In this episdoe we discussed the film Y Mabinogi from 2003.b

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast! 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

Big thanks to Mattie who did the transcript for this episode!

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, my co-host is Adam Whybray. Today we’re joined by Mattie –

Mattie – (Mattie makes a noise imitating a dancehall air horn)

Ren – To talk about Y Mabinogi, from 2003, a film about Welsh mythology. Full transcript will be available, so check the shownotes for that.

(Intro plays)

Ren – Good evening Adam

Adam – Good evening Ren

Ren - Good evening Mattie

Mattie – HIIIIIIIIIII

Ren – Mattie is here, our Welsh correspondent

Mattie – Thanks. Like so many so-called correspondents, I know a bit of something maybe about the subject I’ve been bought in to talk about.

Ren - Perfect, that’s what we want to hear!

Adam - But Ren, I know you do Welsh on Duolingo, right?

Ren – Yes

Adam – I’m ready for some pronunciations mate.

Ren – Oh… Good.

Mattie – I’m sorry to tell you there is not a lot about parsnips in the film, so Ren is at a little bit of a disadvantage.

Ren – I am, there’s nothing about parsnips, nor leeks, or the verb To Iron

Mattie – Smwddio!

Adam – That’s fair, if I’m not talking about different coloured potatoes I can’t talk Czech very well.

Ren – It’s less hot now because it’s half seven, but it has been very hot here, so we’ll blame any lapses in concentration, or knowledge, or Welsh pronunciation-

Mattie – Or English pronunciation, to be fair, you’re gonna get what you’re gonna get. It’s live, sort of.

Adam – I guess one of the consequences of climate change which maybe hasn’t been taken seriously enough, the impact on our podcasting abilities.

Ren – Yeah

Adam – Where’s that in the UN reports?

Mattie – I like the way that you said that like those adverts for like, for £4.99 a month you can rescue this donkey from weird donkey hell, which no one is where it is or why it exists. For £5 a month you can mitigate climate change consequences against podcasters. And, like, its absolutely a money laundering scheme

Adam – So, today, as far as I can tell, things were left on a slightly uncertain note, although it was a kind of “escort you to the door” level of uncertain note. I might have managed to basically have lost a job before I actually got to sign the contract.

Mattie and Ren – (sympathetic groans)

Mattie – I mean, speedrun strats? Ohhh no

Adam – Yeah, because, you know, and this should get some subscribers, right? I’m donating a kidney!

Ren and Mattie – Yay!

Ren – He is!

Adam – Which is great, and is going to be very helpful to the recipient, but I’m afraid a HR department does not consider it so good, because it means I’d probably have to have cover for like 2 weeks. And I’m afraid that doesn’t cut it in the harsh world or HR by the looks of it. But, but, that’s okay because I’ve been cheered up by a film about some bickering siblings in ye olde Wales.

Ren – 2003, to be precise!

Mattie – So much happens! Did you watch the Welsh version?

Adam – Yeah

Mattie - Like the Welsh language version with the live bits. One of my favourite things about it is that it does demonstrate what I have asserted about Pembrokeshire. Pembroke in the early 2000s, all the fashion was current, everything else was the 70’s

Adam – okay, so, Mattie, do you want to introduce this film? Is this a film you suggested to Ren or is this a film Ren that you came across.

Ren – Mattie suggested it

Mattie - Yeah, this is my fault. Yeah, I can’t actually remember how I’ve seen this. I’ve definitely seen it multiple times. It’s possible, my secondary school had the local cinema in it, because it needed to be somewhere, and it’s possible when it came out we were all herded to watch the big animated film in welsh.

Adam – I mean, there is, lets get out the way what is the name of the film?

Mattie – It’s name is Y Mabinogi, the English translation was called The Otherworld, I’ve never actually seen a title card for it called anything other than Y Mabinogi. It’s based on a series of Welsh tales from the Middle Ages, with a, I don’t know, does it count as a modern twist? A modern bookend?

Ren – Yeah, a modern framing device? It starts in live action, ends in live action, and the bulk of the film is kind of animated, sort of rotoscope.

Adam – Yeah, so there’s bits of rotoscoping, possibly some traditional frame animation, and occasional bits of CGI

Ren – Mmmm, And rotoscoping, for people who don’t know, when you draw over the live action film.

Mattie – Yeah, you kind of film a film, then trace over it and make it cooler

Adam – Yeah, it’s why Snow White in the Disney original Snow White and the Seven Dwarves looks all kinda loosy goosey and fluid compared to some of the other characters. Or kind of loosey goosey, no, I don’t know if that quite right. Anyway, she was rotoscoped and the rest of the film wasn't

Mattie – Huh, I didn’t know that

Ren – Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings is another well known, question mark?

Mattie – Other film that is –

Adam – Did you just laugh at the mention of Ralph Bakshi’s name? Poor Ralph!

Mattie – No, Ralph Bakshi had exactly the life that he wanted, that dude is fine

Adam – Making troubling problematic weirdly animated films

Mattie – Yeahhhh. And this is a, this isn’t Ralph Bakshi weird, but it’s a pretty good… So the Mabinogion is a collection of the early, well some of the earliest Welsh prose stories, and they were compiled in the 12th and 13th century from different sources. This is basically an example of oral tradition being written down. So on one hand you have, when oral traditions are written down often there are lots of things that don’t necessarily get included cause everyone knows the story, because it’s an oral tradition. So beyond the fact that over history details get lost, or context is lost, there’s also just an amount of like, why were they being written down why were they being collected in forms, what gets written down? They’ve also gone on a wild journey of, well, the Victorians got them for one, and Victorians loved adding stuff to things. So, um, this film is brilliant, and does a, in as far as it’s a bit, it can be a little difficult to follow, that’s actually a pretty decent representation of the stories. Both in as far as, life as we live it is a bit intense, life with a bit of magic in it is going to be a little more intense, and yeah. Just the way that they’ve been transferred through history has… yeah. Does that make sense?

