by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles ran me a half-hour
cartoon short of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant from 1971 which was a special favorite of his, and
which he thought was unique even though, when I searched for it on imdb.com,
seven other versions came up, including some made for television (notably a
1939 version from the BBC’s experimental TV production group), and a version
dated 2013, though that one is described as “a contemporary fable about two
scrappy 13-year-old working-class friends in the UK who seek fortune by getting
involved with a local scrap dealer and criminal, leading to tragic
consequences.” Exactly what that has to do with Wilde’s story, if anything, is
something I won’t know until I see it. In any event, this Selfish Giant is a quite charming, if rather crudely animated,
26-minute cartoon offered by, of all companies, Reader’s Digest, based on a
Wilde story that’s a pretty obvious parable about the joys of altruism and the
dangers of selfishness — the sort of children’s story you might expect from an
author who wrote an essay called “The Soul of Man under Socialism” that clearly
came from a point of view that regarded socialism as a good thing.
The story deals with a giant (though given
the scale with which he was drawn as compared to the human characters he’s not that giant — more like about 12 feet — and his
appearance, particularly his facial structure and his clothes, made me think
the animators were deliberately copying the famous Frankenstein monster makeup
from the Universal films) who leaves his castle and garden for seven years to
visit the Cornish Ogre, an equally jumbo-sized humanoid who lives on an island.
When he returns, he finds that children have made it a habit to play in his
beautiful garden. Being selfish, he’s horrified by this and immediately puts up
a “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” sign, walls off his castle and garden, and
makes sure the kids can’t come in and play. He’s visited by Winter, the North
Wind, Jack Frost and Hail, all of whom camp out in his garden and turn it into
a year-round wasteland of frost, cold and other unpleasantnesses. Then one
child manages to discover a crack in the wall and sneak in, and the Selfish
Giant takes pity on him, installs him at the top of a tree in the garden, and
by his example the child attracts Spring and more clement weather beings and
turns the garden beautiful again. The Giant tears down the wall and the sign,
lets the children play in his garden again, but is broken-hearted because he
never again sees the child who sneaked in and softened his attitude in the
first place — until the very end of the story, in which the mystery child literally turns out to be Jesus Christ (we can tell by the
wounds on his hands and feet left by the Crucifixion), who tells the giant,
“You let me play once in your garden; today you shall come with me to my
garden, which is Paradise.” Then the giant is allowed to die (the story has
taken place over decades and by then he’s quite old) in peace.
The 1971
adaptation is a bit on the cutesy-poo side for me, complete with a couple of
highly sappy songs that sound like cross-breeds between Disney musicals and
soft-rock, though Charles assured me (and I just confirmed by looking up the
original online) that most of the third-person narration we hear throughout the
film comes from Oscar Wilde. It’s a genuinely charming tale, effectively if not
especially creatively told here, quite moving in its way even though more than
a bit didactic. Indeed, while we were watching it I couldn’t help imagine the
story as Ayn “Virtue of Selfishness” Rand would have written it; in her version,
of course, the giant’s brilliant entrepreneurial spirit would have ensured that
his garden blossomed while everyone else’s stayed stuck in winter, and at the
end he would emerge from behind the wall and say, “If you want to play in my
garden, you will have to do so on my terms.” (One quirky fact about the film
listed on imdb.com: the movie was also released in a French-language version,
and for the French soundtrack narrator Paul Hecht was replaced by, of all
people, Charles Aznavour. If only they’d tapped him for the songs as well!)
