Hilda S1E1-3
This review was commissioned by @firefossil
Netflix's animated series "Hilda" has the look and subject matter of a Scandinavian children's cartoon, but the weird cultural assumptions of a British one. I looked it up, and it turns out that the show is based on a graphic novel series by a British Swedephile. So, go me I guess.
It also has this particular flavor of surrealism that you only normally find in children's picture books. Like, the ones made for kids aged 3-5 or so that manage to get into the child headspace of everything being simultaneously extremely serious and just a game. Where divisions between fantasy and reality, important and trivial, consequential and ephemeral simply do not exist. And yet, despite this childlike (and, to at least a degree, childish) construction, the show doesn't feel condescending or frustrating for an older audience. At least, if it does, it only does so a tiny bit.
Combine this with the specifically Scandinavian aesthetics and the specifically English characterization, and you can probably imagine why "Hilda" is a pretty unique product.
In terms of its message, well...the first two episodes are saying something. I don't know if it's the same thing that the rest of the series is saying (I'll be watching episode 3 later). I also don't know at all if it's something I like.
Hilda lives alone with her mother in a house in the mountains, miles from anything. Their family has been here for three generations, but it's not clear why. Her mother is implied to be a widow. No idea what happened to the father (and it's hinted that the house-in-the-middle-of-nowhere came from his side of the family). Hilda has virtually no human acquaintances besides her mother, and doesn't want any. She's more than content with her pet deerfox Twig, the ill-mannered tree goblin that uses their living room floor as a quiet reading space in exchange for firewood, and the truck-sized spherical flying dog-things that swarm through the skies overhead every dawn and dusk. Her days are occupied by treks in the wilderness with Twig, where she looks for monsters to draw in her sketchbook and often narrowly avoids being eaten by them.
Hilda's mother thinks that maybe they should move to the nearby city. She's just worried that Hilda might be happier if she was around other kids her age, you know? Just a feeling.
Also, Hilda's mother doesn't like that the tree-imp just barges in without knocking and gets snippy if you try to talk to it when it's busy reading. Sure, it does bring them firewood, but that doesn't make up for its bad manners. She's afraid it will be a bad influence on Hilda.
Settlers of Catan fuck yeah.
Bad neighbours are sort of a recurring theme of these two episodes. Well, sort of. It goes deeper than that.
Recently, the family have been getting eviction notices written in near-microscopic script on tiny pieces of paper left on their doorstep. The "hidden people" as they call themselves are, as the name implies, hidden, and also seemingly very small, but Hilda and her mother know nothing about them beyond that except that they want them to leave.
Hilda's mother tries to leverage the will of the hidden people into another argument to convince her daughter to be okay with moving. No dice. Even when the hidden people escalate to breaking in at night and badly vandalizing the house, smashing things and breaking appliances, is Hilda willing to budge. She manages to plead and wheedle her longsuffering mother into letting her try to solve this problem, and her mother reluctantly agrees, but if invisible monsters break into the house and destroy everything even just ONE more time then that's it, they're moving.
Hilda has no idea how to go about solving this problem, but in the predawn hours she gets a lucky break. One of the hidden people, by the name of Alfur (which is sort of like a human being named Humany, but okay lol), reveals himself to her. Well, sort of. He explains that humans aren't able to see elves - or "the hidden people" as they sometimes call themselves when speaking to outsiders - unless they fill out the requisite paperwork.
That ends up being the entire crux of the issue, as a matter of fact. Sort of.
Hilda's grandparents built their house in the middle of well-populated elf county, which itself is part of a sprawling nation-state. Once Hilda's filled out the forms, she can see the towns and villages dotting the hilltop all around her house.
Now, normally, elves and elvish construction are intangible to humans as well as invisible. Step on an elf apartment complex, and your foot will go right through without encountering any resistance or inflicting any damage. However, the experience of being stepped on by gigantic feet is still frightening and nerve-wracking for the elves, especially the children. When the humans shout, or play music with their human-sized radios, or ignite the engine of their human-sized car, the noise is genuinely hellish.
