Eng 4u1 - the War Within

Rameet Sekhon

Mrs.Memme

ENG 4U1

04 March 2015

The War Within

My main motivation for this entire project was to create a story that captured the major elements of the poem, but did so in a way that was sequential and flowed together. The result of this was a story that was unique, and told Joy Kogawa’s story from a new perspective. My inspiration for the first scene was to take the essence of the first 3 lines which was the naïve nature of a child, and put a positive view on the most dire of situations. The child was a symbol of this innocence while her blank and colourful imagery within her thought bubble showed how her perspective as a child led her to believe that the situation that she was in was a positive one, even if that belief was temporary. I used this imagery and thought process to relate it back to the psycho analytic theory. According to Carl Jung, a person’s personal unconscious is heavily influenced by one’s childhood. In my opinion, this is the reason human beings seem to protect a child’s innocence so fiercely. It is because we know that their innocence and childhood is what will determine who they are as adults. This also influenced my next story board scene as you see her parents protecting her childhood and trying to not take that away from her. I represented her childhood as a bright white light. The reason I chose white is because both the colour white and childhood are seen as pure, thus allowing a stark contrast to the imagery around it. To protect this innocence, I chose to use an umbrella that is originally seen as a device to repel rain. In this case the rain seen is extremely dark. The dark murky colour of these rain drops represent these impure “adult” ideas like race and hate which contrast greatly with the pure and innocent childhood of the white light. In my opinion, a major theme throughout this poem was the premature loss of childhood of Joy Kogawa. This protection of her childhood by her parents in the poem ultimately fails as she begins to realize the truth of her “adventure”. To represent this I decided to show the very destruction of the ability of parents to protect their children. A universal archetype of human society is that parents will always be able to protect their children, however the destruction of this creates a big impact on the viewer as an archetype is rarely ever shown as failing, and similar to how the hero always defeat the villain. However, in real life, the hero doesn’t always win. The cracking of the umbrella represents the very essence of this as the pressures of the outside world prove too much for them and they break under the pressure. As a result, these impure thoughts poison the pure innocence of Joy’s childhood and slowly begin to take over her as she becomes more aware of the real world. This imagery is portrayed at the same time as Joy is beginning to realize that the outside world is not as she thought;