Bramble The Mountain King is a grim adventure set in a world inspired by dark, Nordic fables. Explore the beautiful yet dangerous and twisted land of Bramble in your endeavour to rescue your sister. Traverse a wondrous landscape and survive deadly encounters with Bramble’s many hideous creatures.
Bramble: The Mountain King is a 2023 action-adventure video game developed by Dimfrost Studio and published by Merge Games.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows 10 / Processor: Intel Core i5-2300 | AMD FX-4350 / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 570, 1 GB | AMD Radeon HD 7850, 2 GB / DirectX: Version 11 / Storage: 8 GB available space
The plot involves a San Francisco health inspector and his colleague who over the course of a few days discover that humans are being replaced by alien duplicates; each is a perfect biological clone of the person replaced, but devoid of empathy and humanity. It is hailed as one of the greatest remakes ever, as well as one of the best science-fiction horror films of all time. (wiki)
analysis: Writer David Kajganich described the story to reflect contemporary times, saying, “You just have to look around our world today to see that power inspires nothing more than the desire to retain it and to eliminate anything that threatens it.” (wiki)
The British back garden is a familiar setting, but underneath the peonies and petunias is a much wilder hidden world, a miniature Serengeti, with beauty and brutality in equal measure.
In this documentary, Chris Packham and a team of wildlife experts spend an entire year exploring every inch of a series of interlinked back gardens in Welwyn Garden City. They want to answer a fundamental question: how much wildlife lives beyond our back doors? How good for wildlife is the great British garden? (bbc.co.uk)
timespace coordinates: I feel like we can speak as of 2022 about multi-temporal documentary making, especially regarding the lives of plants. Basically a camera shot that can fly in and out at many different temporal scales, induces the feeling of moving around microscopic objects and records microscopic movements imperceptible (to humans) at 3 years intervals (the saguaro cactus ridges extending during eet seasons for example).
Nature documentaries have been transforming and evolving their own technologies in order to track a changing evolving world – engaging and mediating the width and thickness of NOW. These documentaries are not just simply recordings of what’s out there – of some external reality. New visualization technologies, rigs and post production is developed in conjunction with gene editing (CRISPR) so that we can watch under UV light how a transgenic tobacco flares up, becoming “aware” (in the words of D. Attenborough) of an outside attack simulated by a pair of scissors ‘nibbling’ on its leaves. We can see it how a plant ‘anticipates’ or speculates about – further attacks and warns other distant parts indirectly affected. Because such newly mastered gene splitting technologies acquired from bacteria/bacteriophage co-evolution, one can insert genes from a distantly related phylum, a bioluminescent animal – a jellyfish probably into a plant. We can trace out a distress signal circulating inside the leaves of the plant in a laboratory setting. Such fluorescence markers dramatize how similar nerve endings and nervous systems are to vascular plant systems and how a signal can be carried and used as an early warning system in case of predator attack (caterpillar). The inner lives of plants are made visible akin to brain scan imagery – we don’t know what it is like to be a tobacco under attack, or how it prepares a chemical protection strategy, but we can watch and imagine life in a multi-processual way, a life not defined just by nervous systems.
It is only recently that one could track an interior activity that is completly below our radar – even if most of our ‘normal’ experience of breathing, walking, car driving lies at the same threshold of un-cognized activity. This is not just capturing the vector movement of a single plant or vine climbing, a plant activity noted by many observant naturalists in nature or a subject of process philosophy (Bergson, Whitehead), but a bundling of vectorial movements, of tropisms.
Take the example of plants moving and growing in the search of light(phototropism). We do not have here just the level of the leaf or vine, but of the parts inside the single cell (Chroloplasts) of one such leaf. There’s constant molecular activity, all under quantum mechanics rules – that powers up the cell during photosynthesis. This is mostly invisible activity. Most such energy harvesting by Chroloplasts is invisible, imperceptible. Such technologically mediated perception of invisible vector activities and micro-‘societies’ all happening simultaneously inside a plant is portrayed as a grandiose unseen choreography, jumping from level to level or switching scales.