The elves aren't willing to abandon the area. They were here before the human family was (god, the construction of that house must have been a nightmare for them). They also aren't willing to reveal too much about themselves to the family; Alfur says that "elvish tradition" prevents them from simply issuing the forms to all of the family members to make themselves visible to them, but it's pretty easy to see the practical reason behind that "tradition." As is, the family can make elf lives miserable, but they can't end them. If they fill out the forms, they'll be able to both see AND TOUCH elves and elvish buildings, and the elves have no assurance that the gigantic humans won't just wipe them out after that point.
Now, the obvious questions are 1) why the elves are only trying to chase the humans out now after all these decades, and 2) why is Alfur giving Hilda the forms to sign in violation of his people's law? Well, after the elves grudgingly put up with the humans' presence for all this time, a new prime minister got into office by riding that wave of discontent and making getting rid of the humans one of his big campaign promises. Alfur is strongly opposed to the new government (and is also implicitly sort of fascinated by humans in much the same way that Hilda is fascinated by nonhumans), so he's trying to undermine the PM and help the humans.
So, over the next few days, Hilda tries to reason with the elf authorities. First the county mayor, then the prime minister, and then the king. It's pretty much a parody of British bureaucracy and institutional opacity. The mayor, of course, says that it's all over his own head. The prime minister, meanwhile, says that he's got an obligation to his constituents. The king (who seems to play pretty much the same role as the modern British monarchy, in terms of power and influence) says that this is a matter for the democratic institutions to handle. Etc. Every time that she talks to another elf authority figure, Hilda has to go on a long arduous hike, deal with the same kind of annoying-but-easily-intimidated security guards, make the same patient reassurances to the official, and then argue through the same bullshit excuses that the official makes to avoid engaging with her.
The next attack on their house seems unpreventable by anything short of violence, and Hilda isn't willing to go that far.
Her mother drives her to the nearby town, seemingly for the first time since she was old enough to remember. Trollberg, so called because it was initially built as a fortress against the trolls, in the historically troll-inhabited highlands.
Once again, it seems, the humans came as invaders. We're told that trolls have always preyed on humans, thus making such counterattacks perhaps justified, but then on the other hand the one troll that Hilda DOES meet in these episodes is totally harmless and in fact exceptionally kind and patient with her. So. Yeah.
...
Is this sounding like a takedown of the Dark Forest mentality, where fear of what outsiders might potentially do if given the chance ends up creating hostile outsiders in the first place? Well...wait for the end. Like I said, I'm not sure that I like where it ends up going with this thread.
...
Trolberg is everything Hilda feared it would be. Crowded. Noisy. Surrounded by stone walls that prevent any interesting creatures from getting in. The worst of it is when her mother brings her by a schoolyard to meet some children around her age, and their regimented lives controlled by clocks and school bells horrify her. Hilda is more convinced than ever that she NEEDS to prevent her family's eviction.
As this is all going on, Hilda has another discovery in progress. Involving a colossal giant that she sometimes sees peeking at her house from around the hillsides at night. Eventually, she hitches a ride on one of the flying dog-sphere-things to get close to the giant's ear and make its acquaintance.
Much of the information it shares with her is cryptic, but it tells her enough that she's able to glean the rest by twisting wood-goblin's arm until he lets her consult his library of giant-lore.
Giants can travel between planets just by bending their knees and jumping. They're always on the lookout for rival interplanetary settlers though, so they appoint a lookout to walk the world staring at the sky for four thousand years at a time. At the end of that multi-millennia tour of service, the lookout would be replaced. According to legend however, the giants fled the earth when the young human race began giving them trouble, and the last guardian - Jorgen - didn't seem to have gotten the memo. Now, he's here at the appointed meeting-place where his kin are supposed to reward him for his service and appoint a new guardian to relieve him, and there are no other giants in sight. Night after night Jorgen comes, wondering if perhaps he mixed up the date or something.
