay quiet in this crowded house. Their hands know their bodies. They know how to pleasure each other. They know. They feel. They love. They delight in each other and fall asleep in each other’s arms.

When Jefferson wakes up, everything is gone.

****

For the ten thousand, three hundred ninetieth time, Jefferson woke up alone. In a giant, empty bed, inside a giant, empty house. He woke up, like he always did, with a gnawing ache in his chest and a burning desire for nothing more than to go back to sleep. Back to his dream. His best dreams were always about them. Leo. Grace. Home.

Sitting up in bed, Jefferson covered his face with his hands and let a dry sob rack through him. Tears would come later. First sob of the morning was always dry.

“Morning” was not the right word. It was a gray spring afternoon, more or less identical to every other gray afternoon he’d woken up in since he was brought over to this world. Over the years--over so many years--he had gotten in the habit of starting his day when most people in Storybrooke began to end theirs. The only reason he woke up at all was to get a chance to see his daughter walk home from school.

The telescope was in the office, what he tended to think of as the hat room. This side of the massive house faced Main Street. He could see quite a lot--the diner, the Sheriff’s Station, a few important houses. And he had learned quite a lot, just by looking at all these people living their lives.

Nothing changed in Storybrooke. Children didn’t get older. The old and sick never died. People worked the same jobs no matter how much they hated them. There was a girl he saw walking to and from the diner who had been nine months pregnant for twenty-eight years. Everyone was miserable, alone and unloved in one way or another, but they all carried on with what they thought were their lives.

Until the day a yellow bug drove into town.

Looking through the telescope, Jefferson trained his eyes on a lime green winter coat. The coat was bouncing over the shoulders of a young girl as she hopped, skipped and jumped her way around the sidewalk. His throat tightened, as it did every time he saw her. In the lens of the telescope, she looked close enough to reach out and touch.

Grace was walking with another girl--Jefferson didn’t know her name. She was poor, from Old Town. Her father was gone and her mother worked long hours for low pay. Girls like that didn’t get their accomplishments written up about in the newspaper the way Grace did every time she won the Science Fair. Until a few months ago, Grace had never spoken to this girl. Both of them had walked the same path from the school to the abandoned library, twenty feet apart, every day for twenty-eight years, without ever interacting with each other.

Until the day Sheriff Swan started a youth outreach campaign, and made a point to talk about how much safer kids were if they used the buddy system when they didn’t have an adult around.

Then Grace had looked up from her routine, and she had seen the other girl looking back. Both of them needed someone to walk with. Both of them were looking for a friend. Both of them found one. It was a little thing, but it was a change.

He watched them walk from the library to the house in New Town where Tim and Mia Lewis lived. The people Grace thought were her parents. Every once in a while, they ran an ad in the Storybrooke Daily Mirror--all three of them with big smiles, the adults offering their services in insurance and real estate.

The lights were off inside the house, so he couldn’t see into the kitchen. He couldn’t see what healthy snacks Mia had made for the girls today. He couldn’t see what game they played to unwind for a bit before Mia made sure they both started their homework. A few hours later, the other girl’s mother would stop by after her shift at Granny’s. He never knew if she thanked Mia for watching her daughter. Maybe it was just understood. Maybe Mia said she was just doing what Sheriff Swan advised, watching out for children who might otherwise get into trouble, being alone and unsupervised.

Once Grace was out of his sight, Jefferson moved the telescope to look around town. Not too many changes today. Archie Hopper was walking his dalmatian. Marco the handyman was making another trip to the hardware store. The stranger on the motorcycle idled outside Marine Automotive; he seemed to be watching Marco. Mrs. Gold was strutting away from the pawn shop with her head held high.

He watched her, this woman who used to be Belle. It looked like she was going towards City Hall. Curious. Was she applying for a permit? Was there some licence she needed to renew? His fingers itched to pick up the phone and call the Dark One about what he had seen. He was the only other human being in town, the only person who knew the truth about anything. It was just the Dark One, Jefferson, and Queen Regina.

But he couldn’t bother him too much. They couldn’t raise any more suspicion than they already had with their one secret meeting in the woods. The Dark One was still trying to maintain his cover as “Mr. Gold.” Besides, what difference could it make that Belle was running an errand to City Hall?

With a sigh, Jefferson moved away from the telescope. He’d been awake for more than an hour, it was time to put on pants.

In no time at all, he had showered, dressed, and chugged down a protein shake. Most days, it was hard for him to summon up the will to cook or eat. He kept his body going with prepackaged meal replacements. They tasted like crap, but at least he didn’t have to think about them. He left cooking for people who thought they had something to live for.

He made his way to the front doors. The house had a wide driveway that ran under a large overhang. Whenever visitors came, they could disembark from the vehicles and go into the house without the hazards of rain or snow.

If he ever had visitors.

At the moment, and for the past twenty-eight years, all he had was the most recent copy of the Storybrooke Daily Mirror. It wasn’t a bastion of hard-hitting journalism, but for a long time it had been the only way he could know anything about the town he spent so much time looking at. The newspaper had given him names to put to the faces--Mayor Mills, Mr. Gold, Sheriff Humbert, and later Sheriff Swan. It had been a lifeline, and he still clung to it. For nearly three decades, the dates on the front page had been the only changes he had seen anywhere in this town.

Today’s date was April 2nd, 2012. The headline was about the continued search for a missing person. Kathryn Nolan, a paralegal working at the firm of Duke & Duke, had been missing for more than a month. There had been sightings of a woman matching her description in various parts of Storybrooke, but by the time the police arrived, all traces of her had gone. Sheriff Swan encouraged anyone with any information regarding Mrs. Nolan’s whereabouts to call the station.

On the next page, there was an editorial decrying the lack of effort put forth by Kathryn’s husband, David Nolan, to aid in the search. Sydney Glass stopped just short of outright accusing Mr. Nolan of gross negligence or foul play. He only noted the amount of time Mr. Nolan spent with the schoolteacher, Miss Blanchard. The article concluded with speculation that perhaps Mrs. Nolan was not missing at all, but had run away from a terminally unhappy home.

After finishing the paper, he put it away in the office closet and went back to the telescope. The lights were on in the house where Grace lived. The other girl had been picked up. Tim Lewis was home from work. The three of them were making dinner together. Mia was stirring a pot of chili and Tim was taking a bag of corn out of the freezer.

“She doesn’t like corn, guys,” Jefferson muttered to himself. “She won’t eat the chili if you put corn in it. You’ve been taking care of her for twenty-eight years and you’ve never figured that out.”