The Green Planet encourages us to be a witness from our couch of the synchronous bloom (filmed with a drone) not only of two-winged flying seeds of gigantic Dipterocarpacae trees in Malayan archipelago (forests with the tallest angiosperms in the world), but also follow the migration of tiny Chloroplasts herds inside a single plant cell towards the light source. This involves making visible the cellular movements typical of daily photosynthesi, hidden movements that subtend all other movements (animal metabolism) and permit most primary biomass to multiply and replicate on Earth. It is important and a bit scary to imagine this biomass (80%) as active, sentient and not indifferent to what is happening all around and even chemically and termodynamically involved. This invisible world also includes the movement of life-sustaining gases and humidity that pass trough invisible mouth-like structures, the result of an invisible “breathing process”, of countless closing and opening stomata on a single leaf surface, on every leaf, all over the world each day.
For this to be possible, there is a combination of live field recordings (from the Pantanal – the world’s largest tropical wetland area) and filming inside a careful reconstruction of the Pantanal watery ecosystem. This reconstructed ecosystem (a large aquarium basically) in a small corner of Devon UK is place where the largest water lily Victoria amazonica traveled from the Kew Gardens in the hope it would play its part. That is why you have to watch at the end of every eps of The Green Planet HOW it was done. Lots of things came together from new lenses to skills aquired during competition drone piloting (First Person View drones, also called Stunt or Racing Drones). This does not dispell the magic of the series – but makes it even more graspable and adds matter to our imagination, fills in the gaps with the missing time that got edited out and that joint effort that went into it.
What a monstrous and prickly lilypad – to emerge and spring out of this Devon garage pool under the lense of photographer Tim Shepherd wading the depths of his small hot spring!
in a corner of Devon
More horrific in its way than all the natural horror movies – because its claims of staunch evolutionary storytelling of a “Tyrant” takes shape front of you. But hey, let’s not forget that it is also about sensitivity of such a huge aquatic plant that needs all extra care, the perfect conditions, artificial warmth and nurture – in order to perform. To see it in action, one needs the helping hand of many and lots and lots of kg of compost to be drowned regularly in order to match all the fertilizers of a South American river.
The water lily is a “Tyrant” only under these specific and unstable temporary conditions. So this is what it takes to be able to entice it to grow, emerge and rotate like a lasso under the eye of the cameras. It is also a fairly (pardon the pun) willful plant with a mind-of-its-own, that is never there for us or to satisfies our curiosity or the calibrated expection of the camera eye. It goes down into its depth and only unfurls at its own pace.
remote controlled filming and swooping along branches and rainforest terrain like never before
Also (for me) there is this important idea that the water lily only takes over at the end of a temporal-seasonal sequence. It closes down an ecological cycle of sorts, but is not at all there from the very start. There is a before and after. It needs particular conditions and before these conditions are met, there are other goings on happening. Some ‘winner’ plant is never there from the beginning or center of attention, and it might feel like it is always there. There is a set of events and various actors. This ecological succesion becomes visible in the Green Planet documentary because we can follow various species each having their own moment and strange mobility techniques, each its (Andy Warholas) ‘5 minutes’ of glory, each (buyoant water hyacinth and others) having a go at the sun rays in a situation of almost preemptive growth and resplandance as if anticipanting the coming of the waterlily giant.
The universe felt like a small and unchanging place even a few generations ago. There was only the Milky Way (still a huge place) rotating above, but no myriad galaxies in an ever-more rapidly expanding, all part of red-shifting spacetime continuum. On Earth there are all these unseen movments and animated sequences – all dramatized and as much part of what Deborah Levitt calls The Animatic Apparatus. We have to see these documentaries as part of a bigger continuum that comprises post-continuity cinema as well as a specific time of the 3D CGi effects world where one can watch rivers of leaves cut by leaf-cutter ants or think about the deep time history of patch of seagrass, that is basically one organism derived from a 80.000-200.000 year old clone.