Adam – Yeah, that helps explain to me, I’ve written down a note of how fast things erupt into chaos. If that makes sense?

Mattie - Yeah

Adam - So, like, you’re getting characters doing something and then it’s like suddenly everyone’s killing each other. It’s like, what? It didn’t take much provocation! Things are on fire and it happens very quickly!

Mattie – Yeah, and presumably if you were telling these stories, if you were an oral story teller, if you needed to keep a bunch of people really interested for 4 hours, and if you needed to get peoples attention immediately you’d go to the bloody bits pretty quickly.

Adam – Yeah

Mattie – So, like, there’s lots of different ways of telling these sorts of stories and the people who were being told the stories knew what it meant. In the same way as, like, I dunno, the villain’s always backlit you know? We know the villain’s always backlit, and humans throughout history have had their ways of showing “this is the bad guy, I don’t need to tell you he’s the bad guy, he’s 12th century Welsh backlit”. But that doesn’t necessarily translate to someone coming in with no previous knowledge and seeing something on the screen. So it is kind of like, I really strongly recommend watching it, but it is very much one of those like, just watch it for what it is and let it wash over you. Don’t look for plot holes, don’t try, just try and experience it. Experience my weird culture.

Adam – Do you think this was made, cause I don’t know anything really about the production apart from what I read on Wikipedia, and you mentioned that you think you watched this in school. And I did note down early on that it does have a bit of a Look and Read feel to proceedings. So, for those of you outside of the UK, Look and Read was a kind of, I guess, government initiative TV education scheme that was bought into schools, primary schools, for English teaching and to increase vocabulary.

So the one that I’ve mentioned before that's really stayed with me is through the Dragons Eye, which starts off, I mean it’s all live action, but it starts off in a playground and then this girl, there’s a painting of a dragon, a mural on the outside school wall of the playground and then the dragon winks at them and comes to life, and beckons them into the enchanted realm. So they kind of go through the Dragons eye into this fantasy land, then it kind of focuses on teaching you very important words. Like vetacore, which is the source of all power within Palamir, the magical realm of through the dragons eye. So they’ll say “Vetacore, V-E-T-A-C-O-R-E. Vetacore.” But, yeah, so, this to me had, I think it was probably that live action book ending, that was sort of starting with these characters, and clearly we’re meant to realise at some point that problems in their lives are mirrored by the problems in the lives of these sort of early-Medieval Welsh characters.

So its like “Ahh!”, you know, so one of them is anxious about being pregnant and then there’s pregnancy issues going on in this. And another character finds out that his parents aren’t who he thought they were, and he’s adopted. And then we’ve got a mythical character who is adopted. So you’ve got mirroring between the live action segments and I did wonder if that was deliberately to try and say to teenagers watching, like, “hey, look, you see this stuff is relevant, not just old stories, it relates to your own lives”.

Mattie – I, well, it’s interesting you say that cause the live action bits at the start, I don’t know. So this is absolutely supposition, but they really have the vibe of teen, like Welsh teen drama. Wales has a Welsh language television channel called S4C and it is government funded and it has all the things that a television channel would have, including the Welsh equivalent of Byker Grove, the Welsh equivalent of Top of the Pops, the Welsh equivalent of Newsround. And the segments at the beginning and the end of the Mabinogi really reminded me of the admittedly quite small amount of that I watched as a teenager. Because obviously like, it’s government, it’s, I don’t mean government like “The Man is controlling your telly!”. I mean like it’s message driven television, there’s not advertiser led, it’s very like – Wales is not a big country. Anyway. Part of me wondered if the reason that was the way it was was that was how people were writing teen stuff. But, what you were saying about, what was it?

Adam – Look and Read

Mattie – Look and Read. This film was made in 2003 but it’s based on a comic book by Mike Collins which was made in 2001, and he actually worked, probably still does actually but I can’t be sure, but as a key illustrator for Welsh language school books making comic strips for reluctant learners. So I don’t know if there is a connection there other than that’s a sweet little coinkydink. But this film is based off a comic book based off of Y Mabinogion and basically any contemporary work that’s based on those texts is usually based on a more contemporary translation. Like, you can go to Aberystwyth and like, and the big ol’ books are tucked away in a library somewhere in Wales, I think in Aberystwyth, but like people don’t work off of those, they work off more contemporary translations. So again it is that, like, message through different mediums through time.

Adam – I mean I also noted that, and this is the first note I made, that it had a bit of an animated Shakespeare vibe.

Mattie – Yeah

Adam – And it turns out that it’s something like the same production company, or at least some of the people who were involved in the animated Shakespeare, I think the Tempest which is actually very good.

Mattie – Oh yeah!

Adam – And, yeah yeah, I really like that one. And A Winters Tale, was also involved in this. So yeah, there is a loose connection to Animated Shakespeare which again maybe gave it that slight educational feel.

Ren – Yeah, it’s certainly got an educational flavour to it.

Adam – Which I say, I don’t necessarily regard as a bad thing. I think on this podcast I’m on record saying that I’m very actually fond of edutainment. The animated version of The Tempest from animated Shakespeare, whenever I’ve taught the Tempest I’ve used it. I think it’s really wonderful piece of stop motion animation.

Ren – What we haven’t mentioned is that one of the young people, one of our teens at the beginning is a young Matthew Rhys, with frosted tips

Adam – Oh! I didn’t notice!

Ren – Yeah, off the Americans and other things that aren’t the Americans but I just associate him with the Americans.

