In this episode we talked about The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban, published in 1967, and the 1977 animated film of the same name.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

You can experience some of Stuart's work at: https://www.failbettergames.com/

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I'm Ren Wednesday like co-host is Adan Wybray and today we’re joined by special guest Stuart Young to talk about the Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban and the associated film. Enjoy!

(Intro music plays)

Ren Hi, welcome to Still Scared, I'm Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and our special guest is Stuart Young, who is a senior producer at Fail Better Games and a friend of Adams from the past! And we've come here today to talk about the Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban, both in book and film version. This was a suggestion from Stu, who presumably watched it as a kid or encountered it in some way?

Stuart Oh, hi, I’m Stu, by the way! No I've never watched the film, although I'm quite intrigued! I've only read the book, as an older child. My mum only gave it to me when I was about 10 or 11, which I think is probably quite wise.

Adam So is it something that your mum had read when she was young?

Stuart I think she'd read it. I think she read it as an adult because if you think about it, this is published in 1967 so she'd have definitely been a teenager when it came out, at a minimum. So I think she probably read the book as an adult.

Ren And this is Russell Hoban who I only knew for Ridley Walker, which is his kind of post-apocalyptic novel from 1980, which is written in this imagined dialect that's developed in England 2000 years after a nuclear war. So I didn't really know what to expect from a from a children's book by him —

Stuart — Basically the same thing! Yeah, yeah. I would hate to be reductive but yeah, it's quite a similar sort of journey, you know, a kind of picaresque wandering book, isn't it?

Adam There's a fair amount of wandering, but also there's quite a lot where they don't get to wander right, I think. For a book about two clockwork creatures that are set on the journey as tramps and get wound up to go or wandering from one place to another, there's a lot of times where they're stopped in their tracks — because they aren't self winding. And their mission is to try to become self winding.

So there's long sections where they get stuck and they they can't move forward. So it's as much a journey through time and stillness as it is forward movement, which I thought was really interesting. Because normally, whether it's a road trip movie or say, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or other children's books that take place from one place to another, the character will get to move on on their journey when they want. Whereas with the mouse and his child because they're both clockwork they don't get to move forwards when they they want, they're completely at the whim of nature and beholden to other creatures, which is really interesting.

Stuart Yeah, that's very true. It does sort of compare with Ridley Walker differently there because that takes place in about a couple of weeks, I think. I think there's one major time shift in it. Whereas this, one of the things I did notice, like you, was that there are these sort of like huge time shifts where they just get stuck. And they just have to, you know, live with their sort of locked in syndrome, basically.

Adam Yeah! I think that's what I would have found most disturbing myself as a kid.

Stuart I mean, that’s the real kind of body horror of it and it really is quite like something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or something like that, where it gives you an insight into just how terrible it would be, not having any agency.

Ren Yeah, I think if we come back to the horror of it and I'll just give a little introduction to the story to situate people.

So the mouse and his child are a joined pair of wind up toys. The father swings the child in his arms and they dance and they sort of attain consciousness in a toy shop with this ornate dolls house. There's a tin seal with a ball on her nose and and a plush wind up elephant who sings a lullaby to the mouse child when he cries. And they're sold and placed under a Christmas tree and they dance until they're broken by a family cat, then rescued from the dustbin, repaired by a tramp who sets him down on the side of the road and tells them “be tramps.”

They're then intercepted by Manny Rat, who's a dubious fellow who commands an army of windups who he's repaired. He sends them on a mission with one of his rat lackeys to commandeer treacle brittle, but the lackey botches it, gets eaten by a badger, and the mouse and his child escape. And Manny Rat takes this as a personal affront. And from from then on, there's this kind of push and pull where the child's determined to find the seal and the elephant so they can be a family; the mouse father’s determined to become self winding so he's not dependent on being wound up, and the two of them are pursued by Manny Rat, who's determined to smash them to pieces. That’s essentially the setup. And I think we can go back to the to the horror of it because that does come in quite early with the the condition of being a wind up toy and what that means.

Adam I think sometimes this feels very much like a Victorian children's book, and sometimes it feels like it's drawing from much older traditions, like some kind of early modern allegory. And I guess that's just because Victorian kids books drew on older traditions themselves. But it starts out with this very Victorian image of a toy shop, everything brass and gleaming and shining, and then the figure of a homeless man, this tramp outside looking in and the kind of sort of tragical image you'd see on a Victorian biscuit box.

So you immediately have this contrast between the haves and the have-nots and this sort of easeful life inside the doll's house, with these proper little gentlemen and gentlewomen who seemed disturbingly mindless because the tin toys can talk, but the little doll inhabitants of the dolls house just talk in newspaper mumbo-jumbo. Which immediately is quite disturbing because there's this real confusion of agency. Like, OK, these clockwork toys can think for themselves, but they possibly don't have free will because they’re wind up and they could go through their rituals and movements over and over again. But then these other toys who are in the dolls house, they don't seem to be able to think at all.

And there's this clockwork elephant and it says on page six of my copy:

“It was the elephant's constant delight to watch that tea party through the window, and as the hostess, she took great pride in the quality of her hospitality. ‘Have another cup of tea,’ she said to one of the ladies. ‘Try a little pastry.’
‘HIGH-SOCIETY SCANDAL, changing to cloudy with a possibility of BARGAINS GALORE!’ Replied the lady. Her Papier-mâché head being made of paste and newsprint, she always spoke in scraps of news and advertising, in whatever order they came to mind.
'Bucket seats,’ remarked the gentleman next to her. Power steering optional, GOVERNMENT FALLS’.’”

And yeah, that immediately freaked me out. This idea that these dolls just kind of talk minced-up random nonsense words from newspapers.

Ren Yeah, and it makes it in the film, it's quite nightmarish off the bat with with these dolls spouting nonsense and the clock with a face that tells them it's midnight.

Adam Yeah. OK, so the film is worth watching. It's available on YouTube, albeit in quite diminished quality, but it's directed by Murakami Wolf and Sanrio —

Ren — of Hello Kitty fame.

Adam — of Hello Kitty fame, and the sticker books that I give cutesy stickers to my students when they behave well fame. And yeah, you have a certain cutesy design with the the mouse and his child, but it's also got that, I don’t know, ‘70s kids’ animation has this specific hippie-dippie style that is like really hard to pin down but that you recognise it immediately. It looks really ‘70s anyway, you would be able to immediately tell this is 70s animations. It's from 1977 and the most jarring thing about it — I don't know if you feel the same, Ren — is the sound design and music is batshit.

Ren It is arrestingly interesting.

Adam It is wild. It is one of the weirdest soundtracks to a kids film I've ever heard. Like pretty much all my notes are just about the sound design and soundtracks. It's so strange. It starts off with this really awful tuneless existential theme song sung by a child, quite badly.

(Mouse and his Child theme tune plays)

Ren And then there's this big jazz influence because Roger Callaway the composer, was also a jazz pianist. So we got all this kind of jazz stuff going on. And then there's these songs that kind of narrate what's happening in this