What seemed like the domain of science fiction and materialist aesthetics – is now a living example of the history of science visualisation: a move away from the stained tissues, ‘dead’ 19th century outlook of wet collections, taxidermy and type specimens towards a dynamic and dramatized feature of life under various modified lenses, microcinematography, time-lapse camera, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) – under diverse set of laboratory and field conditions. This animating and dynamic recording characterizes what Hannah Landecker has termed the new “molecular vitalism”. This vitalism is not concerned with identifying the old Bergsonian élan vital, the vain search for an invisible lifeforce or one single majestic structure but with tracing, tracking with the aid of moving, living images the very activities that have escaped us. This time-based medium went from recording the machinations of the gene replicators but finished registering the protean proteinic 3D movability of these microscopic happenings, a window into their (ceasless) molecular activities.
All this existed till now, including the Scanning Electron Microscopy – yet it was still too static, too one-dimensional and static. This is why in 2022 and for The Green Planet BBC has hired an expert (Stefan Diller) that used a custom-made 8-axes electron microscope to ‘fly trough’ like a drone in a shot that can track around a mushroom spore, one thirtieth the width of a human hair. New light microsocopy techniques subtend this ‘indepedent’ imaginary flight around such plant microscopic worlds – with impossible clarity and depth by “holding focus all the way while also moving around the subject. “
electron microscope with 8 axes to be able to fly around tiny subjects
There has been a constant effort to make visibile the hidden life of plants available to the human sensorium. Plants are the most obvious yet the most ellusive of beings (of course if we ignore mushrooms). With their slow movements and apparent immobility, plants have been tricking us. It is as if they played dead-alive all this time, fooling us with their organic-anorganic liminal positions, mimicking their surrounding so well that so as not to attract undue attention. Plants do remember our touch and communicate with pheromones or using the mushroom enabled wood wide web. This is all very late observation, since they existed well before human minds or cameras eyes started following their secretive lives. They are waving in the wind or in the water following currents we have never been adapt at following. Already Charles Darwin become intersted in the way plants move, or how to record the speed of transformations that do not happen at human scale. The “view from nowhere” – or that unwated scientific attention made it certain that so much espaced our attention and perception. There is this entire realm of happenings and performativity of (especially) plant behaviour that makes them agents, forces and powers on their own terms. Darwin’s empirical experiments concering the movement and behaviour of carnivorous plants or the steady growth of humus via accumulated worm casting investigated such changes.
This apparent stillness and passivity (in comparision with animals) is something that David Attenborough BBC documentaries strived to demistfy or debunk since 1995’s The Private Life of Plants. The private life is not private at all, and has become very public. This new dynamism of the botanical world has since become public knowledge. Therefore during COVID years we the social animals are staying cooped up in our private homes, more immobile than usual, and more boring than usual while plants are being plants – taking animatedness and mobility as their own. Flights are going down and so they should in an era that realized how much global tourism is adding to the overall pollution. If you get bored with animal docus – you always have plants (said one commenter on YT). So The Green Planet is (also) about facilitating an impossible flying perspective, something typical to digital CGI effects to enliven, intensify a more and more (bored) ‘vegetating’ animal life with shorter attention spans. While the temporality of climate change is non-linear we still continue to hang onto a linear clock-time of calender COP26 deadlines. It is instructive to see this in contrast with the dramatized heightened attention and sensitivity necessary in order to percieve and experience such larger webs of invisible interaction and interdepedence.
South Korean nature documentary directed by Seung-woo Son
“With 4K UHD quality, EBS Docuprime ‘Green Animal’ is a documentary of plants’ life stories by looking for wonderful plants on the Earth by visiting five major oceans and six major continents for about two years. It shows nature’s beautiful scenes with a secret of primal, and illuminates plants that were discounted as static existences with a new point of view. It follows plants’ lives with the actor Sung-hwa Jung’s narration.