Mattie – I know, just the idea of headcannon consistency that Lleu ends up defecting to Russia and ends up doing terrible things.

Adam – The live action segments, I don’t know if they’re wholly necessary. There’s another version, there are two versions of this uploaded to Youtube, one which is in its original Welsh language and another which is dubbed, and the dubbed version only has the animated segments interestingly, it doesn’t have the live action bookending. Though the live action bookending does seem to be connected to myth, and a kind of myth that reminded me of Laputa, the Castle in the Sky. I mean I know, and I only mention this because I know Miyazaki quite likes his European and his, I think of, Welsh influences, Diana Wynne Jones adaptations, obviously Howls Moving Castle and possibly Mary and the Witches Flower. But yeah, this idea of an island that kind of appears at certain times, a floating island that appears at certain times, which you have in Miyazaki. I did wonder if he took that from Welsh mythology because there’s this portal, as far as I understood it, into this realm of the past, this island that emerges, Atlantis like, from the sea off the coast of Wales or something?

Mattie – They’re at Grassholm Island, that seems to be where they’re going, which is past Skomer Island off the southern end of Pembrokeshire. And there’s a little bit of text at the end that goes into it a little bit more. I wasn’t totally clear whether the portal was an island that appears and also there’s a real island. There’s quite a few islands that appear out of west Wales, well out of the Irish sea essentially, so it’s entirely possible Miyazaki got it from one of them. Pretty sure we’ve got at least two.

Adam – Yeah, I quite liked that. And then you get this strange bit of animation where the live action morphed into rotoscoping.

Mattie – And where Matthew Rhys just cannonballs into the sea! Which I did enjoy. Just grab your knees and just fling yourself into Mythology time!

Adam – But it is quite odd, right, it’s like the live actors are just trapped in their animated forms. Partly because it’s rotoscoped, partly because it's very unclear as to whether they’re inhabiting these mythologic ancient figures, or whether they’re just observing what’s happening. It seems like they’re experiencing what they experience vicariously or something.

Mattie – If I had to guess, and I haven’t been able to find much information, but if I had to guess, the live action bits are only in Welsh because they were for a Welsh domestic audience for teens to watch on telly. And so that was just a bit of extra messaging in there and making it extra relevant and interesting.

Adam – Yeah, yeah

Mattie - Or ticking whatever “we need to tell the teens not to have unprotected sex” messaging there needs to be. Because I love that she’s “Oh no, I had sex last night, guess I’m pregnant!” Like, it’s 2003, there’s plenty of things you can do. It’s not like “Oh, I guess I’m a mum”, no, that doesn’t, alright then. But the dub, it’s pretty much the same actors doing the dub, because the vast majority of Welsh people can also speak English, and all Welsh actors can also act in English, and in Welsh if they speak Welsh. So I imagine it was either they didn’t want to re-record the live action bits in English, or this is not relevant to a market outside Wales. This is just here because we’re talking to the youth, but the grown adults buying the DVD do not need to know about this guy finding out that he’s adopted. Which does mean they miss out on one of the best bits of the whole thing, which is the film, which is the blue camo print Lada Riva estate at the start, which is the best car that’s ever existed.

Ren – See, we don’t often get car talk on this podcast!

Adam – Yeah, I mean, have you ever seen the Phantasm films Mattie?

Mattie – No? I’m excited for possible Ladas though!

Adam – Because me and my friend Andee, who is the landlord of the Brewers Arms in Ipswich and has his own podcast Beyond Graves and Stars, or possibly the other way round. But anyway, we’ve been reviewing the Phantasm franchise on there, the idea is he kind of likes to review horror series that have a whole bunch of sequels.

Mattie – So, like the Kamen Riders of horror?

Adam – And Phantasm has a whole bunch of sequels. But, doing the podcast, well one thing I’d read about Phantasm is that petrolheads really like it because apparently the models of cars are very specifically chosen and there’s quite a few car explosions. Me and Andee, neither of us drive and I don’t know anything about cars, so I’m very aware that there’s probably a whole bunch of people in there listening to it who like Phantasm because of the cars and we’re just like “don’t have any idea what model car that was.”

Mattie – Excellent

Adam – But there aren’t any cars in the animated sequences because we’re in the ye olde mists of medi– I mean what century are we dealing with here?

Mattie – errrrr

Ren – Twelfth?

Mattie - Somewhere between Dinosaur Time and now. Yeah, we’re looking medieval, these were written down, collected in the twelfth and thirteenth century.

Adam – This is clearly a period where there were clans. That’s what I gather. I’m picturing it a bit like the Scotland of Macbeth, right? That there are lots of clans who occasionally fight each other.

Ren – Yeeeeeah?

Adam – I mean, I’m no expert here!

Mattie – No, no, you are pretty much spot on, in as far as, like most, we’re sort of pre the modern concept of nations at this point. We’re probably looking at, blueeeeeeegh, about 1040 or something til about, yeah, we start knocking up against the annexation of Wales. So yeah, 11th and 12th century. And yeah, there were just a lot of different kingdoms within kingdoms within kingdoms within kingdoms, nesting like little Russian dolls.

Adam – Yeah and because of that I found it quite hard to follow some of the geography but I got as much as there seemed to be a lot of fighting between Welsh clansmen and Irish clansmen, I think?

Mattie – Yeah. So, it was broadly set in Arberth, which is in Pembrokeshire, and they were up North for, they were in Harlech for the bits with Bendigeidfran the giant and fighting the Irish, they were in Gwynedd for Pwyll (n.b Mattie misspoke here, he meant Lleu Llaw Gyffes). So they’re in three geographic areas and then ‘cause Wales isn’t very big some of the people turn up in some of the other areas. It doesn’t take long to get around to be honest. So, the three characters have the places where their stories are based, and yeah it does just kind of throw you around and exposition text comes up and says “you’re here now” and it’s just like “Cool”

Adam -But this giant, so what’s the giants name again?

