What happens when you take a series of children's books by a Swedish author, which is set in the Viking Age, and inspired by the Icelandic sagas, and have a German production company and a Japanese animation house, adapt them? What happens is that you get a 1974 German/Japanese anime called "Vicki The Viking", or "Wickie und die starken Männer" (Wickie and the Strong Men), or "Chīsana Baikingu Bikke" (Small Viking Bikke). What happens is that it all gets very confusing very quickly.
Halvar, Helge, and Vicki, Tjure and Snore, Faxe, Gorm, and Gilbey all make sense. They are all Vikings and either from the village of Flake or originally from the next village over¹.
Ulme the Italian, who is the the village bard and whose songs and poems are mostly wasted on his Viking audience, makes some amount of sense as he is portrayed as a travelling minstrel who fell in love with his wife who lived in Flake and they just stayed.
But Urobe does not make any kind of logical sense at all. Urobe has the most confusing back story of anyone. I do not understand Urobe at all.
Urobe is described the village druid. Of itself that would make him a high-ranking priest or sorcerer of some kind, though the village of Flake appears to have no organised religion of any kind at all and Urobe is never seen doing any magic at all. Urobe is also described as having originally come from England, which by itself isn't particularly strange as the Vikings had (and have in the series) travelled all over the Atlantic and throughout Europe but what follows though and what we learn about him, is where even the internal logic of the show breaks down.
Urobe has the surname of Hilfenhaus. That surname is perhaps already familiar to an Australian audience as Ben Hilfenhaus played cricket for both Tasmania and Australia. Given that Ben Hilfenhaus was born in 1983 and Runer Jonsson's original book was written in 1963 and the anime was released from 1974-1976, that's a coincidence but it does suggest that the surname was already in existence. The logic problem here is that "Hilfenhaus" in German means "Help House", which is fine if the family trade was already being doctors and/or physicians but it's not very English at all.
Once you ignore the fact that everyone in the world can instantly speak to each other, and that apparently that everyone in the world can also read Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Runic scripts, what makes Urobe all the more bizarre is that he appears to know literally everything and everything literal. This is fine in principle if he is supposed to be a scholar of some kind but there is a snag. Unlike Vicki who is the embodiment of the "Smart Guy" trope, Urobe is the "Book Smart" trope guy; but doesn't appear to actually own any books. We have seen the inside of his house. He has a collection of pikes and axes.
Urobe knows all of the Viking sagas and Viking legends and other lore; despite the fact that as an English person, he probably should not know any of those things. In one episode when the Village of Flake puts on a play about the gods, Urobe plays the goddess Hel (and indicates that he met her). On a related note, Urobe knows about medicines and herbs, despite the fact that as an English person, he would probably not know about the vegetation more than a thousand kilometers from where he was born.
This is all the more strange once you consider that there doesn't appear to be a library, or any books in anyone's house. The explanation for this is either because that Urobe is old, he has seen a lot of stuff, or more likely that because the episodes are 22 minutes long, he exists purely as plot device as Mr. Encyclopaedia to break down, plot, lore, or what ever is needed for the story to work.
This is why Urobe as character device doesn't quite work. If there was a library, or if he had lots of books, then he would be the weird old guy whose job it is to keep the lore. If he had the stereotypical laboratory, or mortars and pestles, then he would fit into the trope of the wise medicine man. If he was the wise old mentor whose job in the story it is to help the protagonist prepare for the heroes journey, then that would also make sense. He is none of these things.
All of the other named adults in "Vicki The Viking" with the exception of Tjure who is a blacksmith, are all multi-purpose farmers. Even though Urobe is old, his occupation is still that of a farmer. Vikings it appears, do not have a retirement plan for their elderly. In fact Urobe's only consistent quality appears to be that he is old and experienced. There are a few episodes in which his being old is useful and there is even one episode where the initial part of the plot involves everyone else trying to convince him to retire, before he ends up saving the village because he has seen the trick that Sven the Terrible is trying to pull, while Halvar's father was the chief². This implies that Urobe has been in Flake a long time but again, we do not know how long. Of course the plot drives him to prove how useful he is because this is a children's cartoon that must always reset to zero at the end of every episode.
Urobe is an enigma. I have no idea how he got to be there, or why he seemingly knows so much about the world. Maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe we are not supposed to think too deeply about the world that they have built in a 1974 children's cartoon. Maybe character as all-purpose Swiss Army knife character/plot device is good enough.
¹Gorm simply got lost while going for a walk one day and wandered into the next village; which is supposed to be ironic considering that he is the ship's navigator. That is easy to explain though, as Gorm is an easily excitable fool, who gets easily distracted. Is that a moth?
²you would assume that Halvar would have also remembered the trick that Sven the Terrible was trying to pull but that is simply never addressed³.
³neither is how Halvar lost his eye. That appears to be a 'noodle incident'.
No comments:
Post a Comment