As plants cannot move, they couldn’t choose good land by themselves. The program reveals plants’ dynamic movements and strategies for survival and their unimaginable life stories. It lively describes images of plants moving for survival by fair means or foul through interval filming, micrography, and electron microscope. With a high-speed camera, it also captured even a hundredth of a second movement created by plants.” (here is more about the documentary from the press conference launch)
Here is a French/ARTE version of it in three parts:
Around the World in 80 Gardens is a television series of 10 programmes in which British gardener and broadcaster Monty Don visits 80 of the world’s most celebrated gardens. A book based on the series was also published. (wiki)
I wanted to start with a critical quote by celebrated author and Sci-fi feminist Ursula K Le Guin as an entry point to something quite different: the new Chinese movie Monster Run taking risks. Indeed, we hear it more and more often: “Commodified fantasy takes no risks”.
a screen within a screen within a screen
21st century blockbusters tend to adhere piously to this dogma. Apart from instances of tokenism, it is less about world building new worlds, but only about propping up the old ones. Banking on previous successes is what big franchise do nowadays as a matter of good economic course. This stale creative output (i mean here mainly Marvel capitalist superheroines and superheroes) can be sure entertaining, yet incredibly predictable. And yes maybe they are not cinema and this for good reasons(and not especially becose M Scorsese sez so). I am not going to rehash old/new media-technologically significant histories of why the first half of XX c was ruled by cinema and why cinema gave way in the 1950s to TV in the US, or why 1970s Godfather gave way to the The Sopranos. The debates around post – continuity cinema from a few years ago, theoretically mapped by Steven Shaviro in his Post-Cinematic Affect have been stimulating to everyone, including me. What I’m trying follows up on those fruitful debates but also keeps an eye of fan studies and fandom in general. Cinema is not cinema anymore because it also commercially engulfed like a process of phagocytosis – all these previous non-artsy core fandoms, especially older comics/male-dominated geek cultures – that were already contested & blasted from within. Ursula K LeGuin is herself part of a generation of radical women writers (together with Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ & others) that actively & successfully challenged the most cherished ideals of Golden Age Sci-fi establishment in the 60s &70s & 80s that went hand in parallel with developments within comics. IMHO we are just entering a phase of truly global fandoms & one more diverse (artists, authors, publics, critics) than ever & completly bonkers in the best sense – one that the titans of media struggle to keep up with or try to ignore at their at their peril. Marvel nowadays exemplifies a sort of mise en abime mediatic spiral, the rush of older (retro) canons & fanon (full of contradictions & unsolvable antinomies) carried along and modulated by always mutating & rapidly changing technologies.
binging your way trough the time warp
New “structures of feeling” manifest as current meta- series reflect and build on our own binge status – #fullretromania churned by streaming giants (the Netflix Apple+ Disney + era) under Corona stress loockdown conditions. The soap opera TV series mass appeal success – gets to be lionized within the confines of streaming services such as Netflix. Importantly, and out of the Anglophone bubble – not everyone is Netflix & chill. There’s also in Eastern Europe (especially Romania satellite TV multi-channel bonanza) an acquired post 1989 TV taste & fandom of an older generation (those in their 60s or 70s and still quite gendered – say the generation of our moms) enjoying a whole array of Turkish dramas or Korean historical k-dramas. Otherwise no accident that some Marvel series and movies are self-reflexive, self ironic (postmodern cultural logic at work) chocke-full self-referential digital products. WandaVision is practically one single (and quite unsettling) uninterrupted history of home entertainment in a screen whitin a screen within a screen shot. To me they are like Nam Jun Paik art installations assembled for stay-at-home public in a serial form. Audience is akin to the special agent- (SHIELD-like?! NSA LOVINT?) pay-per-view binging and media analyzing to death 1950s 1960s 1970s US drama universes. The Marvel prosumers live within their screens and pay with their distracted & highly trained attention or continue tele- working uploading new YT replies or reaction videos about their favorite shows. For me it is not important to condamn binging or to relegate it to the addictive. Even if addictive it should still teach us something about our current status – of beings living trough very fast technological change, while almost doing the equivalent of a inter-planetary (or inter-galactic) trip. Binging feels almost like a trance state where nothing is portioned, where supposedly you get the whole season in one gulp. It is the media equivalent of constant guilty pleasures – basic ally what woman audiences have been been accused of all along. Binge and bulimic habits converge and a moralizing attitude akin to the moral panics of the 1980s has been internalized & casualized.
