War and glory, reinvention Fusion, freedom, her attention, Out in daylight, my potential, Bold, precise, experimental
I assumed that “Reinvention” was referring to how Pearl stopped acting servile (and for a lack of a better term “pearl-like”) but I think it could also refer to how she changed between the war and the present (aka she now knows how to be “strong in the real way” and is a lot less brutal than in her war days).
For Pearl’s song “It’s Over isn’t it?” the scene is about Pearl accepting a loss. As the series has progressed, she’s learned that she isn’t always right, and that there are things about herself that she’s has to reevaluate. This all comes to a sort of climax in this scene where she accepts and admits out loud that her relationship with Rose was never as deep and complete as she wanted it to be or told herself it was. This is where she’s left at the end of the scene, feeling lost and out of place.
In the outline written by Ben Levine and Matt Burnett, this is how the scene looked:
You’ll notice a lot of things ended up changing compared to the final version. Most of that was due to time constraints. When we started storyboarding the episode, all of the rough demos of the songs were recorded so that we had an idea of the amount of time we had between each song (which ended up not being very much). The result was that we had to basically be transitioning constantly between songs, but doing it in a way that felt natural and as gentle as possible.
In addition, Rebecca remembered a part from the 1982 movie “Victor Victoria” starring Julie Andrews that she wanted to use as reference for the feeling of the scene:
Right away we latched onto this spinning 360 degree camera move. I loved the energy and focus it gave to the character and I immediately roughed out a version with Pearl.
If you’re ever stuck during a scene this is what you do: Don’t start from the beginning, find the moment you see clearest in your mind and build out from there. From these rough thumbnails I built the rest of the scene outward. I brought back motifs like her sword skills and her dance style to help evoke the past events of the series, and I tried to give as much time as I could to each shot and make her acting as expressive a possible.
Below are my rough boards set to Rebecca’s demo. At the end, i added a pause for when she throws the Rose into the air. It felt like a good spot for things to crescendo ring out. Deedee Magno Hall’s rendering of this blew us all away when we heard it.
From there clean up was pretty much straight forward. The scene didn’t change much except for tweaking her acting here and there. I’m super proud of how this scene turned out, hats off to Nick DeMayo our animation director and to the team at Sunimin in Korea where they draw the entire episode on paper:
I’m still positively reeling from the new episode but I really, really wanna talk about Pearl’s song for two specific reasons (which I had to process back-to-back so consider me thoroughly destroyed.)
Beyond the fact that it’s beautiful and touching and basically everything about it is perfect – the pacing, the colors, DeeDee’s vocals, the lyrics, the cinematography, the emotion – I feel like this song does a little extra for us. It might feel like a rehash, especially given how much material we already have concerning Pearl’s feelings for Rose, yet despite all previous musical numbers and instances of Pearl addressing that, this still feels very fresh and unique a perspective to bring to the topic.
Because I think what’s really gripping about this song is how it’s not even really about Rose, it’s about Pearl! Who she is, what she wants, how far she’s come.
It’s about Pearl wanting to move on, about her loving Rose but her wantingtomove on from Rose, to move past petty feelings, to focus on what’s important now.
I’ll say that the moment that really struck me most in this song was when we take a step back and we see Pearl fully, when she’s standing on the glass of the balcony and delivers these lines:
War and glory, reinvention
Fusion, freedom, her attention
Out in daylight, my potential
Bold, precise, experimental
I feel like this is Pearl reflecting back on all she dreamed of, the things she aspired for before Rose left. She was a renegade soldier, fighting for change, ideals of freedom and self-importance. Pearl came from a background where she was never meant to fight, but she worked at it, became something stronger than she was, for herself as much as for Rose. Out in daylight, my potential. Bold, precise, experimental.These are things Pearl truly sees herself as, or at least, she used to. Someone who was growing, becoming something better, something she could be proud of.
Then immediately she falls, doubts herself, thinks of what she is now, what she’s become in Rose’s absence. She thinks herself ‘petty and dull’, as if she’ll never be anything beyond that (what does it matter? it’s already done), but she has to be here without Rose. Be there for Steven. Because if there’s nothing else Pearl can do that’s worthwhile, she at least wants to be there for Steven.
That’s why this song is so heartbreaking to me, but also gives me hope. Pearl isn’t quite there yet, but she desperately wants to be, she wants it to be over. She wants to move beyond this. Yet the song isn’t hopeful, it’s a sigh of defeat. Benign acceptance thatit’s over, isn’t it?
But Rose is gone, and she’s still here, and she still can’t move on.
I think she can, though. I think it’s important that we’re shown Pearl wants to become better. I think that’s the point of her character, in the end. As much as it might sometimes feel like Pearl’s entire character is built entirely around Rose, to the point where it feels like they’ll never be separate, I think it’s more that her character is built on top of the impact Rose left on her.
Pearl’s development is about her learning to love herself, to better herself on her own terms, for her own reasons, and this song is amazing because it shows that she wants it and she’s slowly getting there, despite how much it still hurts.
Okay I’m only gonna say this once and preface this with the fact that I am Eyak and I probably do not want to hear your opinion on the Pharah skins Raindancer/Thunderbird. This is a really soul baring post so I’m not so sure about people reblogging it, if you do just try to be respective and remember this isn’t a go-ahead to go and appropriate all native cultures.
They’re pretty damn clearly based on Pacific Northwest tribal cultures. The ones I can pick out being Eyak/Tlingit/Haida/Tsimshian, but we often get grouped together so that doesn’t surprise me. There are many more, but I don’t claim familiarity with all tribes and I can’t say if their art styles and myths were used.
For your comparison a little sample of the tribe’s artistic styles just to get the point across:
And I really have to get something off my chest people. I don’t have a problem with these skins, in fact I adore them. Please just chill with me for a second while I explain.
The biggest issue I see here is people (who usually arn’t ndn, let alone from pac nw tribes) yelling about cultural appropriation. Which good! I’m glad people are on guard for it! But it’s entirely possible that Pharah’s father was Eyak/Tlingit/Haida/Tsimshian or from another closely related Pacific Northwest tribe, so we can’t really call that yet. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was.
Most importantly, speaking as an Eyak. Which is all I can do despite Tlingit/Haida/Tsimshian being so closely related, our tribe’s relationship with cultural appropriation is uh, not exactly the norm.
The last Eyak fluent speaker died in 2008, her name was Chief Marie Smith Jones and she was also the last full-blooded Eyak on Earth. The very last. Please appropriate Eyak culture. It’s the only way it’s going to survive. There’s less than 500 of us remaining, and we’re scattered more and more every year. Families I grew up with in Alaska converted to Catholicism. The military took my family across the globe and left us an entire continent away. The language I learned at the dinner table in 1998 now almost exclusively exists on those cassette tapes my white father recorded that night and in reconstructive attempts from a French academic that studied our language from halfway across the globe.
It sucks shit guys, it really does.
When I first saw the Thunderbird skin I cried, I cried for an hour. Because Overwatch is huge. It will live on for years if not decades. And there’s Pharah with her hair in braids I haven’t seen my mother wear in over a decade. Wearing the colors that remind me of a home I no longer have. Embodying a mythic figure that I trusted to protect me during Y2K and sought out constellations in the sky for.
So before you spew vitriol about how racist it is that they did that. Just kind of chill out and think about different perspectives for a moment. If you really want to help us? Consider taking a poke about http://www.eyakpeople.com/ and taking a look at our language revitalization project! It’s pretty fun and you could even learn a language out of it.
AngelMihe 