A Film Canon

The Blue Bird sets the standard for one of the most powerful narratives of children's cinema - a quest through a series of tableaux depicting adulthood as a fundamentally disorienting, alienating and, above all, frightening state, in the name of of some relatively tangible goal (in this case, the mythical blue bird of happiness) that is gradually revealed to be little more than a cipher for the parental - and especially maternal - love, hitherto unappreciated or underestimated, that is alone capable of easing the transition to this new universe; that is, an allegory of growth, in which maternal love plays the paradoxical, if implicit, role of ushering its object into a world in which it is no longer fully required, resulting in an exquisite melancholy that is only enhanced when the children are 'reunited' with their parents, and is encapsulated in the most haunting of the tableaux they visit - a house populated by their dead grandparents and (multiple) siblings, which is explicitly cast as an analogous, joyful reunification. For the most part, these tableaux retain the fantastic theatricality of Maurice Maeterlink's original play, particularly clear in the cavernous, minimal backdrops, which are little more than curtains, and nicely subsume everything to a vast, subterranean register. That said, Tourneur makes spectacular use of a number of cinematic techniques (reverse footage, stop-gap animation, superimposition), albeit with a distinctly theatrical self-consciousness - a series of magic tricks - as well as favouring narrow, occluded sight-lines; a rudimentary deep-focus sensibility, if not cinematography.