embracing the comics no risk formula
Hollywood embraced the comics majors formula AFTER independent comics artists (especially IMAGE comics) started their own publishing, changing and countering such formulaic franchise monoliths to start with. Comics Marvel or DC where pretty much over-extendeding themselves in a gamut of remakes of remakes BEFORE they ended onscreen. They were always banking on their wide distribution and wide readership by indulgin into canonic fan service, killing various titles ritually, constantly burying and resurrecting their stars, cashing in on the formulaic, extracting value from their pedigree pop iconicity. TimeWarner has been shrinking DC comics division – after it merger with Telecom+ Before this cinematic conglomerate – comics merger, there were re-issues and re-adaptions of previous 50-60 years of lesser or bigger successes – all ij tow with their widening readerships, stagnating sales and diversifying sub- audiences. Various pop cultural aspects were infinitely debatable & exciting with endless discussions even back then via letters from readers or during face 2 face atComic Cons etc Although Ursula’s insightful rant aims at heroic fantasy & space opera (mainly resuscitated by SW) tired tropes (culminating perhaps in ridiculous 1987 Masters of the Universe movie) , it still cuts across everything that is most despicable nowadays; entire media empires as an extension of global theme-parking. Now one single Marvel blockbuster makes as much box office money as the whole US comics industry. The gold is in the ownership and control over the characters – the milking of old & established caped hero brands. Cutting costs and pension plans has become a priority in comics industry, especially since blockbuster movies became so profitable. Yes, there is incredible reductionistic ‘toyfication’ going on – changing and reversing the flow of production chains, so that movies get made ONLY in order to sell more plastic merch and build even more experience economy parks.
world-building and world-playing
While this has been our lot since at least the 2000s, I would like to try and recover at least a certain uninteded effect of toyfiction. There is defintely a golden age of Chinese sci-fi going on – kehuan – uses original concepts, images, constructions, techniques sometimes derived from classical or ancient times to surprising effect. In view of Chinese 2020 Monster Run movie – all religions might have thus a bottom-up cosmological readiness, practicing their skill with various toy universes. Thinking this way makes a lot of ancient sacred artefacts – revered in their time, seem very much like sacred toys, and I am not saying this in order to belittle religious experience or draw attention on the ‘infantile’ aspects of religion or in order to draw ridicule at their attempt to world-build and world-play. Toys also have to do with models of the world, with the speculative capacity to model the universe. What is basically that essential Ptolemaic instrument – the armillary sphere, or what is that Antikythera mechanism but a long series of elaborate pre-electronic cosmic toys?!
toyfiction: lively automatons and religious toys
It is maybe useless to see toyfication and toy-fiction as anything but as further attempt to sanitize, to cutify, to subsume all creativity, to repackage innocence and ingenue aesthetics into further expansions of capital. But toys have lead us in other directions as well. Well, if we regard the first lively automatons as religious toys participating in a theo- robotic history, then they are all expressions of a certain restless (neo-vitalist?) mechanistic mystery play. More often than not there is the possibility that any cheap toy u buy might be poisoned or produced under inhuman forced labor (laogai) conditions and thus be the preferred vehicle & embodiment of the darkest toxic forces of capital. With that in mind, I consider Monster Run a new example of how toons and toys blend into religious mechanisms and Escherian geometrical puzzles – mystical complexes reinvented as weird playgrounds of Spirits, Demons, Monsters, Gods.