He shook his head and looked away. Sometimes it was maddening to watch the town like this, to see these people make the same mistakes, over and over. Emma Swan had made some changes, but there were still so many ways to be unhappy.

He watched dinner in the Lewis household. He watched Grace carefully pick out all the corn from her bowl of chili and set it into her paper napkin. He watched Mia shake her head at his daughter. He watched Tim lecture her about wasting food. He watched Grace scowl as she picked up the napkin and dumped the offending corn kernels back into the chili. She ate, but she looked like she was going to vomit.

“I’m sorry, love,” he whispered. He had to get to her, somehow. He had to let her know that he was her father. He had to get her back to Leo.

After dinner, the family watched TV. Grace sat on a couch between Tim and Mia, and flickering light bathed over all of them. They weren’t bad people, her fake-parents. They did love her, and they did the best they could to raise her to be healthy and successful in this world. Whoever Tim and Mia had been before, they were victims of the curse too. They had never meant to steal another couple’s daughter.

He had to put this right. He had to end this curse. Jefferson didn’t have much power, but he would do anything to put his family back together.

He moved the telescope away from Grace. After a brief search, he found the big pink house in Old Town where the Dark One lived. The lights were on, but no one was visible through the windows. If he called on the phone, the Dark One would tell him to be patient. The Savior would break the curse in due time.

But Jefferson had already waited too long.

Scanning through town, he set his sights on the Sheriff’s station. Storybrooke was peaceful enough that most of the cops could hang up their guns in time for dinner. They were all long gone by now. Even Sheriff Swan was packing up and getting ready to go home for the night.

Perfect.

Picking up the sleek, silver cordless phone, Jefferson punched in the numbers he had seen in the newspaper. Through the telescope, he could see Emma Swan hear the phone ringing. She slumped and grimaced in the way of everyone being clawed back into a job they thought was done for the day. Then she straightened up, and picked up the receiver on her desk.

“Sheriff’s station, this is Emma.”

Jefferson cleared his throat. “Yeah, is this the number to call if somebody saw Kathryn Nolan?”

Perking up, Emma fumbled on her desk for a pen and paper. “It sure is. Who am I talking to?”

That question was too complicated to get into. “Yeah, I don’t know for sure if it was Kathryn Nolan, but it looked like a woman in her mid-thirties, caucasian, looked kinda haggard. I, uh, I tried to talk to her, but she just kept walking through the woods.”

“Which woods are those? Where was this?”

“Oh, yeah, it was the north woods. You ever been up on Angus Drive?”

“Can’t say that I have. Still kind of new to the area.”

“Yeah, well that’s where she was. About ten minutes ago I saw her, she was walking towards town. Like I said, I tried to get her attention, but she didn’t listen. I didn’t wanna try to chase after her. Might scare her, you know. Make things worse.”

“Right, right,” Emma said. “So, north woods, Angus Drive, ten minutes ago. And what was your name?”

Jefferson hung up the phone. Then he got his coat and a scarf. It was time to go for a walk.

****

There were several cars in the massive garage of the house where Jefferson had been a prisoner. For the first twenty-eight years, he hadn’t been able to open the garage door to get them on the road. Even after Emma had rolled in, the cars were still useless. None of them had gasoline.

So Jefferson walked. He had walked along the highway and through the woods and over the town line as far as he could before something terrible happened. He walked into town sometimes, trying to find a way out. When he’d noticed “Mr. Gold” acting strangely, he had walked to the pawn shop.

At this point, he knew the town better than anyone else. Who knows the shape of a cage better than the captive inside? He knew the borders and boundaries, especially the area around the house. He knew where the road made a wicked hairpin turn, where someone who was still kind of new to the area wouldn’t know what was coming and could be caught off guard.

The yellow Volkswagen had better brakes than he thought--Emma stopped short of actually hitting him when he emerged from the woods onto the road in front of her. He’d been willing to take the hit, half-curious to see if the curse would let any injury last longer than a week or so.

Emma’s quick driving stopped him from actually getting hurt, but the collision was close enough that he could fall to the ground in a convincing show. She stopped the car and got out when she saw him.

“Oh my God, are you okay?”

On the gravel shoulder of the highway, Jefferson groaned and clutched his leg.

“Sir? Sir, can you talk? I’m Emma Swan, do I need to call for EMTs?”

“No,” Jefferson gritted his teeth, swallowed the imaginary pain. “No, I live around here. I’ll be fine. Can you just get me back to my house?”

For just a moment, she hesitated. “Uh, sure. Yeah, let’s get you inside, at least.”

She helped him up and into the passenger seat of the bug. Then she began to drive.

“So where do you live, Mr…?”

“Angus Drive.” He answered only the question she had said out loud. “It’s up ahead.”

“Funny.” Now that the moment of panic had passed, Emma seemed less willing to accept half-answers. “I just got a call about that address. A man said he saw a missing person out this way. Maybe you saw her when you were out. A blonde woman in her mid-thirties?”

He shook his head. “That sounds like your description, Sheriff.”

“First, I’m not in my mid-thirties. Second, how did you know I’m the Sheriff?”

“I read the paper. And who else would be getting a call about a missing person? And, you’ve got your badge on your hip.”

She frowned. “Guess that all checks out. Yeah, I’m Sheriff Swan. What’s your name?”

Again, Jefferson didn’t answer. “This is the house on the right.”

“A house?” Emma said as she parked under the awning. “This looks more like a hotel! Do you have a big family or something?”

Jefferson opened the door, but made sure to wait for her to help him out of the car. “No,” he said. “It’s just me.”

“The sign on the mailbox says Dogdson.”

“Sure does.”

Leaning on Emma, Jefferson pretended to hobble up the stairs to get into the front door. The curse had never given him a key to this house, so he always left it unlocked. Someday, when the curse was broken, he would find a way to lock the door behind him and walk away a free man. He would take Grace and walk all the way to the Discworld if he had to.

“Where should I put you?” Emma asked once they were in the foyer.

“Closest living room is over there.”

She set him up on one of the white leather couches with his “bad” leg propped up on the arm. “Want me to take a look at it?”

“No, no, I’ll be fine. Listen, I’m kind of an amateur cartographer. Upstairs, I’ve got maps for all of these woods. They could be useful to you, since you don’t know the area well.”

Hands on her hips, Emma Swan looked down at him. She looked shrewd, suspicious. Kind of like Leo, only skinny. “I never told you I don’t know the area.”

