RISE OF THE GUARDIANS (2012)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* 

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical* 

I'm a longtime lover of crossover-concepts, so I suppose 2012 must go down in my personal history as the first time not one but two animated crossover-films appeared in the same year: Dreamworks’ RISE OF THE GUARDIANS and Disney’s WRECK-IT RALPH.  Both are reasonably amusing entertainments, but only one of them realizes the full potential of a crossover: to juxtapose ideas that weren’t meant to go together but can successfully blend when the writer understands how to play the disparate elements off one another.

Given that Dreamworks did a nice job with crossing over fairy-tale figures in its original SHREK film (though not so much in the sequels), I might have expected that company to produce the better 2012 crossover-film.  Instead, the Dreamworks film never goes beyond its derivative nature, which might be capsulized as “MIRACLE ON 34^TH STREET meets THE AVENGERS,” with lots of goofy jokes.

The viewpoint character of GUARDIANS is Jack Frost, a young winter-spirit able to conjure up ice and snow wherever he pleases.  Though he generally has no cares beyond having fun, he has two sources of disquiet:

First, he doesn’t know who he is or where he came from, except that the unapproachable, never-seen being called “the Man in the Moon” gave him his name. 

Second, though he can interact with humans with his powers, they can’t perceive him, and only know his name as an outmoded expression. 

In contrast, children the world over still believe in the mythic characters who comprise the Guardians—Santa Claus (given a delightful Slavic accent here), the Easter Bunny (rendered as an Aussie for some reason), the Tooth Fairy, and the Sandman.  In their capacity as Guardians, these folkloric characters not only pursue their assorted child-nurturing duties, they keep watch to make sure that children’s belief in them stays strong so that they can continue those duties.

Along comes a menace to that stability: an evildoer named Pitch Black, also called the Boogeyman, who flourishes on the emotion of fear.  The villain manages to take control of the benign dreams created by the Sandman and spawn hideous nightmares—or to be precise, night-mares, since Pitch’s creatures all take the form of black monster-horses.  With these minions Pitch begins undermining the ability of the world’s children to believe in their protectors.  The Sandman is (apparently) killed, the Tooth Fairy’s domain is ransacked, the Easter Bunny’s eggs are smashed.  Though Christmas is months away, even Santa is diminished by the growing plague of disbelief. 

The Guardians attempt to enlist the flighty Jack Frost to their cause.  As if usually the case with rebel-heroes, initially Jack can only be drawn into the battle by appealing to his self-interest: his desire to know how he came to be what he is.  This becomes a running subplot, in which Jack learns that there’s a record of who he once was in the Tooth Fairy’s collection of harvested teeth (don’t ask).  However, in good time Jack gets religion and begins fighting Pitch for the sake of the kids, particularly one young boy who maintains his belief long after his kid-friends have lost their faith.  A climactic scene in which the kids use their belief to combat Pitch's terrors put me in mind of a similar "belief vs. unbelief" struggle in the 1982 animated cartoon THE FLIGHT OF DRAGONS.

The attention to Jack’s self-realization is a secondary matter: GUARDIANS, which has obviously patterned its concept on comic-book hero-teams like the Avengers and the Justice League, falls squarely within the mythos of adventure. Accordingly, Dreamworks doesn’t spare the CG-graphics in the area of wild battle-scenes.  At the same time, the film provides an acceptable amount of fun with such ideas as a sword-wielding Santa or a boomerang-tossing Easter Bunny.  However, though GUARDIANS is enjoyable formula, it’s never anything more than that.

There are hints of mythic resonance that could have gone beyond mere plot-utility.  Jack is revealed to have been a human before becoming a frost-spirit, and the Tooth Fairy tells him that all of the Guardians were humans raised to the status of protective spirits.  This follows a myth-pattern set by the heroes of ancient Greece, who were portrayed as mortals who once lived and later became gods.  The Man in the Moon, who remains an otiose deity-figure, is a folkloric stand-in for God on High.  The villain is a pretty simple Satanic type, seen to best effect when he plays “tempter” and nearly sways Jack Frost from his heroic course.  It’s interesting that the writer of the books on which the film is based named this boogieman “Pitch,” a name which appears in the 1960 Mexican film "Santa Claus" as a name for the Devil.  However, this devil's gimmick of unleashing nightmare-horses gets old very quickly; he might have seemed more like a master of nightmares had he been able to unleash a greater variety of horrors.