The resolutions to the giant's problem and Hilda's come conjoined. While making her final appeal to the elf king at his mountaintop castle above her house, she accidentally triggers an avalanche (excellent animation here, given the style the show is working with).
To escape the snow, she hides in a cave. A cave that turns out to be an ear canal. Upon being awoken by the voice in her ear, the "mountain" gets to its feet and shakes off its coating of snow and mineral sediment. Hilda just barely manages to get herself and the elf king (and his castle) to safety before it all comes loose.
Jorgen's...wife? girlfriend? some sort of romantic partner, anyway...couldn't find him during his vigil, so she decided to wait for him at the chosen regrouping place. She must have fallen asleep though, silly her. He finds her easily now.
For saving his life and his dynastic home, the elf king makes a royal decree proclaiming Hilda and her family to be friends of elfkind. The prime minister's policies no longer have the popular mandate, after this highly public event.
The giants thank Hilda, and then walk away to go leap off into space and rejoin their kin on their new planet. As they go, one of them unthinkingly steps on Hilda's house and completely destroys it. The giants are out of earshot before anyone can get their attention.
There was a reason the humans drove the giants off of Earth. It was a better reason than the one the elves had for wanting to be rid of the humans, on account of humans lacking their intangibility-by-paperwork power.
So. No house left to fight for. They'll just have to pack up whatever belongings they can salvage from the rubble and move to Trolberg after all. There's no argument to even be had anymore.
Alfur is coming with them, at least. He just got the paperwork approved for himself to act as an official observer on behalf of the kingdom.
I think the prime minister just wanted to get rid of him, honestly. But at least he's getting rid of him in a way that makes everyone happy.
Going by the show's intro visuals, the rest of the series will have Hilda and her mother living in Trolberg, with Hilda having to deal with other humans (including the same children she met in the schoolyard that one time, by the look of it). Hence my decision to split the review where I did; the show undergoes a major change after these two intro episodes.
So. The art is really amazing. The amount of awe and natural splendour these animators are able to evoke with such a simple picture-book style is incredible. I've seen cartoons with better visuals than "Hilda," but I'm not sure if I've seen any that do as much with as little as "Hilda." It's musically beautiful as well, and the voice acting...well, it's understated and overly calm for the situations at hand, but that kind of works for the vibe this show is going for.
That said...
So, subtextually, the bittersweet message about the freedom and innocence of childhood being unsustainable is pretty effective. Eventually, the world starts getting too small for unlimited fun and adventure. Big dreams need to be let go, and the dreary necessities of school bells and paperwork become inescapable. As a sorrowful paean to childhood lost, I can appreciate these opening episodes of Hilda (the visual symbolism works especially well for me, since I spent my early childhood in a tiny town lost in an endless expanse of forests and mountains, and then moved somewhere much more urban when I was around Hilda's age).
The text, though...I don't know. I doubt it was intentional, but it's pretty hard to avoid the xenophobic "Xland for the Xfolk" reading. Looking at the literal events, the show has the Dark Forest attitude basically be justified, and has the pitchfork-wielders who don't want those unlike themselves to be living anywhere nearby proven right.
Granted, there are counterexamples. I didn't detail it beyond a one-sentence mention, since it was very short and disconnected to the rest of the story, but the beginning of the first episode has Hilda fleeing from a troll that she foolishly stayed near until sundown (trolls work on "Gargoyles" rules in this world, turning to stone in the day and then back again every nightfall). It turned out that it didn't actually want to eat her, but only for her to remove the warning bell (there's that bell motif again) that she'd tied around its petrified nose. After she removed it, the troll even returned her dropped sketchbook to her before ambling back off into the woods. Fear of the unknown creating a fearsome unknown, and the loss of that fear leading to the potential for understanding and friendship. What was the real story behind the building of Trolberg, if trolls aren't actually so bad?
But...then the giants step on the house at the end, proving that no, really, different kinds don't mix.
Like I said. I don't think it's intentional. But it's also hard to ignore.
Anyway, next time I'll have a look at the beginning of Hilda's new life in the historically fraught town of Trolberg.