Jefferson grinned. What was the old saying about honesty? Better to tell the truth because then you don’t have to keep track of your lies? “I guess you didn’t.”

“The only person I told that to lately was a man on the phone who also didn’t tell me his name.” Emma sat down on the coffee table in front of the couch so they were on the same level. “Did you actually see Kathryn Nolan around here?”

He didn’t stop grinning. “No.”

“And your leg isn’t hurt at all.”

It wasn’t a question, but he still answered. “No.”

“Can you give me a single good reason why I shouldn’t arrest you on the very serious charge of Wasting the Sheriff’s Time?”

Jefferson sat up. “I do need your help,” he said. “But I thought if I told you what was going on, you would think I was crazy.”

Emma didn’t blink at that. “People who might be crazy need just as much help as people who might be sane. Let’s start from the beginning: Tell me your name.”

“Jefferson,” he answered immediately.

“Jefferson,” she repeated. “Is that a first name or a last name?”

“First.”

“And the last name?”

He didn’t really have one. Few people in the old world did. “Ogg,” he answered.

It was the name he went by on worlds where last names were common. Leo’s name. He was part of a proud tradition of men becoming Mr. Ogg when they married an Ogg woman.

Emma looked him in the eyes, long and hard. “Jefferson Ogg,” she said slowly. “That’s… such a weird name, I don’t think you made it up.”

“I didn’t,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “And what do you need help with, Jefferson Ogg?”

“I…” Gods, how could he even start? He would just have to show her. “It’s upstairs.”

She gave him another look, not speaking. Then she pulled a cell phone out of her pocket and pressed some buttons.

“Texting on the job?”

“I left my walkie-talkie in the car.” She put her phone away. “Just letting my roommate know where I am and to call the dispatch office if she doesn’t hear from me in 10 minutes.”

That was almost funny, that she thought he was dangerous. As if the most dangerous person in Storybrooke wasn’t signing Sheriff Swan’s paychecks.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

****

It was the first time anyone other than him had set foot in the office. He wondered what Emma made of the room. All Jefferson ever cared about was the telescope and the walk-in closet where he stored the newspapers. Neither of those things drew Emma’s focus.

“That’s a lot of top hats,” she said as she stood in front of the lit-up shelf. There were rows of them, all made of an endless supply of black felt. “You part of a show choir or something?”

“No.” He shut the door behind them, locked it. “The hats… are actually what I need your help with.” He pulled out some of the felt, some sewing needles and a pair of scissors. He tossed them all onto the table in front of her. “I need you to make one.”

Now the expression on Emma’s face was what ‘suspicious’ wanted to be when it grew up. “You think I’m a hatter?”

He stood behind her, nudging her into a chair in front of the raw materials. “I think you can do extraordinary things, Emma. I think you can do exactly what I need you to. I think you can save me.”

Her expression morphed from disbelief to exhaustion. “No, not you too. Have you been talking to Henry? What is it with this town and people thinking I can save them?”

“Because you can!” He put his hands on either side of the chair and pushed her to the table. Then he leaned over her to keep her from getting up. “You are a special person, Emma. You made the changes start, you can make everything good again.”

“Bring back the happy endings, is that what you want from me?”

She was angry. She meant the remark to be flippant. But she was so right it brought tears to his eyes.

“Yes,” Jefferson whispered. “Yes, that’s all I want. The Dark One says it’s your destiny, that you have already brought--”

“Wait, who?”

“The Dark One,” he said. “Rumpelstiltskin, he--”

“Will you listen to yourself?” Emma pushed herself up away from the table and stood up to confront him. “Do you think you’ve had a conversation with Rumpelstiltskin? What, do you think Regina is the Evil Queen too?”

“Yes!” he shouted. He picked the felt up off the table and shook the fabric in her face. “You have all the pieces, Emma! Why can’t you put them together?”

“Because this is the real world!” she shouted back.

“Every world is real!”

She made for the door. The lock kept her busy for just enough time that Jefferson was able to catch up with her. Gently, he pulled her away from the door and stood in front of it. Just being taller than her was enough to make him look like a threat.

“You don’t understand,” he tried to keep his voice from breaking. “There are so many worlds out there. I’ve been to most of them. The Dark One gave me a hat that I can use to travel from world to world. I could use it to get out of here, but I don’t have it anymore!”

Emma reached for her phone. He grabbed her wrist and pulled the device out of her hand.

“It needs magic,” he explained, as calmly as he could. “I’ve made a hundred hats, but they’re just hats, no good to anyone. I need magic. You have magic. You brought magic to Storybrooke the day you came here.”

She frowned at the phone in his hand and stepped back. “There was nothing different about the day I came here.”

“You’re right.” Keeping her in his sights, he stepped away from the office door and toward the closet. “It was the day after you arrived, the day after you broke the sign. October 24th, 2011. That was the day the clock on the library started to tick.”

Emma just gaped at him. “How could you remember that?”

“It was the most important day in the history of this town. The first real day to happen in twenty-eight years.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Can I show you?” he asked. “I’ll even give you your phone back, so you can tell Mary Margaret you’re okay. But I just need you to promise that you’ll hear me out.”

She glared and held out her hand. “You are damn lucky you don’t have a gun right now.”

He watched her press the buttons, then put her phone back in her pocket.

“You bought yourself another ten minutes because I don’t feel like filling out the paperwork necessary to arrest you.”

Jefferson went to the closet. “It’s in here,” he said. “All the evidence I have is in here.”

She put her hands on her hips, squared her shoulders. “Go get it then.”

Right, Sheriff Swan wasn’t going to be the first one to go through an unknown door in the house of an obvious lunatic. Jefferson opened it, and showed her the newspapers. Twenty-eight stacks and counting. Each stack was made of twelve bundles, reaching to the ceiling. Three hundred and forty one bundles. The whole of the curse, contained in this room.

“I saved them all,” he said. “Twenty-eight years’ worth.”

“So you’ve been saving newspapers since you were, what, five?”

“Since the day I came to this town,” he answered. “Since the day anyone came to this town.” Kneeling on the ground, he moved the smallest pile and pulled out the smallest bundle. “Do you want to know what day that was, Emma?”

She didn’t answer, but he took the paper out from the bottom of the bundle and held it up in front of her.

“Go on,” he growled. “Read it.”

“Uh, it says that Mayor Mills announced a new committee to--”

“Read the date!” he snapped.

Jaw clenched, Emma yanked the paper out of his hands and looked at the top. She didn’t read it out loud, but he saw her eyebrows furrow.