faux gold auratic glow of the bloody fun fair parks
Such a natural philosophy of toys would regard humankind itself as human toys of elemental forces(or humans as playthings of the Gods). I say this in order to reverse engineer their infantile consumerist function and cautiously map their preternatural cuteness across an unexpected both sacred&profane terrain. Aberrant toys, cheap copies, fake plastic artefakes, lucky cat faux gold do have an unsettling auratic glow even as they are mass produced and easily reproductible. They also end up on the same mall stall – the golden plastic toothpick box next to the electoplated orthodox incense burners (both made in China btw). In a thoroughly commodified fantasy world, of Spirited Away theme parks abandoned and new ones being built, heaps of plastic toys, puppet limbs on beaches and microplastic slowly filling our oceans, toys become harbingers of ‘numinous’ doom. On the more auspicious note – there is a link between ancient Chinese lucky cats, old sayings (recorded in The Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang) about feline behavior and good omens that announce easy commerce or are supposed to ward off evil. Our 21 c plastic temples in contrast are left floating under more or less murky waters. Yet, they are more strange, more weird than your usual place of dedicated prayer. They are generally scary fun fair theme parks like party clubs mimicking Egyptian glitz or Las Vegas pyramids as sold and Made in and increasingly Created by China.
new elasticity of time & space in the 21st century
Monster Run could be one such backdoor entry, a portal towards the 21st c inter-dimensional thinking & feeling. Onr that id still at odds with 20th c notions & certitudes. Thinking about the MULTIVERSE or about PARALLEL DIMENSIONS, PORTALS – has become pretty common, even maybe a signature of 21 c century spatial and temporal restructuring under both unbridled speculative daredo & as insidious algo-capitalistic means of reproduction. While most non-essential dream-workers work from home(ones that David Graeber hoped to wake up from their productivity slumber) bouncing off the four walls (and sometimes singing from their balconies). These dream workers are also exposed to time warps and bouts of binge-induced non-locality. We are always elsewhere, on The Expanse riding together with the Rocinante crew or chased by mutant monsters on K-drama hallways or deep inside a game level. This restructuring usually arrives via Sci-fi tropes but is also felt as the accretion of a condensed all embracing atmosphere precipitating from our daily experiences under lockdown. Binging on series, YT or TikTopk videos, or reading various lenghty novels is not just a time filler – it also explains something universal about sentient beings. Either cyborg or human they might be spending their long pod-status onboard life under lockdown crunching trough and enjoying media. This has been one of the universal constants of COVID time – something that would feel familiar to (Martha Wells’s) MURDERBOT onboard the long stays in between the landing stations. We are not alone even when alone or most solipsistic, but surrounded by various invented, imaginary creatures, attachments and life support systems as well as very material cloud computing infrastructures burning a lot of fuels that keep us glued to the ultra-HD streaming. We are closely interdependently enjoying various cultural serialisms at a time of general distress. This basic mediatic serialism (with healthy interruptions) during COVID pandemic staycation exhibits a new chewy elasticity of time spent mostly inside closed, built environments. An elastic time best expressed by the Indonesian notion of rubber time jam karet (check interview with Riar Rizaldi by bv film critic Łukasz Mańkowski ), one also taken up by Irina Gheorghe in one of her lecture- performances in Yogyakarta.
homemade creepiness and animatronic mystery plays
What would such a sacrificial rite (sacrificing childhood dreams, naivete, plain fun etc) look nowadays? Toys (animatronic ones especially) offer bloody movable spectacles – empty (abandoned) creepy temples where few make it out to tell the gory tale. Under their healthy, family-oriented innocence, what lies beneath amounts to a splatter grand-guignolesque childhood spectacle where a ham-acting Nicholas Cage plays along. Material toys do take part in a larger creep that includes a longer trail of various creepy digital objects. In fact this homemade creepiness is key nowadays. From creepypasta to YT toons – we unwind a disturbing children’s world gamified, exploited and uploaded by automated editing toolz that push non curated content under ur nose to ur toddler. These creepy hard-to-follow (for adults) content loops have been explored in the essays of James Bridle and their follow-up of rules and manic content filtering.
