Here's the basic premise of the show: a little girl (Marina) lives in a national park, where her grandfather is a scientist. Her best friends are Zico the monkey and a "secret agent" fish who can fly into the air with a specially designed suit that keeps him wet. In each episode, the friends are faced with a problem -- last night, the fish were getting sick in the lagoon -- and they must solve the mystery of what is going on -- again, in last night's episode, it turned out that someone had accidentally dropped laundry detergent in the stream. The series focusses on problem solving, on preserving nature, on the teamwork of friends... all in all, not bad messages.
Here's the problem, though, and one that is even more clear after seeing the rather insipid Justin Time, which has the same problem solving structure. In adult literature, mysteries require clues. Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple find murderers by following the traces that they unintentionally left behind them. In Fishtornaut, however, the clues come from a POP, a kind of beach ball that emerges from a giant clam in the middle of the ocean, and then explodes to offer the clue when the friends do a certain kind of dance (this is, after all, a Brazilian cartoon...). The clue is, as such, given instead of found, which means that before the friends try to solve the mystery, someone else already knows the answer.
Kids' games work like this, of course: in a scavenger hunt, some adult has to know where all of the things really are. I see two serious problems with this kind of approach to solving mysteries:
- If someone else already knows the answer, then what the kids do doesn't really matter. It is a game without consequences, because if they can't do it, an adult will step in and solve the problem easily. This strategy seems part of a general world-view that sees children's actions as inconsequential.
- If the adult knows and does not act to solve a serious problem (Fishtornaut's piscine friends almost died in the detergent accident described above), then that adult is perverse, even evil.
Many years ago, working as a street educator in Santa Fe, I met a brilliant young man forced to live on the street by a combination of bad family and mental illness. He described to me about his occasional schitzophrenic attacks: "Suddenly, things aren't just there. They all mean something. They are all a message to me. That pillow over there on the couch means that I have to leave the house. That bird singing means that Mom wants me home. And there are so many other things that I know that they mean something, but I don't know what they mean. Like words that should mean something, but I can't read them." The young man didn't know who had written these "words" in the world, who has sent him these messages, but someone had.
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| Helena, trying to understand Amazonian pottery. |
Here's the difference between a murder mystery and its childlike equivalent: in a mystery, no one "sent" the clues, no one intended them to be there, but they still have a meaning. When someone sends Fishtronaut the clues, on the other hand, the meaning is no longer simply in the solution to the crime, but in the intention of the sender.
The issue, then, is really about God. Who is the adult who sends messages giving clues, but who will not act? Who knows all and wishes all well, but who decides to withhold himself from the world? And who, truth be told, provides rather confusing and ambiguous clues? Who sent the messages to the buy on the street in Santa Fe by means of pillows and birdsong? Fishtornaut depends on a kind of theodicy (trying to understand why evil exists) with a rather perverse God.
As they say, this question opens a completely different can of fish.
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