“That’s… my birthday,” she whispered. “Like, that was the day I was born.”

“October 23rd, 1983,” he said. “That was the day the curse started. The day you were born was the day the Evil Queen cursed us all to live in a world without magic.”

“That’s--”

“There was no time.” He didn’t let her speak. “Nothing changed, nothing happened. We were frozen. Most of them didn’t notice, but I did. I remembered, I…” He couldn’t go on. “I thought I was crazy. I thought nothing I knew was real. I thought I had lost everything. But you… You’re the Savior. You can bring it back.”

Emma shook her head and looked down at the newspaper again. “Even if all this is true, why am I the one who has to--wait a minute!” She pointed at the paper, at a picture of the mayor. “This is a crock of shit! That’s Regina! Regina wasn’t mayor on the day I was born!” She flipped through the other pages. “Yeah, look at this. Sydney looks the same in this picture as he does today. Look at the school news, I’ve seen these kids!”

“I told you, time was frozen.”

“Or you put a fake date on an old paper just to mess with me!” She kept looking at the newspaper, seeing but not understanding. “Yeah, this ad here, this is Tim Lewis. He gave me a discount on my car insurance. His daughter, Paige? She looks exactly like she does in this ad. Pretty sure she’s eleven, not thirty-nine.”

Jefferson ripped the paper out of Emma’s hands. “She is not his daughter!” He snarled. “Will you listen to me? That girl’s name is Grace. She is eleven. She has been eleven for twenty-eight years!”

“I--” Emma put her hands up and let out a slow breath. “I don’t think either one of us is going to convince the other.”

“I don’t care if you believe me, I just need you to make a gods-damned hat!”

To Jefferson’s shock, Emma seemed ready to do what he asked, maybe in the name of de-escalating the situation. She went back to the table, slowly sat down, and picked up the felt. “You need this so you can go back to Fairytale Land?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t care about that world anymore. I need to go back to the Discworld.”

Emma squinted as she tried to thread a needle. “Discworld? I’ve heard of those books. They’re supposed to be funny, right?”

Jefferson didn’t smile. “It’s a real place.”

Looking up, Emma opened her mouth, and then closed it. “Sure.” She began to half-heartedly jam the needle between two pieces of felt.

He collapsed into a chair by the telescope. Gods, was she really doing this? Jefferson only knew enough about magic to know that he was better off not playing with it. But if the Dark One was right, then Emma Swan wouldn’t be able to stop herself from using magic. She would do it naturally, maybe accidentally. It wouldn’t matter if the hat looked awful. All it had to do was work.

“My wife is from there,” he offered as a way to make conversation.

Emma didn’t look up from the stitches. “From Discworld? Does that make her a witch or something?”

He shook his head. “Her mother is. I guess she could be too, if she wanted. Most of the time witchcraft is just knowing something other people don’t know.”

“Like how to make a hat?” Emma looked at him through a tube of felt. “It’s been a long time since my last Home Ec class. This is not going to be pretty.”

“It just needs to work,” he muttered. “Just… get it to work.”

Sighing, Emma pulled out her phone again.

“Has she even answered you?” he asked. “Maybe she’s off somewhere screwing David Nolan.”

A glare. “I’m doing you a favor by working on this hat. So maybe you could do me a favor and not say rude things about my friends.”

“I got you here by talking about Kathryn Nolan. Do you actually care about her?”

Emma kept her eyes on her work. “She’s a person. I care about people. She could be lost in the woods, disoriented and hungry. Of course I want to find her.”

“Do you think she’s still alive?”

“I have to hope so.” She cut one of the threads. “We haven’t found a body, or even body parts. If some monster was out there cutting out hearts and putting them in jewelry boxes, at least then there’d be some evidence.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Do you care about Kathryn Nolan? Or do you think she’s just a fairytale character?”

“I care about her because she’s a fairytale character,” Jefferson said. “Her name was Princess Abigail. She was the daughter of King Midas. She gave me a lot of gold just for trying to find a way to reverse the effects of her father’s… gift.”

Emma nodded, clearly humoring him. “I’d heard that King Midas had a daughter. I didn’t know her name was Abigail. Doesn’t sound Greek, but what do I know?” She was sewing the brim on the hat, after that it would be finished.

Jefferson stood up. His feet moved on a schedule that was bigger than Emma Swan. He looked through the telescope. It was nine-thirty. Bedtime.

“Do you want to see her?” he whispered to Emma.

“Kathryn?”

“My daughter.”

They were putting her to bed, Tim and Mia both. She was almost too big for the gesture, but maybe that was why she wanted it so much. Jefferson felt Emma’s presence beside him, and he stepped away from the telescope.

“They never remember to give her the stuffed rabbit,” he said. “That’s the only one that keeps her from having nightmares.”

“Oh, that’s Paige,” Emma said. She looked up from the window. “You… have a telescope pointed at the bedroom of an eleven year old girl.”

“She’s my daughter,” Jefferson repeated. “I’ve lost her mother. Grace doesn’t know who I am. I need to keep an eye on her.”

Emma stayed between Jefferson and the telescope. “Is it because Paige is adopted? Are you her birth father or something?”

He didn’t know whether to scream or cry, so he laughed. Emma kept talking.

“It’s no shame if that’s the case. Believe me, I know how mixed-up it can be to have a kid that’s yours but isn’t yours.”

“Shut up,” Jefferson said through gritted teeth. “Grace is mine. Mine and my wife’s.”

“You said you lost your wife…”

“Yes! And I’ll only find her again once I have a hat that works!” He almost grabbed her by the shoulders, but she was too fast. She made it back to the table and kept it as a barrier between them.

“Enough!” Emma said. She picked up the hat and tossed it over to him. “This is the last of my goodwill, understand? I’m going to leave now. You’re gonna let me out of this room and out of this house. I’m gonna call Tim and tell him to buy his daughter some blackout curtains. If I ever catch wind of you snooping around little girls again, I will personally make sure you rot in jail.”

Jefferson looked down at the crumpled felt in his hands. It was only a hat by the most generous definition. But maybe it would be enough.

When he looked up, Emma was gone. From outside, he heard the rumble of a car engine starting up. As she drove away, the sound grew fainter. He still held the hat in his hands.

It didn’t feel magical. His old hat had a certain… quality. There was an aura about it, not quite tangible. But there was a feeling he got when he looked at his hat. A feeling of… possibility. Like there was so much more to it than what met the eye. There was none of that in the hat Emma had made.

