A suggestion for discussion

[fpb]

In the last decade or two, the United Kingdom has produced two tremendous cultural phenomena that have gone around the world: the Harry Potter series and the Wallace and Gromit animated movies. SUBJECT FOR DISCUSSION: Do they have anything in common, and do they have anything in common with other British successes such as the Dr.Who franchise or

Comments

[chthonya]

Off the top of my head, I can think of two things they have in common:

1) the humour: JKR does some delicious parody of British society - pretty much everything in the Ministry of Magic, for example (which presumably translates reasonably well for anyone who has to deal with bureaucracies), and a sly wink at 'facts we all know' such as the reinterpretation of witch burnings. And many of her names are rather corny puns (eg her textbook authors) in a very similar vein to Gromit listening to 'Poochini' and so much else of W&G's visual humour. I'm not sure how well those things translate, though? For example, I remember flicking through an Italian copy of 'Chamber of Secrets' a few years ago and noting that 'Fudge' had been rendered as 'Caramel' (or similar - I can't remember the spelling). I don't think that carries the second meaning of 'Fudge'?

2) both draw on an idealised archetype of British life - Southern/Middle Clasee/defanged boarding school for Harry Potter, and Yorkshire-without-the-rain/Northern/Working Class for W&G. Both steeped in the British perception that we love eccentricity - Arthur and Wallace in particular have much in common.

Whether either of those are particularly exportable traits, I don't know. But both root the material firmly in their originating culture and create worlds that exude a sense of coziness (on first view, at least, with HP), which probably makes any unfamiliar cultural elements more accessible.

[fpb]

You got me thinking on a few points.

Well, the fact that they have been exported many times over - even the Beatles had something of what you call idealized local identity - does suggest that they are exportable. How they are interpreted in other countries might make an interesting study. But I don't know that I would call their versions of British environments "idealized". Standardized, perhaps; but in spite of the amusing technical wizardry, I see little that is properly speaking ideal about Wallace and Gromit's dowdy and even vaguely dusty home. I would rather call it quirky, even arbitrary, but arbitrary with a purpose. To call a box of matches "Duck" rather than "Swan", when the box is otherwise recognizable to every Briton, does not amount to idealization; what it does, in my view, is to bring attention to the arbitrary, even silly nature of many of the objects and symbols that surround us, since there is indeed no reason why matches should not be called "Duck" instead of "Swan".

And DON'T get me going on the *&()^^R@!!!! CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED Italian "translation" of HP. Every single thing they could have got wrong, every point at which they were able to prove culturally insensitive, they did. I washed my hands with soap after touching that abomination. Don't take it as evidence of anything but its own frightful incompetence. (I gather that a similarly wretched job ruined the British perceptions of Jules Verne, whom the French rightly consider a classic; and I have myself seen a French "translation" of Agatha Christie whose author should have been had up for fraud. Why do translators treat popular literature with such contempt?)