DIVE TOO DEEP...into bionicle: MASK OF LIGHT {part2: lava bones}

surfs up dude

Last time, I actually jumped ahead a minute or so for the purposes of thrilling cliffhanger (!!!). When we last left our hero, he had just picked up a giant medium-sized rock. This causes what is apparently an extremely localized earthquake. He drops the rock, and it rolls down into the lava river, vanishing into the depths. But then...!

It's a mask...that emits light...like some kind of...
Mask of...Brightness.

A mask which maybe, just maybe might be the titular Mask of Light rises to the surface, the stone that encased it having been...shattered (?) by the lava. Jaller calls it a "Great Kanohi mask".

Today on Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Bionicle But Were Afraid to Ask: Kanohi Masks!

Masks are extremely important merchandise objects in the Bionicle universe. Matoran will eventually die without their masks, while Toa and Turaga are severely weakened. A few other species in the Bionicle universe can wear Kanohi masks, but don't need to. Most masks are just carved metal "protodermis", but there are also Great masks worn by Toa which have mystical powers, and less powerful (in some vague, undefined way) Noble masks worn by Turaga. As examples, Onua has the Pakari, the Mask of Strength, and Gali has the Kaukau, the Mask of Water-Breathing.

You could also buy matchbox-sized mask packs, which contained a few of the twelve Great and Noble Kanohi that existed in 2001, each in one of six colors. Gotta catch 'em all!

"Never seen this language."

Here Takua, let me help.

A substitution cipher is the same thing as a language, right?

Jaller points out that finding a mystical mask of unknown powers and purpose is no reason to be late for the playoffs, to which Takua responds, "Hold your Rahi, I'm coming!" This is sort of like saying "Hold your horses," but instead of horses, it's Rahi. This is how you know it's a different world from ours. The lava cave and robot boys may not have tipped you off. And not any particular kind of Rahi (all the animals in the Bionicle world are called Rahi), mind you, just...all of them. As a concept. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if they have horse-analogues. They've got some goat thingies, I think...

What were we talking about? Oh, right. This is when the lava surge finally makes its debut.

"Kept you waiting, huh?" -the lava

The movie's creators realize Takua doesn't have a bag to put stuff in and definitely doesn't have pockets, and so has nowhere to stow the mask. They could have given him one, but decide instead to have him throw the mask to Jaller over this lava river, which has got to be a good thirty or forty feet wide. Apparently he already knows this mask is worth sacrificing one's life for.

He could use those stepping stones he used to get here to get back, but instead he uses his lava surfboard. Takua has a lava surfboard. Lava surfing is a thing they do in Ta-Koro. Trying to surf across the current of a slow-moving river works about as well as it would in real life.

This is like, totally unradical, bro.

Maybe this is a silly complaint, but something about the music bugs me here. I'd like to give the music its own post actually, because it's very nice, but there's a choice made here that annoys me.

Mask of Light's soundtrack is, I suspect, very inspired by that of Lord of the Rings (Return of the King would hit theaters just a couple months after Mask of Light). The composer, Nathan Furst, employs similar quiet, chaotic choir that LotR uses around the Ringwraiths and such, and applies it to some scenes with the Rahkshi. But for some reason he also uses it briefly here, as the wave of lava bears down on Takua. It's just a natural phenomenon; it shouln't have that music. If anything, if it was triggered by the Mask of Light being removed, it's more like a divine defense mechanism, isn't it? Or is the music asking me to infer that Makuta created this big lava surge in order to---

Takua gets saved by Tahu.

He has a lava surfboard, too. But his is made of swords.
Beat that, Shirou.

Tahu is the Toa of Fire. Because his element is fire, he is red. Because he's red, he's the team leader. Because he's the team leader, he is obligated by the laws of fiction to be the one least qualified to lead. In 2001's storyline he was a jerk, but he got better. In the previous half of 2003's storyline (a dull coda to 2002) he was a jerk, but he got better. In Mask of Light, he's a jerk. But he gets better.

If you recall the image of the six Toa I posted back in the introduction, you may notice this red guy looks nothing like that red guy. The movie wisely doesn't mention this at all, because it's confusing and useless information, but this is technically not Tahu, but Tahu Nuva. At the end of 2002's storyline, the Toa were dipped in magic goo and transformed into the Toa Nuva, thus letting LEGO sell more good guy sets while keeping the same characters.

The Nuva designs are...

"I'm you but stronger."

...yeah. Tahu looks decent, but the Hau is such an excellent design the Hau Nuva is still a serious step down. Everybody else looks like crap. In the original designs, each Toa has a distinctly different weapon Toa Tool, but now they're all just twin swords.

I think the only thing they have in their favor is that each of their weapons has more than one function. Tahu's swords can become a lava board, Kopaka's become skis, Onua's chainsaw...drills...can turn into chainsaw...skis (?), Lewa's swords can be used for gliding, Gali's axes work as flippers, and Pohatu's claw thingies can be combined into a...ball thingy. It's still a step up from his previous weapon, which was, of course, a rock.