Maybe magic was different here. Maybe there was a way. Some way. He had to try. He would never know if he didn’t try.

He closed his eyes and took a breath. “Please.” With all his heart, he prayed to any power that was listening.

With a flick of his wrist, he tossed the hat to the ground, as he had done a thousand different times in a hundred different worlds. The hat spun and he waited for it to keep spinning, waited for it to grow larger and disappear into a whirlpool of purple smoke. He waited for the hole in the whirlpool, the portal that could take him anywhere.

But the hat barely made a full rotation before it stopped spinning. It sat on the ground, unmoving, unmagical.

Jefferson stared at it, until his vision blurred with tears. Then he began to laugh.

Of course it didn’t work! Why would anything work in this world? Of course there was no escape! Of course he was going to die in this world! Or worse--he would live forever in a world without time and he’d never see Leona again.

He sobbed. His legs gave out and sent him careening to the floor. He lay face down on the patterned carpet, stared at Emma Swan’s misshapen hat, and wept like a child.

****

Later--an hour? A year? Did it make a difference?--when couldn’t cry anymore, Jefferson pulled himself off the floor. He made it all the way to the chair before he collapsed again and hung his head in his hands.

It hadn’t worked. The Savior hadn’t worked. The side of goodness hadn’t worked. Well, Jefferson was never one to get too hung up about paltry matters like good and evil.

Slowly wheeling the office chair over to the desk, Jefferson fumbled for the silver telephone. He pushed in numbers he knew by heart, numbers he had wanted to call a dozen times in the past month, but never had. Not until now.

He tried to breathe, as the phone rang. But then he stopped when he heard it pick up. A woman’s voice. Belle’s voice.

“Mr. Gold’s residence. Who is calling?”

Jefferson didn’t speak. He didn’t breathe. Mrs. Gold knew that he had slept with her husband. He couldn’t ask her to put him on the phone. He couldn’t even let her know who he was.

He hung up.

With another deep breath, he pulled a book with yellow pages out from a shelf above the desk. He flipped through the thin paper, until he found the name and number he was looking for.

He dialed slowly, taking a breath between each number. He couldn’t sound like he was upset. He couldn’t show any weakness in front of her.

This was a bad idea. This was the worst idea he could have ever come up with. The last time he’d worked with this woman he had watched her murder a helpless servant once she was no longer useful. How could he know that she wouldn’t do the same to him?

Maybe by the time he wasn’t useful, he would already be in the Discworld.

He needed magic. He needed to get out. He needed power. So he called the most powerful person in town.

Regina picked up on the third ring. “Who exactly do you think you are to be calling my home at this time of night?”

“Your Majesty,” he said calmly. “This is Jefferson the realm-jumper. I’d like to offer my services.”

#golden rings #rumbelle #rumbelle fic #jefferson #hat trick

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dustydreamsanddirtyscars · 8 years ago

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12x11 “Regarding Dean”

On the “Alice in Wonderland” & “Alice Through the Looking Glass” in “Regarding Dean”

”...cause all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, couldn’t put him back together again...”

-The “Humpty Dumpty” Riddle

I talked about this topic a little bit yesterday already in this post, but was too tired to expand and talk more about all of the references to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” as well as “Alice Through the Looking Glass” that were inserted in this week’s episode. It was in 10x05 “Fan Fiction” that Maeve, the stage manager described the moment when Calliope started influencing their play with the words “we’re past the looking glass, people” and it couldn’t be a more fitting and more impoortant line in relation to 12x11 “Regarding Dean”, because as much as the 200th episode was about a fictional story and with it it’s characters becoming real, so one major theme of this week’s episode also dealt with the question of reality. And the uncertainty of reality, perception and truth aren’t just topics extremely heavily tackled in Lewis Carroll’s stories, these things also play a heavy and important role in our current reality/society where we are met with “alternative facts” and “fake news” every single day and which it seems Supernatural even if only very slightly is making a comment on. But don’t worry, this is all I am going to allude to here in relation to RL.

What excited and still excites me about this week’s episode is how cleverly and detailed it worked with “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass” references all throughout the episode. And I refuse to believe all of these are accidental - especially when taking into account how the show made a great effort in making known that Sam and Dean work in Arkansas, which is described as the “Carroll County” (see the 4th gif)

Lewis Carroll, the creator of these stories, in scientific discussion is analyzed as someone who used these stories not only as an homage to childhood, childhood innocence and the sadness about the inevitability of growing up, but he is also understood to have been a writer who tackled a whole lot of philosophical questions on semantics, language and logic in his works. In literature his two probably most famous stories surrounding Alice are described as “non-sense literature”, but if you dig deep you can find a whole lot of sense in it and also a great deal of thoughts about aspects of identity building. And that: growing up and identity shaping have been integral parts of Supernatural during these past few seasons.

Down the Rabbit Hole

So let’s take a look at how the episode starts. After a brief chase through the woods, which establishes a fairytale-esque setting and the archetype of “lost in the woods” (see more thoughts on that here) Dean finds himself waking up on the ground unable to re-trace how he got there. Not accidentally in that moment Dean isn’t shown alone, but in company with a black bunny, which serves as a wonderful first reverse parallel and reminder to Alice following the White Rabbit down the Rabbit Hole and down to “Wonderland”, a place where nothing seems to make sense and challenges Alice’s beliefs and understanding of reality and truth. And these two things are issues Dean faces in the episode as well. Almost all of the characters she meets down there theorize and ponder quite heavy philosophical questions. For example about the nature of words and the importance of names and who gives meaning and names to which things and who determines which are correct and with that the truth. The whole discussion and focus on names and meanings that is prevalent in “Alice in Wonderland” is featured in the episode through the post-it’s and especially so when Dean calls a “lamp” a “light stick”, which isn’t wrong per se, because it captures the essence of the object, but still would be considered the false name. Other example within the episode that tackle the topic of language and names in a Carrollish way is when Dean says that “Rowena’s a weird name” for example or the whole Dean trying to read his own lips and only producing gibberish or - in other word “non-sense” - at best (this reminds of Humpty Dupty talking about the jabberwocky and his grammar for example)with “Now salsa, you mittens.”

One of the most memorable conversations in this regard Alice has with Humpty Dumpty for example (and this is the only character I’ll mention here otherwise this meta would be wayyyyy too long) and Humpty Dumpty is the character I chose, because the famous poem surrounding him provides a picture perfect summary of Dean’s predicament of losing his memory and in so far not only losing control, but moreso losing his sense of self. Commonly Humpty Dumpty is imagined as an egg, something fragile. That analogy is in so far very fitting as - like the rhyme shows I quoted at the top - the mind is a fragile thing and it is hard to put yourself back together after you’ve fallen apart (and here I’ll mention this also fitting to Dean as the tin man).

