Figuring out why Katamari Damacy has me in a creative chokehold (part 1)
♬ Here is a Katamari tune to set the mood~
Katamari Damacy is a weird game to me. It's comforting yet uncanny, nostalgic yet foreign, cozy yet stressful.
In the game, you play as the 5cm tall Prince, who rolls around a katamari (a sticky ball that collects things smaller than it to grow in size). Your goal is to roll up material on Earth , becoming big enough to recreate the stars and moon that were destroyed in a drunken stupor by your father - The King of All Cosmos. Its gameplay is fun, visuals colourful and soundtrack upbeat.
* btw, if you’re interested in exploring the game, there’s this amazing website called noclip that lets you explore video game levels. It’ll be the first result if you search “noclip”. There’s one for Katamari Damacy too! Just scroll down to the PlayStation 2 section.
I don't consider Katamari Damacy my favourite game of all time. Yet I always wind up here whenever I'm brainstorming a project. As if returning home, returning to where it all began. In alot of ways, Katamari Damacy is a "root node" to alot of my creative interests, like a corridor connecting different rooms.
So, for this blog post, my aim is to clean up the corridor and explore some of these rooms, rather than rush through them in search for "the perfect art idea", which is what I usually do.
1. Katamari and Stuffed Birds
One of my favourite aspects of Katamari Damacy is its aesthetic. The game's levels are made up of low poly simulacrums of real world objects and beings, from soy sauce bottles to a family of four. These inhabitants rigidly move about, as if an invisible hand is simulating a lively environment.
There's also a sense of humour in their placements. For example, in the level "Make a Star 5", there's a blowfish fruitlessly swimming on a scanning bed, a maneki neko piloting a cardboard box car with halved watermelons as wheels, an old lady with a blank expression slowly riding around town on a toy car, and many more.
Seeing the artist's hand so blatantly, the town’s liveliness feels artificial. It's like I'm making my way through a toy town, in the midst of an invisible person’s play session.
During my second year at Elam School of Fine Arts, I stumbled upon a text called "A singular obsession: Bird motifs in the paintings of three New Zealand artist – Don Binney, Raymond Ching and Bill Hammond" by Alice Tyler. I was researching stuff for that semester's brief - "What would NZ art look like if the Pakeha did not come?" Whether or not I actually hit the brief at the end is debatable, but the rabbit hole I fell into after reading this text is still something I think about till this day.
In the paper’s section on Bill Hammond, the author talks about the artist's references to Walter Lawry Buller. Buller, along with illustrator Johannes Gerardus Keulemans, published “A History of the Birds of New Zealand”, which helped establish Buller as an authority on New Zealand ornithology. Keulemans’ chromolithographic plates are still used today as standard imagery of indigenous birds.
Despite his contributions to the ornithology field, Buller is a controversial figure. In his efforts to understand and immortalise, he inadvertently contributed to the extinction of several species.
Keulemans himself has never even been to NZ. He used stuffed birds provided by Buller as references for his drawings.
Both Buller an Keulemans understood birds through empirical data. One expressed his findings through words, the other through illustration. Knowing the book's publishing in the midst of Colonial New Zealand, a connection emerges between empirical science and colonialism, between understanding and ownership.
Another artist praised for the scientific accuracy of his bird paintings was Ray Ching. He has an interesting quote -
"I suspect that the reason I ever started to paint birds was not an interest in natural history; it was because I desperately wanted to own stuffed birds, and I couldn't find any in the junk shops..."
He sought to understand birds through painting. This understanding became a substitute for the ownership of stuffed birds.
The stuffed bird is subject turned object. It's literally a husk of its former self. Its only purpose is to be owned. The bird's wild nature has long been extinguished, songs silenced, and corpse ripped away from its natural context. The bird has been stripped down to its bare basics, enough to be recognisable, enough to be possessed. This simplification allows for easy consumption and understanding, without the unpredictability of a wild creature.
This reminds me of a quote from Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer -
"…I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and reducing the possessed."
I am familiar with the impulse to own the things I love. Back to Katamari Damacy, this might be why I enjoy the low poly mundanity in the game.
Okay, I know all this talk about stuffed birds and ownership sounds pretty bad. But I think, in the end, it's about control.
...which also sounds bad.
For me, I needed control to feel a sense of autonomy. ‘Wanting' things felt sinful growing up. My opinions never really mattered at home and I had a weak sense of self. I remember loving Pokemon. I enjoyed handpicking my unique combination of six companions to travel with me. I would even draw my team in my notebooks, so they could follow me even when the gameboy turned off. Pokemon were easy to obtain, easy to draw, easy to understand.
The same thing can be said for the objects in Katamari Damacy. Their simplified forms feel like something I can hold in my hands and put away in my pocket. They contain the essence of the object, the idea, but without the weight, price or real estate. I could draw it, sculpt it in Blender, mimic it with clay, turn it into a keychain or print it on a shirt. They can become building blocks for my sense of identity, much like growing a katamari.
Love of the stuffed bird is love of the self.
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...phew! That went longer than expected! I'll continue in another blog post.
If you're reading this, thanks for reading all the way! I don't really have anyone to talk to about stuff like this, so I rambled quite a bit here;; But I'm glad I got to put everything into words. (o´∀`o) I was discovering things about myself even during the process of writing.
I'm excited to dive into the next part!
Side note, I need to remember that this isn't an academic essay. It's a blog post on my personal website. I can write whatever the hell I want! >:)
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References
consistent APA format be damned!
1. Katamari Damacy Reroll (The game)
Pg.6 – intro to Buller and Keulemans
Pg.63-64 – about controversial nature of Buller and how Keulemans drew from stuffed birds
Pg.45-46 – Ray Ching quote, more in depth about Ching’s practice
3. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1b46/buller-walter-lawry
a more in depth look into Buller’s life
“[the Maori] are dying out and nothing can save them. Our plain duty as good compassionate colonists, is to smooth down their dying pillow.”
an absolutely insane thing to say . The white supremacy of it all.
4. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/play-shows-bird-mans-treachery/2DAZOLK3O26O3OHFEPZTTFT4NM/
more about how horrible Buller is. There’s even a play about him!
5. https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/blog/behind-the-scenes/2013/10/bullers-birds
pictures of ‘A History of the Birds of New Zealand’ with Keulemans’ illustration
6. https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_834239_smxx.pdf
Colonialism and science
Gathering Moss quote. I love this book and highly recommend it! Especially the chapter this quote came from, called “The Owner”. It pairs quite well with the readings on Buller.
The author also voices the audiobook, which is extra nice!
