Fix All

I watched two things recently which touched on the nature of creativity.

The first was The Minecraft Movie, really only because it had come up as free on the Prime Video rotation. I can barely remember what happened in it. Creativity is brought up in regards to two characters. Jack Black's character (I don't remember the name -- basically he's just Jack Black on a sugar high) loves the world of Minecraft (a real place in this movie) because it allows him to create.

He spent twenty years at it, covering the world in his creations, then was captured by the bad guys. When the rest of the cast fell into the Minecraft world I sort of hoped they'd see and explore all these strange ruins and wonder what was going on. Such was not to be.

The other character is the kid, and I can't be bothered to remember character or actor name. He's okay. He does what is required. He is called creative but being stifled by the world. This creativity he shows by, among other things, putting a jetpack on a still-life banana. This bit bothered me because I half agreed with the arts teacher. Drawing what you already know and love, in the style you already know, is what exercises like that are intended to break you out of.

But the part that really stuck with me is that the drawing shown (and the drawings shown from some of his classmates) are totally wrong. They are the practiced render of school-trained artists. There's a style of rendering in pencil that isn't instinctive but really has to be taught, and they are all using it. So...it looks bad and fake and this "has little left to learn from you" rendering completely defeats any of the purpose.

And when it comes to the environment of the movie? There's no process of creativity. He just builds stuff that works, end of story. 

The other thing I watched had a more interesting take. I ran into it because I'd taken on as a research project to learn something about Isekai (and the often-related LitRPG genre.) I found enough to become quite familiar with Truck-kun:

Zenshu isn't really an isekai (despite what Natsuko says when she first wakes up in another world). Of course, so many isekai are deconstructionist it would be more accurate to call deconstruction of the idea of being reincarnated as a hero in another world the "standard isekai" plot.

It follows some of the template of superpower stories in that Natsuko's new-found ability turns out to be a liability, gets her in worse trouble, she gives up on it, then returns to it to finally save the day.

But even that is not quite right. Natsuko has been dropped into the favorite anime of her childhood, the one that made her want to become an animator herself. And, itself, A Tale of Perishing is not standard golden-age fare. The Nine Legendary Heroes become one by one the dead heroes, until Luke Braveheart breaks under the strain of seeing his friends die and the Void win over and over, and going mad, destroys the last Soul Future himself and ends the world.

Natsuko's power is completely OP, but that isn't the point, nor is it enough, as the world contrives to reshape itself to ensure the original bleak ending remains. Until she breaks through; leaving behind her unthinking adoration of the original's director, her imitation of other works, and her fear of her own failures.

And yes, one of those failure is she died of bad food and overwork while tasked with directing a high school romance -- something she had so very little personal experience with she went as far as charging down the corridors of the studio with a piece of toast in her mouth.

In her final victory, she first draws Luke from memory; the same lines she drew thousands of times while teaching herself from the work of others. That holds off the Void for a little, but what wins the day is drawing the Luke she has come to know, and even love; a real person in a world she thinks is worth saving for itself, not as a memorial of the animation director she idolized.

Oh, did I say draw? Because that's her power in this world. She gets a full-on Magical Girl transformation, only her henshin stick is an animation peg bar, there's no costume change, and what it does is summon her drawing desk (which then exists as a real-world object and can be interacted with during the fight scene).

And that transformation goes so hard some of the MAPPA animators might have keeled over from overwork themselves...!