Mattie – Bendigeidfran

Adam – Okay, so Bendigeid-. Sorry, Ben-Dy-Geid-Fran?

Mattie – Yeah, you smashed it mate.

Adam – Sure, okay, alright, he’s not always been a giant as far as I can tell. It seems like he started off like a regular man and then, Incredible Hulk like, got so angry he became a giant, am I right?

Mattie – I mean, he was always-

Ren – I think he was a big guy!

Mattie – He was always, like, would make the Undertaker look like a normal sized human. And when he’s mad gets like I dunno, “I’m a ship now” big.

Adam – Yeah, that’s quite a big difference!

Mattie – I think the implication is that he’s like maybe about 8 or 9 foot tall, which is pretty giant, and gets engianted when you lock his sister in a kitchen.

Adam – So, so, yeah, why did he get so angry?

Ren – Well. He gets so angry, because, this is the part that Dan is involved in, who is one of our teens.

Mattie – Love Dan. Dan’s the best.

Ren – He’s not as central to his strand of the story as the other two are. Well, he gets more important.

Adam – Okay

Ren – To begin with he’s sort of there as part of Bendigeidfran’s entourage.

Mattie – He does, well he is one of the brothers. And he consistently has the most sense out of everyone. Which I really like about his character. Cause, if you’ve got the live action bit, these three people are learning about themselves through the medium of their experiences in mythology, and mostly what Dan seems to learn is “Oh, I’m not actually an idiot, I’m just a bit late for stuff sometimes”. But he does do his best to prevent multiple international incidents.

Ren – Yeah, cause the King of Ireland, Matholwch, appears off the coast with a fleet of boats and says he wants to marry Branwen, who is Bendigeidfran’s sister. And so they’re like “Well, this does seem like this would be good for relations between our countries, so sure”, but…

Mattie – But they have a really angry racist brother called Efnysien who they’re like “I’m sure if we arrange a wedding feast to marry our sister to the Irish, who he is super racist about”…

Adam – He really, really hates Irish people…

Mattie – “…He won’t find out and do anything.” Yeah, he’s not about them. And they’re like “Ahhh, no but, this is a good decision, it’ll be fine.” Like, everyone has someone in their life who really doesn’t like conflict and thinks that if they just try hard enough, they can make reality not involve people doing unreasonable things, and this is the very extreme “No, no he’s going to lose his temper and stab all the horses”.

Ren – Yeah, Efnisien stabs all the horses.

Adam – I guess this is where the horror comes in. Cause at first I was quite confused, well not confused because it’s an interesting animated film that’s vaguely for kids, but like obviously at first I thought “this isn’t horror”. But I think the aspects that make it, and maybe it’s more dark fantasy. But I think, I mentioned how fast things erupt into chaos and I think it’s that which is horrifying. Because things are just ticking along and then suddenly things are really bloody and violent!

Ren – Mmm, horses are being slashed.

Mattie – Yeah, and it is one of those things they don’t go into because the film would be about a million years long. But for us obviously, those horses didn’t do anything wrong, that’s horrible that you slashed up those horses, you’re a bad person. But horses are incredibly significant in Irish culture, and lots of cultures. They’re big strong powerful freedom providers. If you imagine how adverts want us to feel about cars is how people actually feel about horses. They are, who you are when you’re on your horse is the true completion of you. That is agency, that is power. And, you know, connections to, cause horses are pretty, I don’t know how much time you’ve spent around horses but they are pretty magic. Destroying things that are, like, holy to you. And that it’s so wanton and violent. It’s really intense. Which they do not make a big deal of because as I am explaining I’m like “Man, I am saying too much”. So they’ve got to be like “ The man cut up the horses, it’s not good to cut up the horses”.

Adam – Okay, so, is this, and I’m sorry I’m asking so many questions. I think part of recording this podcast is just trying to make this film clear in my head. Because not knowing really any Welsh mythology going into it, it was quite a confusing experience. Not a bad experience, and as you say, like, maybe it makes sense to have the telling of these stories be rhythmically a bit weird, like rushed in some bits, and then slowing down, and then really fast, that makes a certain amount of sense. But it means the experience of watching it if you’re not familiar is sometimes a bit overwhelming and confusing. So, was the killing of the horses something that then prompted the appearance of this wicker bone headed horse monster?

Mattie -The wicker bone headed horse monster is in the other story that’s in, the first story that begins the film that’s down in Narberth. Which is funny to me because that’s the town up the road to the village I grew up in. It’s like I know Narberth, I’ve sat and drunk cider in that castle.

Adam – Does that creature have, I just thought it’s like a hobby horse, that’s the name I think when I think skeleton horses. Does that have a special name?

Mattie – Not that I can… It’s worth, as we said at the start while we were setting up and trying to work out how to make microphones work, I sound really reassuring and like I know what I’m talking about. But I want to be very clear, I am not passing on any scholarship here. I’m passing on what is in my mind and my person from being, from having all of this stuff be part of the general sea water that I was raised in, the briny soup that I rose out of.

Ren – That you were pickled in.

Mattie Yeah, it’s the pickle brine, this is the mustard seeds in the pickle brine. And I would highly encourage people to check out different translations of these stories and find out more. But, if anything I say sounds really good, just treat it like I’m just another oral story teller telling the story, that doesn’t mean I’m telling you anything accurate.

Adam – So, did anything cause that creature? Did anything make it or did it just appear like some sort of agent, is it like Grendel in Beowulf? Just this monster?