Where were we? Oh yes, impending fiery death and daring, heroic rescue.

"Chronicler! Sightseeing, were you?"

For some reason this line became a slight meme on BZPower, the largest Bionicle fansite. And by meme I mean I remember seeing "Sightseeing, were you?" multiple times in fanfics.

Tahu then surfs to shore and safely out of the way of the oncoming torrent. Nah, just kidding. If he did that, this scene would be 50 seconds shorter than it is. And that would be horrible.

Instead, he keeps going and shoots off over the edge of some BOTTOMLESS LAVA FALLS. After plummeting for a mile or two, he finally realizes he should do something about this and stabs his swords into the wall to halt their descent. He also demos his Mask of Shielding, protecting himself and Takua from the falling lava.

They went so far down the can see the skybox.

Incidentally, they fall for (I counted) twenty seconds. Now, tell me if something about this sequence of events here feels odd to you:

As he flies over the edge, Tahu turns his board back into swords...

Grabs them...

Turns them back into a board...

Turns his board back into swords...

...And swordwalls himself to a stop. (That's a word,
right? Swordwalling?)

I feel like there are some extra steps in the middle there. If you have an explanation, please let me know in the comments.

Joking aside, this is a problem that crops up often in movies. Not switching his weapon between sword and surfboard modes too many times - that's something you don't see much of outside Bionicle. The part where the creators put something in the movie that they thought was really, really cool but didn't get around to checking if it made sense and it keeps going and going but you in the audience are indifferent because you don't care about the characters and it's not relevant to the plot and also it wasn't that cool in the first place.

You see this pretty often in anime. There's actually a website dedicated to cataloging the phenomenon. It's called Sakugabooru.

(I kid. They have lots of other things there too.)

The difference between an animator playing around and wrecking the pace of a scene in an anime, and this, is that this was storyboarded. By the director. This is Terry Shakespeare and/or Bob Molina's Original Artistic Vision.

Well, Tahu and Takua are now about a jillion miles beneath the earth, desperately hanging onto the wall over a goddamn bottomless pit of fire. What does Tahu do? Well if it was 2002, he'd switch to the Miru and levitate back up, but we ain't about that anymore. That's honestly for the best, as each of the Toa having their element plus 12 different mask powers would be both confusing and excessive. So what does he do instead? He uses his swords as pitons and laboriously climbs back up.

By the time he gets to the top, not only will the Kolhii match be over,
but 2006's storyline will have ended the world.

Let's review the events of this scene: Takua forgets he has to play sportsball because he wants to look at a rock, said rock contains the Most Important Artifact Of All Time despite being completely out in the open, which he retrieves from said rock by pure coincidence, which triggers an earthquake for no reason, Tahu coincidentally happens to be right in the area and saves Takua, decides he wants to dive into the fiery abyss for no reason, and then hauls himself to the top of the world's tallest waterfall at the speed of slow.

On the one hand, every bit of this scene is stupid and bad. On the other, the plot's already been kicked off and it was kind of exciting maybe. That puts it ahead of lots of movies with 10 times the budget.

Several hours later (I assume), Tahu and Takua reunite with Jaller. Jaller then delivers this line:

"Kolhii-head! You could've been lava-bones!"

That line is peak something. Exactly what it is peak of I'm not sure, but definitely something.

I initially intended to leave things there, but then I remembered something I heard when I watched Mask of Light's "making of". Like all 'making of' DVD bonus features there's nothing of value said in it - but some insights can appear when you read between the lines:

"Their expressions should come from their own world as well. When one of the characters almost falls into a volcano, his friend is really angry with him. He says, 'You could have been lava-bones,' instead of, you know, 'You could have been killed.'"
-Henry Gilson (Writer)

Yeah, no. That's not why Jaller said that. That's why there are lines like "Hold your Rahi," but this one? No. This is here because LEGO didn't want to say "die".

Technically this is just speculation, but I'm pretty confident about it. LEGO is (used to be) very committed to nonviolence. Which is pretty tough to stick to when making a story about super fighting robots, but they did their best. It's a worthy ideal, but it just isn't feasible because, like I said: super fighting robots. I'll talk about this a bit more once we get to our first battle scene.

"Coulda been, but I'm not."

also jesus fucking christ its ok for kids to hear the word 'die' i mean come on

While Tahu thinks a mysterious glowing Kanohi mask of unknown origin is worthy of note, he thinks his village winning The Big Game is a much more pressing concern. Kolhii seems to be like soccer in everywhere that isn't America: slightly more important than life itself.

"This could be important. Take it to Turaga Vakama...after you've
won the Kolhii match."

This update is on the short side, but the Kolhii match deserves its own post. I'll also make sure to define some of the terms I haven't yet. After the game, we'll have seen enough characters that I can finally spend some words talking about the character designs in-depth. Lots and lots and lots of words.

つづく