Identity and Individuality of Derivative Fictions -- continued

Peter and Wendy have become intimate without realizing it, and it is the fairy Tink who suddenly interrupts them by pulling Wendy’s hair. The fairies that Wendy had been longing for in her imagination were actually unfriendly beings who behaved hostilely towards her. This is a direct reflection of the theme of the original Peter and Wendy, the ruthless gap between aspirations and embodied ideals, and the unavoidable sense of loss of paradise brought about by adult experience and objective reality recognition. It is one of the countless cruel episodes prepared in the original Peter and Wendy to allude to the harsh fate imposed on all conscious bodies. Wendy is painfully forced to experience the unbearable gap between her deepest ideals and her own materialized desires that Peter will never realize.

Tink! She’s not very polite. She says if you try to give me a thimble again……she’ll kill you. ／And I had supposed fairies to be charming.

Fairies, mermaids, and Neverland itself will never be as friendly as they were to those who grow up and become adults. This was the central theme that formed the keynote of the original Peter and Wendy, which describes of the fateful loss of paradise imposed on all the conscious existences. As Peter tries to leave the nursery, Wendy stops him wth determination. Her next words are suggestive, pointing to the peculiar themes of the movie, Peter Pan, which are somewhat different from the original.

Peter, don’t go. ／I have to tell the others about Cinderella. ／But I know lots of stories, stories I could tell the boys.

Thus, in the movie Peter Pan, Wendy voluntarily makes a proposal to Peter to go to Neverland. The ensuing conversation between Peter and the Darling children is also somewhat different from what was in the original.

Come with me. ／ I cannot fly. ／ I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you to ride the wind’s back, and away we go. ／Could John and Michael come too? Michael! Michael! John! John! ／ I didn’t do it. ／There is a boy here who is to teach us to fly. ／ You offend reason, sir…. I should like to offend it with you. ／You just think happy thoughts… and they lift you into the air. It’s easy. ／I’ve got it! I’ve got it! Swords, dragons, Napoleon! ／ Stand back. ／ John! ／Wendy! Wendy! Watch me! Puddings, mud pies, ice cream, never to take a bath again! /Michael! ／ Come away. Come away to Neverland. ／ What about Mother? Father? Nana? ／There are Mermaids. ／ Mermaids? ／Indians! ／ Indians? ／ Pirates! ／ Pirates? John, wait for me!

In the end, Peter acts as a cunning seducer to Wendy. And the ideal world that he talks about is filled with all the aspirations of children, as John says in this scene, is a world of logical contradictions that is genuinely unreasonable. This is because it is depicted as a world where fairies, Indians, and pirates coexist. The legend of the mermaid, which must have been passed down on an isolated island in the north seas, the wicked transactions of pirates in the south ocean represented by the Caribbean, and the Indians who captivated the hearts of children as the subject of adventure stories set in North America, are nothing but mutually destructive elements that will inevitably lead to contradictions that will never meet together. Neverland, where Peter is supposed to live and all the desires of the children are fulfilled, is a protoplasmic dimension that lies in latent state where countless possibilities coexist in quantum cancellation before they are manifested as events, and it is also a logically impossible world that can never be actualized in the phenomenal world. In the movie Peter Pan, the line told by John is used to explicitly refer to the subject of the impossibility description adopted by the original Peter and Wendy. What can be understood as a meta-self-referential act in a fictional setting between parallel worlds is the line John said to Peter, “You offend reason.”
In the movie Peter Pan, Peter plays the role of a seducer as in the original story and talks to Wendy, who is worried about leaving her home and leaving her parents behind. Wendy’s hesitation is shown in the following dialogue:

Forget them, Wendy. Forget them all. Come with me where you’ll never have to worry about grownup things again…What is it? What’s wrong?
／ Never is an awfully long time.

Complementing John’s line, Wendy tells us that Neverland is the dreamland that underlies children’s consciousness, a space of ambiguity that constructs a circular iconography of the unity of the never and the ever, that is, the impossible and the eternal, and makes inexplicable coexistence possible. It is a blissfully subjective world in which a vague and undifferentiated protoplasmic state in which logical contradictions cancel each other out and phenomenal-world limitations can never maintain its restriction, is allowed to unfold in the delusions of children.
Here, in Peter Pan, the voice of a female narrator takes over the role of proceeding the story forward. And the Darlings, who sensed something unusual and rushed back to the nursery, are forced to choose a result that prevents them from reaching the room in time, for the sake of the story’s own progression. Just as things in the phenomenal world are materialized according to the observational effects of the consciousness, the development process of this story is determined by the author’s narrative that reflects the reader’s expectations. (note)

note:
This autonomous feature of fictionality is something not to be overlooked in arguing the peculiarity of fictional phase of entities in contrast to ones in actuality. Full discussion of the aspects of perspectives are developed in the author’s several studies of anime work, including the study of Madlax.


This awareness of the interaction of the subject of conscious in the creation of the narrative world is also maintained in the film Peter Pan, disguised as the interaction between the audience’s expectations and the narrator. The narration of the film is voiced copying the same words used by the narrator of the original story.

It would be delightful to report that they reached the nursery in time. But then there would be no story.

The scenes of the children abandoning their parents and home and flying to Neverland are not only depicted with John being bewildered by the selfish Peter completely forgetting his existence, as in the original, but also, with a new hilarious shot where they are allowed to share the fun of Peter’s who is always coming up with fresh new seeds of games.

Who are you? ／ I’m John. ／John. … Take hold of this. Both hands. Pass it on.