Mattie – Are you talking about when it comes and nicks that baby?

Adam – Yeah!

Mattie – Well that’s cause Rhiannon was meant to marry one dude, but she didn’t want to marry him, so she went and found the other dude and went “What up, do you want to marry me?” Well, “ What up, do you love me?” and Pwyll was like “Well, I’d be a fool to say no wouldn’t I, so yes, I do.” So there was a bit of a, it’s Red Wedding situation, actually, wherein you were meant to marry one person, and you married someone else, and the baby getting stolen was a bit of a like, wizardly consequence of that. But not the wizard later, a different wizard.

Adam – Okay, yeah, I guess I just sort of, what’s it got to do with you bone horse? You just seem to appear and be really awful. Oh my gosh, it’s just taken off this poor baby. And I’m like, Why? What’s it doing? And this is a bit of CGI animation, so it looks pretty, pretty demented.

Ren - Yeah

Mattie – Yeah, doesn’t it look so much better than it has any right to?

Adam – Yeah, it looks pretty cool. Can we do texture of the week? Cause, you know.

Ren – Yeah, yeah lets do it!

Adam – What… Is there an obvious translation of Texture of the week into Welsh?

Ren – [Villainous chuckle]

Mattie – Errrrrrrrrrrrgh

Adam – Sadly we’re not using the webcam so I can’t see Mattie’s expression at my very reasonable request.

Mattie – I mean, like, there is. Do I know it? Mmmmmm, that’s a, that’s a beautiful question.

Ren – Penwythnos. No, that’s a weekend.

Mattie – Penwythnos. So if Pen is end…

Ren – Yeah, wythnos.

Mattie – Boom, got it.

Ren – It means week.

Adam – So what do we need to say…

Mattie – Yr wythnos, of the week. Um, I cannot remember off the top of my head what texture is though. So “Tecsture”. Tecsture yr wythnos.

Ren – Eyyyyyy!

Adam – Oh! That’s nice

Mattie – Just take the English word and say it a bit Welsh. It’ll do. You can fix it in post!

Adam – I thought that sounded really nice!

Ren – Thank you Mattie.

Adam – Thank you, yeah. So mine is wicker bone headed horse monstrosity. Because especially as rendered in early 2000s CGI, it looks incredibly metal. It looks like it’s just stepped out of some kind of ridiculous nu-metal music video, straight into the medieval Welsh past to snatch up babies and cause havoc.

Mattie – Yeah, it does look like the back projection for some profoundly problematic doom metal band.

Adam – Yeah

Mattie – That thing’s just in the background destroying stuff whilst they play 40 minute long songs that absolutely slap and then you look up the lyrics and you’re like “Oh No. Oh, that man went to prison for reasons why people should go to prison.”

Adam – Yeah, but anyway, I was all there for it. You could imagine it as some sort of terrifying puppet on stage.

Ren – My texture, they have some little bits of interstitial bits of live action scenery, that fades back into animation.

Adam – Oh yeah! They do actually, it’s quite odd. There’s some kind of, I don’t know if it’s bones or just like charred ashen ruins.

Ren – Yeah, that was the bit, kind of blackened charred wood that then turns into a crows wing. I thought that was pretty textural.

Mattie – Yeah, that’s after they burned down… I love that the Irish are like “Aww, can we make up imprisoning your sister for you by building you a Big House? Build you a Big House that you fit in, and then it will get burned down.” For me, it’s right towards the end, when Lleu Llaw Gyffes has continued having the most bewildering time, just absolutely bewildering, and he’s a hawk tucked up in a tree whilst his adoptive Mum-Dad Gwydion the Wizard is like “Look mate, I’m really sorry but I love you, could you come down here so I can make it so you don’t die”. And he’s just up there like “I wasn’t equipped to deal with where we started with this and I am not equipped to deal with where it’s ended up, but actually yeah I would like a hug”. And there’s something about that that really gets me. And Gwydion just being like “I’m sorry you’ve never really had a choice and this is your first go at having a choice. Will you please come down here so I can make this better?” I don’t really know if that counts as a texture, but tree leaves and my own tears would be my texture of the week. Cause yeah… yeah, how are you meant to know how to deal with that?

Ren – This is the third strand, this is Lleu, Matthew Rhys, who in the real life beginning finds out he is adopted. So his Welsh fantasy counterpart is also dealing with parental woes.

Mattie – Yeah, there’s a lot to unwrap there. Cause there is really something to be said of Gwydion, Gwydion being the mage, or wizard, who takes care of Lleu. He kind of is that archetype of a parent who’s really really good with kids but doesn’t quite understand that one day they’ll be adults and you need to prepare them for being adults. But yeah, poor Lleu was a child born in shame who’s mother was like “I’m not having anything to do with this, get my trauma baby away from me!”. And within his culture the only person who can name a child is their mother, and the only person who can give them arms, weaponry, make them a warrior, is their mother. [ Note - Mattie is wrong here, actually Arianrhod cursed Lleu with three “tynged”, social prohibitions or taboos, on him. One that no one but her could name him, one that no one but her could arm him, and finally that no woman from any race that was on the earth then would be his wife.] His mum didn’t want anything to do with him, so Gwydion finds ways of tricking her by using illusions to make it look like the child who will be called Lleu are different people. In the first case, we were talking about it earlier, he’s clearly decided what he wants this child to be called, and so engineers a situation that's really long winded. “Ohhh,. He just pinned a sparrow to a piece of wood with a pin from 300 yards. He’s good with his hands, isn’t he. Would you call him Mr Good-with-his-hands? AHA! That’s his name now!” There really is a great deal of someone's good intentions really colliding with their lack of emotional intelligence to create a bit of a compounded omnishamble of this young man's life.