Chinese Boxes and Matryoshka universes
To go back to Monster Run in spite of what critics have been calling a mess and “salad script” -you can just mainly watch it for fun (if you find a good subbed copy of it). On one level it is just a very fresh Cantonese Taoist Ghostbuster story. My interest was the setting of this monster hunt conflict between worlds that wanders between sino-futurist city cyperpunkish back alleys, CGI interiors etc New Chinese construction sites (including the Belt & Road Initiative). They are the current inter-dimensional nexus hiding in plain sight but also offering the comfort of tiny houses or private otaku room interiors that offer respite from very brutal outer worlds. In this movie backgrounds are morphing, being constantly remade almost in a Minecraft way and with a view (for me) for neglected aspects of the Chinese 21 c miracle – (as opposed to the NY skyline of Nolan’s Inception kaleidoscope let’s say). Of course there is a lot of shamanistic goings on, gate-keeping, sliding and hiding in-btw worlds and worlds that are nested inside worlds like Chinese boxes or Matryoshka universes.
convenience store gate-keeping & monster rampage
The convenience store is integral to this border crossing. It is the place where the young Jing Mo (Jessie Li), the movie’s heroine and future inter-dimensional gatekeeper works. She works at the convenience stores at a dead ends job(a typical experience of pre-Corona youth no?) after being diagnosed, medicated and separated from her mom (who seems to be her only living relative). She is transformed into a patient because she sees invisible entities that influence and affect our world in very material ways. She also gets paid to dress up as a furry – in a monster costume that looks very similar to the real monsters in the movie. She has to try hard and ignore otherworldly creatures (monsters), beings that are oblivious to everybody else but her in the beginning. Later on she finds out that she is part of a group that have made a living out of hunting monsters that wreak havoc to our world. Monster do stick to her, and she attracts some gigantic hairy creatures (akin to kinda cute Yeti’s) that seem to freeze their victims (but not kill them). This convenience store is almost a mythical place in itself. Very colored, overly full of all sorts of specific Asian packaged products, bright stalls with products that get chaotically thrown around and misplaced after consecutive monster romps.
maximalist space, armilary spheres and Egyptomania
Another scene is set in the backside of a street vendor’s shop called uncle Ping. In fact this very amiable street vendor is a mythical creature; a shape-shifting half-lion half human. He could be part of a long series of wondrous antique shop owners or your favorite from the nearest China Town. I also saw him like one of the Ming dynasty scientist. He could also remind us of the Zicawei portrait of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci maybe because of the armillary sphere (no mother Mary thouh). There are all sorts of exotic artefacts in this liminal space, from Armillary spheres to incense burners. Egypt also plays a role too, although it is again almost a theme park show of Egyptian antiquity. Of course ancient Egypt was part of Imperial Orientalism and of course it became such an important iconic treasure trove to be ripped off by incipient European secret societies and even masonic iconography. Maybe indeed the Mummy’s curse was of course a memetic artefact of such British Imperial fears and hubris after pillaging most extra-European cultures, a process of appropriation that went unimpeded till recently. But this ‘hodgepodge’ is almost like an contemporary alchemist’s room, an unusually crowded, non- Ikea furniture space. No room for Marie Kondo, this is a non- minimalist maximalist environment akin to the setting of a Korean female shaman ceremonial or the dense arrangement of a Chinese pharmacist shop. Young Jing Mo is the next in line shamanic traveler & inter dimensional gatekeeper and the true battle of the movie pits her against an older, more power hungry (?!) matriarchal (shaman) generation.