In the episode after Dean says hi to the black bunny and tries to determine where he is, he uses “Waldo’s Waffles” as a meeting place with Sam. This may be a stretch, but the mascot of said food chain reminds me a great deal of Humpty Dumpty with the hat and all that.

Walking further through the episode another recurring theme of the past seasons is brought up again, that is also an integral part of Lewis Carroll’s books: The aspect of adolescene and growing up. In relation to how Dean becomes more childlike the more the spell progresses, Sam’s line about Dean “not being 20 anymore” stands out quite drastically and directly relates to the whole identity discourse in which often times adolescence is understood to be a transitional and transformational time that goes hand in hand with a certain loos of self, which Alice faces as well when she mutters at some point “that she barely knows herself anymore”.

Loss of Direction, Loss of Control and Loss of Self>

This type of confusion can also be found when Dean is standing in front of the mirror (and the mirror shots have been plenty with Dean the past seasons - especially during the MoC arc - and revealing and were massively important in relation to issues with identity) and basically echoes the same kind of confusion Alice is experiencing as he looks at himself in the mirror and no longer can even remember his own name.

This loss of self in the episode as well as in Carroll’s story goes hand in hand with a loss of direction as well. For example when Alce asks the shehire cat which way to go, it tells her that to know the way, one first has to know where one wants to go (another quite philosophical topic of the book). When Alice tries to get out of the forest with the shehire cat, the signs constantly change and this constant change is quite troubling and traumatic for her, because she loses her sense of direction and by all means control. Similarly Dean can’t find their motel room any longer, saying these “dumps all look the same”. And even more of a direct nod to “Alice Through the Looking Glass” is made when Dean drives forward when thinking he drives backwards. In the book for example Alice has to stay standing to arrive somehwere or has to head the oppposite direction of where she wants to go in order to actually get there. All of this confusion of course culminates in an utter feeling of loss of control, which Dean explains he feels how “everything is slipping out of his hands”.

At first Sam chalks up Dean’s odd behaviour to him having been blackout-drunk and lectures him on that. His choice of words is really interesting here, because he says he would also “like to crawl into a bottle too sometimes” implying that Dean did just that to escape the doom and gloom of their recent past. Alice, as has been stablished by now, is Alice. And you know how she manages to travel and get away one time in the story? After she takes a drink (a bottle labeled “Drink Me”, which is referneced through the post-its in the episode and most prominently when the trunk of the Impala says “open me”) she decreases in size and is able to literally crawl into a bottle and escape that way.

In the end of “Alice in Wonderland” it gets revealed that all of what Alice experienced only happened in a dream of her childlike phantasy to which she escaped when she should have been studying. So she wakes up, still a kid, but closer to adolescence, having experienced the uncertainty of not knowing where to belong and who to be. Dean’s experience when having been hexed could be compared to that. And like I said yesterday already, this aspect of the innocence of childhood and the grim brutality of adult life is driven home through the ending montage set to “Broomstick Cowboy” describing childhood like a dream every adult needs to wake up from at some point. But even though that song evokes a lot of sad connotations, one thing should be remembered: That montage very consciously intercut moments of Dean under the spell with Dean riding Larry. And if you ask me, that was done to drive one point home: That yes, that spell may have unburdened Dean for a while, but it also ripped him off who he is (which was horrrifying for him even though he didn’t remember anything - yet he stoof in front of the mirror and cried). Yeah, in the end that montage showed that Dean is able to be just as goofy and carefree (cause he’s a kid at heart still) with all of his baggage, because when he decided to go rodeo riding, he may not have been entirely sober, but she sure wasn’t one thing: hexed. He was just himself.

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iftekharsanom · 8 years ago

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Top 10 Animation Movies You should Watch

Moving a piece of paper to (the old way) or ink with billions of pixels (the new one) has made some of the greatest films of all time. Of the Persepolis Giant Iron, critics had Selected top 10 movie of time ,here the movies are....

1.Waltz With Bashir

This extraordinary and extraordinary Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman Animation is the story of dm era, he sees as amnesia and his nation in Sabra Shatila dying during the Lebanese civil war. The title "Bashir" is the internationally admired Phalangist leader Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, who was involved in Einem complicated diplomatic and strategic dance of Israel with protested in 1982 in the country Israeli calf raids instructed Syrians die will contribute to encourage and PLO die, Assassinated Gemayel's dignity of pro-Syria three months after the Israeli invasion forces, was, but for the killing of Palestinians die unduly assigned. Were killed in the mysterious atmosphere of fear, anger and revenge, half Israeli troops in the stockpile districts and Sabra Shatila in Beirut near the terrible reprisals slaughter Christian militias in Lebanon the ease of dying civilians counted to 3,500 Palestinian. Israel declared to give Bad power not directly guilty; Kahan Commission accepted the blame or partially indirect Its; PLACES matrices and by Folman, because dying is historical fact is never completely resolved in collective consciousness information or the nation absorbed threatens Worden and always dying SURFACE to break the Save. Obviously, he chose to die from funds for animated film, digital video-derived live rotoscopy techniques like Bob Sabiston. It is and hyperreal, unreal at the same time: Strange landscape in a reality dying of dreams Between two and three dimensions something is. Flit surfaces and airplanes and die harder with hit, sharper colors and brighter than reality. It seems a long hallucination, SO and perfectly recovered to the memories of Folman's trauma. This is his journey through acid storage, die Apocalypse and He could have even created by Israel. It begins with themselves as directors of the self show: middle-aged, a beer having a man with military service in IT did Israel Defense Force. Friend says IHM be it through a dream of repeating persecuted harassed himself by wild dogs and says he thinks he deal with DM slightly in the 1982 Lebanon war. The director noting that there is much of the memory purveyors of their own participation at these events removes hat. Everything is blurred. It begins with the appearance of the director as herself, in middle age, have a beer with a man who has made the Defense Force with him the military service in Israel. His friend tells him that he is plagued by a recurring dream of being pursued by wild dogs and says he thinks there is something to do with the 1982 war in Lebanon. The director notes that he has far from his memory of his own participation in these events. Everything is blurred. Thus, he begins to seek out his former companions, to ask them what they remember, and therefore the animation takes a bit of oral history and psychoanalysis, and personal drama. They say strange and scary consequences on the screen type: sometimes it is not clear if these episodes were real, or if he dreams are traumatized, but tell the dreamer something important. However, the director does not know what he remembers, Sabra and Shatila or even if he really exists. As they move to their investigation moves closer to the truth, and the experience is always painful and confusing. Waltz with Bashir appeared in 2008, seven years after Richard Linklater's Waking Life, which uses a similar technical animation; It came to spread or not popularized, as it had become "handmade" by Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki Pixar and DreamWorks style in his golden decade of digital animation and not a personal signature like the work. But it's distinctive and compelling - and fits just one movie.