Ren – Yeah, both Lleu and Rhiannon have a difficult time in the otherworld. Rhiannon’s baby, well the skeleton horse monster tries to steal her baby, but actually the skeletons hand is hacked off with the baby inside, but they don’t know that the baby is still alive.

Mattie – So yeah, skeleton horse monster hobbyhorse, if you will, steals the baby, makes all the nursemaids fall asleep and nicks the baby, and then goes to try and steal the foal of a friend of theirs, who’s gone back to make sure his mare foals safely. And the man is there looking after his horse, horses, you’ve gotta look after them, and he hacks off the hand of the terrifying monster and is like “Ohh, a baby! Guess we’re keeping it!” Cause him and his wife haven’t been able to have children, so they’re like “well, miracle horror baby is here, might as well look after it.” And then, considering that he saw Pwyll and was like “Oh, gotta go home and make sure my mare foals alright, see you later!” and then doesn’t come back for seven years…

Ren – Yeah, when the nursemaids wake up and they find the baby gone, they decide they’re all going to stick together on the lie that Rhiannon destroyed her own baby. So they sort of, so this is some more horror…

Adam – Yeah, this is quite distressing actually.

Ren – So they get some animal blood and put it on her and her hands and she wakes up and they’re like “don’t you remember what you did?”

Mattie – Yeah, they basically gaslight her into thinking she had some sort of terrible post-partum psychosis and her husband never believes that that is the case but the court of their community finds her guilty and her punishment is to sit at the gates of their settlement and tell everyone who comes what she did. And she gobs off, as you would!, and an additional punishment is put onto her that she has to carry everyone who comes to visit the court on her back for 7 years. So, your man with the foal, who ended up with the baby, comes to visit after 6 years and is like “Oh look, this child sure does look like my old friend, maybe I did kind of know about this”.

Ren – Yeah, at which point, reunited with Rhiannon and named Pryderi?

Mattie – Yeah. In a very lovely… so Pryder is, like, a worry or a care, as in “you’ve got all the cares in the world”. And she’s just like “Well, you coming back has taken them all away. So you are all my cares, it’s all redeemed in your return.” Which is lovely, and also woooooooow, that is some taking the high road there. I do note that those nursemaids are not seen again. I don’t remember what happens to them, but they’re gone.

Ren – Meanwhile in Ireland, Branwen is being punished for the horse killing actions of her… uncle? I think he’s her uncle?

Mattie – I think he’s her brother. So, after horse-gate, Branwen has been married to Matholwch, and he’s like “Why would you do such a humiliating thing after I’ve married your sister?” and they're like “We didn’t plan this, he’s a nutter, can we just give you this ominous magic cauldron to make it up to you?” and he’s like “Yep, we’re sorted, it’s all good, we will not take any vengeance.” And that’s a recurring theme in this, because it’s something that is very important in sort-of clan based cultures, in modern times as well as in the past, is “If you say we’re good then we’re good. And if you say we’re good in front of people then we’re good. And if you go back on that…” It’s important that stories contain the consequences of going back on your word that we are forgiven. But yeah, going back to Ireland and decide “Actually, we’re not good, let’s take it all out on the sister.” So they separate her from her child, and she works in the kitchen and is abused the whole time. She nurses a starling back to health and sends that starling back over the Irish sea with a message to her giant older brother, who becomes Very large, really very large.

Ren – Yeah, and stomps across the sea.

Adam – And then becomes a bridge! And says “The one who leads must be a bridge!” And I assumed that was an emotional bridge, or some sort of moral, but no! I should have taken that far more literally. The one who leads must become A bridge!

Mattie – Fun fact! So, when I was in primary school, I was quite tall for my age which, in combination with the amount of group performance that was involved in the Welsh education system, would mean I was included in things because it was handy to have a girl that was quite big and who was quite biddable. So I featured in the school choir as the point of the triangle but wasn’t allowed to sing. And in a performance of a long spoken word poem about this, about Stori Branwen, I was Bendigeidfran and had to be the bridge. So, like, we were all stood together reciting this poem really dramatically, and at this point I would then step to the right, then lie down on the floor and be a bridge and everyone else would march. Next to me, thankfully, not over my body.

Adam – Oh good, yeah!

Mattie – But just sort of march next to me. And then I think I’d sort of get up again and then stand next to them, and then die.

Ren – Amazing.

Mattie – And all you’ve got to be is like 5 foot 8 when you’re 10 and this could all be yours!

Adam – You too could be a bridge!

Mattie – You too could be a bridge and an apex!

Ren – Yeah, when the Irish crew see this increasingly giant brother they decide…

Mattie – “Oh no. We made a mistake.”

Ren – Yeah, and they said “How about we’ll build you a giant house.” But then they sneakily decide to hide men in the house.

Adam – As bags of flour or something?

Ren – As bags of flour.

Adam – Cause there’s a horrible bit where one of them [inaudiable] “Oh, it’s just a bag of flour!” and crushes the person inside the bag to death.

Ren – This is our friend Efnisien the horse slasher. He’s not convinced by the good intentions of these Irish people.

Mattie – Yeah, he’s like “That’s some lumpy flour.”

Ren – And he just goes round methodically crushing all of their skulls, the men who were hiding in the flour sacks.

Adam – In the original Welsh version it also had subtitled sound effects. It said “Sound of body being crushed.”

Mattie – Yeah, the subtitles were a hilight for me, it was memory lane, Ceefax 888 Welsh subtitles. [n.b. It wasn’t Ceefax, it was Teletext]

Adam – I think my favorite one was “the cries of past woes”.

Mattie and Ren – Yes! The cries of past woes! Yes!