There is also an incredible chase that feels like constantly folding space inside the lower lever of a construction site or parking lot. I really liked how the construction boom (cement) molded space is somehow itself folding and refolding into new temporal configurations as the monster hunters car tries to loose some pretty pesky nemesis. Importantly – folding paper is key in Monster Run.
folding space-time while folding paper
Somehow this topological art of the foldable translates perfectly into portal openings and folding space-time. Paper was invented in China and the main non-human character of the movie is Paper the sidekick of 2000s HK heathrob Shawn Yue – literally an animated spell (a piece of written paper that has taken a life of its own). The Chinese craft of paper sculpture is directly linked to the after-life and nether world. There are elaborate paper copies of golden ingots, paper money, paper humans, paper houses (even paper VHS or paper cars) also included figures of paper gods that were made (and sold) all over the Chinese diaspora, including Taiwan and Singapore. All these paper objects were intended to be ritually burned and thus mainly de-materialize HERE and re-materialize THERE in the great beyond. They are intended for the after-life and the ancestors cult. Recently this art form – as most of our paper products got replaced by (cheaper but much more noxious) petrochemical plastic replicas. Monster Run features some really nifty tricks involving recycled pop ephemera as idol posters, while -Paper- the Daoist side-kick appears to be made out of single use coffee cups or tetrapack packaging.
sentient flower portals
The novum of Monster Run is an inter-dimensional tunneling that is quite organic. I was totally surprised by this since it is not at all what inter-dimensional wormholes look like in usual Sci-fi settings or scientific illustrations. Monster Run spins these wormholes almost like the silk moth cocoon is spun. It almost fells like a soft funnel spider web without the poisonous arachnid chelicherae waiting for you. This inter-dimensional labyrinthine silky structure I dare say is quite different from other architectural mazes (as in The Maze Runner series for example) I have seen in movies, Sci-Fi books, science experiments (the famous maze solving slime molds!), comics or even speculative scientific renditions. This human-sized inter-dimensional spider web or silken cocoon blooms flowers portals at its ends. In fact these incredible moving gigantic peony(?!) flowers (see screenshot below) are the portals – like undulating, sentient fleshy sea anemones of sorts with moving, unfurling petals and feely touchy stamens. Peonies have been called “the longest-used flowers in Eastern culture” and they have such a diverse morphology ranging from your garden variety to 3 m deciduous shrubs! Last time we counted Paeoniaceae compounds it included 262 phytochemicals. What more do you expect of botanical alchemy? This amazing list include compounds that have shown antioxidant, antitumor, antipathogenic, immunomodulative, cardiovascular-system-protective activities and central-nervous-system activities (in vitro). Peonies are a cocktail of monoterpenoidglucosides, flavonoids, tannins, stilbenoids, triterpenoids, steroids, paeonols, and phenols. Monster Run CGI giant peonies are the first floral ‘sentient portals’ I have yet encountered in movies. Flowers of course are very important in Buddhism and Hinduism, and giant lotuses abound in Buddhist cosmology with a predilection for the floral as the seat of myriad Buddhas (such as the iconography of the Prabhūtaratna and Shakyamuni in the jeweled stupa wall painting from the Yulin Caves) or as spatial representations of various Buddhist realms. Hutzul minority in Ukraine & România also identified the lucky 4 leafed clover as a model of the universe. The various Lotus petals surrounding the central Pistil (mount Meru of Hinduism) are the various regions/cultural centers/worlds (Lokas). But you don’t need all these references – the CGI makes it something sui generis, aptly transporting us between computer game worlds and a backyard globalized reality. Anyways, the takeaway is that Monster Run, even without a big release is well worth watching even just for seeing these portals bloom!
TimeSpace Warps 