2. Fantasia

The popular view of Walt Disney is that it is a pragmatic war; Even die youngest quasi-biopic Saving Mr. Banks, the company's own sieving was published, showing the legend of pre-printed animation autographs to distribute the theme park. But the peak seamers popularity Set the Disney of the abstract films of New Zealand artist Len Lye inspired a great art concert film recognize dying Silly Symphonies thirty years of the series have come to a place to do the dignity where "rule implanted imagination." He knew how to risk dangers he nahm, told the New York Times, "not if someone does, new things to break have movies would not be where today is an idiot ... to be someone's Hat." Even with today's 1940's fantasy features is a remarkable company, the music of Bach, Tchaikovsky, Schubert and Beethoven with hand-drawn animation, calves teams of 700 people mixing, an innovative sound system to die for - Fanta who would Die Illusion A whole orchestra in the film, But Disney's war plan, not that the music die images accompany, but are invited instead, perhaps die most extraordinary sequence of the film to make the soundtrack - literally magnetic stripe on the white A separate film Receives surreal reacts Various instruments. From this stage of the approach move made in the studio marketer, RKO, nervous as the Disney way the movie in which Roadshow die calm days released, from city to city to move, proved to be an expensive mistake. Disney's regular fans did not die to get narrative, expert and classical music in the hated its literal. However, on time it is time for Disney to decline; Once known as your failure, now is your high watermark. In fact, his most famous section of the wizard's Mickey Mouse is not only a great work of art of the twentieth century is populist but also die apotheosis of thinking calves Creator Who would have waited to die that Uncle Walt Goethe brought masses?

3. Up

The economy, grace and order protection "Married Life" can be up to four minutes early in the film, it is one of the best performances of the animation. At the height of their flawless strips in the mid-Pixar 00s they ventured with the delicate, energetic and wildly uncontested adventure of Carl Fredricksen and Russell, alongside South American Explorers remain unusual. Up is dumber and more committed, showing that some other great animated films, but with the famous and rigorous narration of Pixar along with an animation indicates that it brings everything - from perfectly caricatured dramatic humans - to life roaring. Up is a story that could not exist outside of the animation, show with a flight of the house and talking dogs, but also the moments more realistic the value of the medium; Carl tired of moving through his house chia, vivid colors, thrown to the ground, balloons, the cliffs of South America were twisted and pulled wild. The film follows a tense border between fantasy and reality, so that the pilot dogs are as important and real as Carl's hunting pain. The emotional climax comes when the house is perched on top of Paradise Falls - the victims and joys of marriage and truly literal age powerful. The animation is made for kids in Hollywood still almost exclusively, which means that most of the big screen cartoons have similar soporific problems of self-acceptance and triumph. By doing well, but slips into deep rich editions since its inception, both an exploration of life's deceptions and regrets majestic Paradise Falls.

4. Spirited Away

The Japanese animation Hayao Miyazaki has to scare the leadership of Lewis Carroll to the gods of this rite rite of passage on the adventures of a girl in a bathhouse. For a moment, Chihiro 10 years is charged in the back seat, to be stuck on the way to a new home. The following, obviously, her parents are pig, she forgot her name and asked for a scrub "stinking spirit", who reserved an appointment. Sitting somewhere in front of a dragon and a witch. In a perfect world, children would be more movies like Chihiro's Voyage, which has a kind of dream logic, shake up an extravagant universe, but runs its own rules. Most filmmakers install their player as fixed notions of good and evil to sustain. Miyazaki, but sends jumped like troublesome and scary pinballs, so that the dead "faceless" Flowers on a carnivore all that consume. Spirited has the same list and volatile pace. It's a magic spell, a trap, a disaster for a happy ending.

5. chicken Run

Why did British artists cross the street? An agreement with signature Steven Spielberg. Has Aardman Animation, the claymation studio before "stop-motion" Bristol, an offer similar to Disney's few years rejected Spielberg's DreamWorks has occurred. "It used to be that the best we could hope for summit of our ambitions was to do something like Wombles or Paddington Bear," Peter Lord said, the first feature film by Aardman, Chicken Run with Nick Park Co-Regie. The Aardman / Dreamworks wedding after disappointing returns further dissolved the Flushed Away co-operation and The Rabbit's Curse. But Chicken Run, the first outside of the cooperative, was a success. At the same time, computer animation, smooth and thick, threatened obsolete, making old techniques, this film was boldly against the grain to the whole world, as if everything was done in someone's yard. It is essentially a film Pow chickens, rather brave British soldiers, rubber tips instead of hard top board. There is the efforts of Ginger (voice of Julia Sawalha) and her fellow chicken trail of Tweedy Chicken Farm - a fight that a boost from the arrival of Rocky the rooster (Mel Gibson) is replaced, the fled the circus and is recruited chickens To teach express Even in their most ambitious sequences as involved a scary machine to make cake, in which chickens are allowed to fall just emerge ready for the supermarket shelves, at the other end, Hand has the image of the earth made after the first Aardman shorts. You can feel the care that has gone into it. More than that, in practice, you can see fingerprints.

6.Persepolis

The German-Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi co-wrote and the film adaptation of his own co-director Persepolis, based on his memories of growing up during the 1979 revolution. His youngest colleague on the screen, Marji is a brave, rebellious sprite, Who adores Bruce Lee, the breeze with God and shoot prophet believed. His family includes the overthrow of the Shah's regime, but Marji acknowledges that Iran does not change for the better. By offering Hope and Glory John Boorman, the ultimate vision of life during the war, Persepolis honor the small concerns of its protagonists. Even with the escalation of the Iran-Iraq war and missiles to destroy the environment, Marji's main concern is to win a game of "My uncle was in prison when his father already" or a copy of Iron Maiden's new album score. Persepolis has a light touch on weight issues, while the designs accurately capture Marji's confusion in his rapidly changing world. If you made your uncle in a Dissident visit to the cellar Gothic cellar charcoal stained, soft and clear lines of his own body to make it look as if he had diverted a strange comic. At school, scarves and veils transform Marji and his companions into the rows of Russian dolls, peering shyly at shoulders from behind. The visual contact of the image is wonderfully refreshing. Lines or blocks of darkness veiled with white details (such as gas masks with silhouettes with two moon-circles for the eyes) diffracted simple blacks, are simple and poetic. Satrapi and co-director Vincent Paronnaud, do a little more: snow spots in a landscape soot Tehran show noted that it is not necessary to conjure David Lean an impressive sense of place. It is very gratifying also learn about using a top-level, monochromatic, almost minimalist animation describing a theme as chaotic as modern Iran.