Mattie - There was also a very “Oh this is why they gave it a 12 rating” bit of animation wherein they go to like the Congratulations on your house! feast and the scene begins on one of these quote bag of flour, pans down it to a droplet, a large droplet of blood forming, which has in it reflected the scene of the room, and then the camera pans to the room. And it’s just, like, that is intense guys, that is some intense animation there.

Ren – Yeah, and then during this betrayal feast Matholwch opens these bags of flour, I guess the men are meant to jump out and start fighting. But this really quite graphically crushed corpse slides out of the bag instead. So yeah.

Adam – Yeah, just slumps.

Ren – Yeah, but…

Mattie – And Matholwch is genuinely like, at least voice acted. Really horrified. Like, “I was not expecting this. These are people I know. And we were about to do an awful thing. But I’m not thinking like the welsh are people, I’m thinking like these corpses in bags are people. It’s really quite visceral. Because, like, that’s probably a lot of members of his extended family.

Adam – Yeah, yeah

Ren – So this leads to a big fight. And they have the cauldron, because they were given it.

Adam – The Black Cauldron, which we met in the episode Mattie was on before where we talked about the Disney film The Black Cauldron.

Mattie – Yeah, you think I’m here for the Welsh episodes, I’m actually just here for the cauldron episodes. All about the cauldron.

Ren – So yeah, they have this big fight, and the soldiers start coming back to life out of this cauldron.

Mattie – Yeah, they’re coming back to life but they’re all mute, they can’t speak.

Ren – Efnisien, in the end, destroys the cauldron.

Mattie -He does also throw his nephew in a fire.

Ren – He did do that, yeah.

Mattie – He did also do that. Branwen is having…

Ren – Yeah

Mattie – This really is a myth about how men make women's lives miserable, archetypally.

Adam – Yeah, that was quite a shocking moment, the baby really goes flying. It’s quite a sort of quick, sudden, horrid thing.

Mattie – Yeah, and it’s such a sweet moment of him going and sitting in the throne and being just a regular little kid.

Adam – Yeah!

Mattie – Efnisien really represents a sort of, like a reactionary antisocial element. In many ways, he’s not wrong in terms of not trusting Matholwch means he finds the bodies in the bag. He’s an antihero, you are not meant to like him. He’s not a cool antihero, he ruined everyone’s lives by caring more about being a very particular kind of right. In a way that’s quite uncomfortable for us living at the time we’re living in right now. Yeah, we’ve got some of that going on right now. You are the worst and none of the ways you’re right matter. Yeah, so, he climbs in the cauldron and destroys it.

Ren - Bendigeidfran was hit with a poison spear. So they cut off his head and take it back to Wales.

Adam – Big head, presumably quite heavy to cart around?

Ren – Yeah, big head! And they go to a magic island.

Mattie – I would also like to say that Branwen dies of a broken heart on the beach. That also happens. She sings a very, very sad song about two islands, two cultures being destroyed because of her. She just takes it all as her fault and dies on the beach. And then all of her surviving relatives go to what I have called the Cocaine Bender Island where they wish to forget about everything they did. Which they do successfully for 8 years until someone breaks the spell and…

Ren – The cries of past woes enter the dining hall…

Mattie - And Bendigeidfran dies. Yeah, Celtic mythology is, it does not mess around. It has a very very high body count and like, actions have consequences.

Adam – Yeah.

Mattie – Yeah, how does this compare to the Black Cauldron for you? Revisiting another great Cauldron film. Like, this bit specifically, looking at The Black Cauldron, how are you feeling right now?

Adam – I think the Black Cauldron’s more of a romp than this. You know, the Black Cauldron obviously… Okay, I think it’s because The Black Cauldron, for a contemporary viewer, is working within very clear fantasy and Gothic-hued fantasy registers. You’ve got the spooky castle, and you’ve got, like, I don’t know, even the undead warriors look like something you might find in an EC Horror comic or something. It’s all kind of palatable somehow. Whereas I think you’re right that this film somehow gets across these stories… I dunno, maybe on some level how they were communicated, or how they might have felt at the time. Like, yeah, they’re not softened. I don’t know, maybe it’s the difference between a fairy tail that’s passed down through an oral tradition, and then there’s the Disney version of that fairy tail. And this is closer to the stories in the oral tradition. What do you think Ren?

Ren – I think, despite the kind of live action bookending bit of it, which is a kind of “Ohh, we’re going to wrap this up, sort of, in a way” kind of thing, but apart from that it’s not very concerned with wrapping things up neatly, or parcelling up into palatable stories. And I think the way it cuts between the three different stories, it sort of, I don’t know, feels kind of a bit chaotic and tumbling. It feels very rich and alive, but it’s not neat.

Adam – What’s your memories, can you remember your experience of watching it for the first time Mattie?

Mattie – Oough. That’s an interesting question, because it ties into something I was thinking about. Because this is very much mythic storytelling, so it’s archetypal universal things that are supposed to make you feel something about the culture you live in and your place in it. And you asking that question, I don’t remember anything factual about it, like what day it was, where, I can’t remember anything factual, but I can remember how I felt. I can remember how it made me feel. Like, I can remember feeling so sad about Branwen. I guess that’s kind of part of why I wanted to ask about The Black Cauldron, because obviously Lloyd Alexander was really impressed with the cannon of Welsh mythic storytelling, it had a massive impression on him. And he managed to work out how to take elements of that to make a narrative story that you could follow from beginning to middle to end, with people in that you know what they’re doing and what they’re about and you don’t know much about their context because you don’t need to. And I think that’s a magnificent skill, and I think it’s an important skill because a lot of culture, elements of it get preserved through that process which can be woven back in later.

