I’ve been thinking about this scene lately.
It had a profound impact on me when I was a young child. The whole movie, in fact. It’s hard to imagine now, but when I was a child this was the most vivid and modern and convincing animation in the world- and it was being cast on eyes barely old enough to understand 3 dimensional space.
The way this whole movie feels like it’s shot in the glow of candlelight at night and lanterns in the fog by day, feels so subtle and intimate and old and weary at the same time. The world feels old and rickety and lived-in rotten wooden.
What’s interesting to me that I didn’t put together until recently is that the world of the humans to the mice in this movie is very much like the world of adults, to kids- the target audience. The mice are very small, like children, and live beneath the humans- unseen, with no interaction. It’s not the complete relationship with adults that children have, but it is very much the relationship children have with the adult world in general- in all of its wonders and dangers, beyond our childish comprehension or understanding.
I believe this movie gave me my very first impression of what the adult world I was coming into might be like. Probably why I still chase all things Victorian and Gilded Age to this day.
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