7. Yellow Submarine

Yellow Submarine the fourth Beatles movie in the space of four years and was in the summer of 1968, two years after the band stopped touring in a shower of gelatinous babies released. No, Not Only Physically: In light of the band's growing contempt for its advertising machine, this ambitious animated film is based not only on the hypothesis of the three previous Fab Four films, in which it interpreted versions of themselves as characters , They take the logical extreme inside, even voice. After their seminal album Sgt Pepper and Monkees pretty well surreal prevent to head for several months, they somehow managed the Beatles psychedelic aspects of the movie about the general public to pass. In fact, the film was quickly accepted by children who responded by Lee Minoff's script simplicity, which appears in the extraordinarily rich face that later claimed that his only influential pieces of songs were repeated Yellow Submarine and a date with Paul McCartney, Moptop voiced the Hope that the movie would contain "a monster". Pitiendo attacking the band against the killer music aversion to the Blue Meanies, the Pepperland and leaving frozen there in a state of limbo, the film was directed by the producers of Canadian experimental animation George Dunning with a budget of only 1 million dollars. Dunning's masterpiece was installed in the illustrator and art director Czech Republic and Germany Heinz Edelmann and the noble artistic creations that remain in the head, especially the sequence of Eleanor Rigby with its bombed streets of Liverpool and the brain Abstract Landscapes Lucy In the sky with diamonds. That says a lot about the band's careful treatment of their own image Yellow Submarine is still their favorite of their three feature films for United Artists. But perhaps it says more than the following year Let - the only movie of the "real" Beatles to catch on the verge of collapse - is not currently available on DVD. 8. The Iron Giant

If the new Star Wars movies were announced, there was a brief glow of feelings when Brad Bird's name was discussed. It is not hard to see why. While Mission: Impossible IV and The Incredibles showed that the bird style could bring in 1999 giant kinetic pieces also showed that what is missing for over 30 years of Star Wars: Colossal Heart. A loose remake of Ted Hughes's tremendously sad modern fairy tale Iron Man, The Iron Giant failed in publication. This is, of course, absurd. The movie has been called one of the best animation such as Disney, and the review is difficult to argue. Hogarth, a young boy discovers a huge metal robot that fell out of space, erased his memory. Hogarth teaches exclusively an ideology of the childhood world and the open eyes. The giant learns about good and evil, about death. It is a kind of local popular hero, but it falls against the military. At the end of the movie, after bird has the broadest courage Hughes and pacifism forced through their own retro-futuristic prism themes, has the heart strings drawn and tears were unsuccessfully caught. A hidden treasure in every respect, the huge iron was perhaps a little ahead of its time. Five years after its introduction, Vogel had made cornered to the power Pixar's Incredibles; An impressive film that shares many of the key messages of the huge iron. If I had suffered a few years and given complete CGI treatment, there is no doubt that the giant would have conquered all who have been in their way

9. Grave Of The Fireflies

Animation in Japan because they used an adult and raised status as in other parts of the world to some extent with the dark dare to employ as Disney-Pixar play themes: politics, metaphysics and of course the event in the Japanese history of XX century definition - nuclear annihilation. While the supernatural, the end of the days of Akira millenarianism (1988) was crazy a little crazy immediately 200,000 inhabitants of two bombs, Isao Takahata grave response to losing fireflies - published the same year as Akira - is another question: the human response Affected in how the war two normal children. The mission of the young Seita to her younger sister Setsuko worrying about a former bomb shelter after her parents are killed is irresponsible and proud - you can not stop yelling "for your bad aunt to come back!" While frogs think of eating to stay alive, but it is a kind of real heroism, the film is not reflected in the actions of selfish adults. See Seita Setusko and, as the rest of the country to normal slowed back; But his adventures of Robinson Crusoe, despite being condemned, have a merry purity condemned the hypocritical status quo. Although the animation of Studio Ghibli, a bit can be dated now, and this shows how you can draw what it would cost to capture on the camera: worm drop from burn victims, yes, but also the physical details of a girl's life - Oscillating bravely to face from side to side with the separation from the side of his mother, holding the remaining three drops eat only fragments of sticky fruit. There is a pathos that an actor four years could never convey. Do not think that a movie about child hunger was so edifying, or so beautiful.

10. The Tale Of The Fox

The Mutt Fox does a number of tricks hidden in his neighbors of the gullible animal kingdom with a frightened rabbit and a wolf. . The king of the animals, a lion, subpoena charges face, but the fox is any trick, including the king himself, when Ladislas Starevich this story told in the 1930s, was by no means new: the versions of the story of Reynard in the Europe was for most of a millennium in circulation, but the funds were to say, from scratch. Animation for 18 months 1929-1930 (and released after a long delay in 1937 in Nazi Berlin), the film Starevich seductive is often cited as one of the first animated films of all time; It is certainly one of the first properties made up of stop-motion animation. What is surprising is, eight decades later, how demanding it is. In 1930, 20 years of stop-motion tapes had conductive Starevich - began short films with dead bugs to make what is now Lithuania; After the October Revolution, he emigrated to France and then to the sixties to make films there. The fox is a testament to his abilities as an artist: the humanized form (an unspeakable badger Baron, cat courtesan Queen eyes) is remarkably expressive and film to make inventions. In the process of fooling the poor old wolf, née Gourmand evokes a vision of the sky, the imaginative flights of Georges Méliès (whose studio neglected in Paris Starevich used after arriving in France) recalls. There are extended dream sequences and in their heyday, when the king was angry at a total military action, extended high Burrow many roles and resonant strains comic siege involved. It's hard to imagine that Wes Anderson, in preparation for the Fantastic Mr. Fox, did not see the film Starevich with a watchful eye, and pick up a trick or two in the process.

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