Whereas this story, as we’re talking about it’s really difficult for me, at least, to follow through my notes and feel confident that anything I’m saying is going to make sense to anyone listening. Cause, look, I just felt a lot of things about these people who in some ways existed, in some ways never existed and in some ways always exist and will never stop existing. And, yeah, I feel a lot of respect for the people who made the film of the Black Cauldron, and anyone who’s ever tried to grapple with this sort of text, because how, how do you do that? Cause you’re trying to make people feel something beyond whether or not they can tell you the story in a linear way, and that’s… Humans have achieved a few miracles, I think music is one of them and I think this sort of storytelling is one of them.

Adam – Oh, thank you, that was quite moving

Mattie – Thanks, cause I was going to follow it up with also, I love that in the film of the Black Cauldron, the person who breaks the cauldron is the cute comedy scruffly little guy, and in this one it’s the worst person you have ever met, and I’m really curious as to how that decision was made.

Adam – That’s a really good point!

Mattie – I kept thinking about it whilst I was watching Efnisien doing stuff because I remembered what he was going to do, and I kept thinking “You’re Gurgi!” Your character inspired Gurgi, which inspired Gollum. What is art?!

Adam – Before we wrap up, I should mention just because it’s of interest, that the soundtrack was, I believe, done by John Cale.

Mattie – Yeah it was!

Adam – So there we go, we have Welsh co-founder of the Velvet Underground doing the soundtrack.

Mattie – Yeah, he sure gets around.

Ren – We should also mention that Dan meticulously makes a mouse gallows, just, I think that’s important to our listeners.

Adam – Oh! That is important to our listeners, you’re right. You know our listeners. Mouse gallows, to hang a little mouse that’s not really a mouse but someone’s wife.

Mattie – And it’s genuinely I think one of the best bits of the film.

Adam – That bit is really good actually.

Mattie – A guy being like “No, you cannot move me. I know what I’m doing. The reasons for it are revealed and it is resolved in a way that is good for him, everyone, it’s good for reality, reality is restored. But it’s just this guy being like “No, I don’t care if I look unreasonable, I don’t care if I look insane, I’m going to build this mouse gallows until I get what I want.”

Adam – Do you think that’s what I should have done in terms of hanging on to my new job today?

Mattie – I think it’s what we should all do at all times

Adam – I should have sat there staring at the woman from HR whilst building a tiny gallows for a mouse?

Mattie – Yeah, cause what else are you going to do? Like, literally what else are you going to do? Like, I absolutely think going home and going “Nah, I’m not dealing with this” is a really good response to that sort of situation. But, there’s no talking to them, there’s no reasoning with them, there’s no negotiating. Build a mouse gallows. Just stop responding to unreasonable people with reason. Just be really weird until they go away. I’m just going to be weird and difficult until you stop lying. Now give me all my friends back. Yeah.

Adam – Yeah, that’s a good message actually.

Mattie – Yeah, just build mouse gallows. And, we’re completely… Everyone listening, just go and watch this, it’s on Youtube. You will get the joy of knowing that someone has done a VHS rip of this, and in many ways I think that’s great because a lot of the effects, a lot of the CGI, probably looks as good as it does for us watching it because it’s from a VHS. So it’s not a DVD, it’s within the technology it’s made for. Just go watch it, it’s great.

Adam – No, you’re right though, cause it’s like when you get those Bluray editions, those 4k Bluray editions of Video Nasties, it’s like I really don’t think the visual effects were made to be scrutinised at that level.

Mattie – No! Or even worse, no, the person who made these special effects gave themselves a mental breakdown trying to work out how to make a bucket full of meat scraps look horrifying, on VHS. This was done the way it was done on purpose, it doesn’t need to be in 4k. But yeah, like, a woman is made, is bought into existence and then cast out of it to try and.. Ohhh, it’s just, Blodeuwedd. In the time of AI and people having a lot of their emotional needs met through constructed means, it’s a good story in that no-one looks good in it and also you can kind of see where everyone’s coming from. It’s a mess, again, it’s consequences. But yeah, Blodeuwedd gets done dirty. And then that leads you into Alan Garner and the Owl Service.

Adam – Ohhhh! Yeah, of course! Oh, we need to do the Owl Service at some point. Maybe you can come back and do the Owl Service at some point Mattie.

Mattie – Oh, you know what, I’ve never actually read the Owl… No! You know what, I have read the Owl Service, it’s just from a bit of my life that I don’t remember.

Adam – Have you watched it?

Mattie – Ooooh, there’s a watching format?

Adam – Yeah, there’s a TV version.

Mattie – Ooohhh, when is it from?

Ren – Oh, it’s from the 70’s. Yeah, it’s proper.

Mattie – Yeahhhhh

Adam – Cool, well that sounds like a good future project.

Ren – Well, thank you Mattie.

Adam – Yeah, thank you.

Mattie – Thank you Ren and Adam, and to you dear listeners in your homes, living your beautiful individual lives, swimming in archetypes and retaining your selfhood. Well done, that wasn’t easy, good job. Thank you for putting up with getting a bit intense about things. And also shout out Richard Bros coaches, that I loudly popped for at the start of the live action bit when one of the buses comes past and I’m like “Oh, I’ve probably been on that bus to Cardigan!” Go to Pembrokeshire, go to Wales, go to the 70’s. Someone buy me a Lada. It’s so hot….

Ren – Right, well, so, our intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, our outro music is is by Joe Kelly, artwork’s by Letty Wilson. You can email us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com or follow us on instagram @stillscaredpodcast. Do you have a signoff for us Adam.

Adam – Yeah! You too can be a bridge, creepy kids! Go and be a bridge.

Ren – Yeah, go and be a bridge creepy kids.

Mattie – Be a bridge.

All – Byeeeeeee!