There is a movie that impressed me a lot recently. It is Tim Burtonâs Big Fish, telling a story about a man, Edward Bloom, who adores telling made-up stories about his life, and nobody trusts those stories, especially his son Will. The last one is so disappointed with his fatherâs passion for telling fairy tales about his life that he doesnât talk to him for a long time and blame him for his attitude. According to Willâs opinion, his fatherâs attitude made Will unable to trust other people. At the end of Edwardâs life, his son realizes that his father mostly told the truth but exaggerated his stories to make them brighter.
While watching this movie, I was trying to compare its main ideas with Ovidâs Metamorphoses. The intention of his poetry can be defined with just four lines, which can obviously be connected to the sense of his poetry in general.
My intention is to tell of bodies changed
To different forms; the gods, who made the changes,
Will help me â or I hope so â with a poem
That runs from the worldâs beginning to our own days (Ovid 29).
Just like Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the main character in Big Fish sees the sense of his life in telling stories about people and events that can be changed to different forms. Similar to Metamorphoses, where Ovid tells a mythological story starting with the creation of the world and ending with his own time, Edward tells the story of his own life. While Ovidâs narration starts with the creation of the world and ends with his own time, Bloom states the story, where his friend Karl is a giant, dancers Ping and Jing are Siamese twins, and Amos, the girl he was in love with, is a werewolf.
However, there is a difference in the way that Edward tells his stories. All the characters in Metamorphoses are made up of, for example, gods. In a Big Fish, though, the main characters are only overstated. In my opinion, the only exception is Amos, a werewolf. The last one is obviously a made-up mythological character, which can not be just exaggerated.
As for the rest of the characters in the movie, Edwardâs son finds out in the end that his father was mostly telling the truth. Will meets his fatherâs friends near the river, where everyone comes to say goodbye to his father. Karl appears to be really tall for a regular man -7 feet, 6 inches. As for Ping and Jing, they are twins from Siam in Asia, but not Siamese twins. These facts make Will believe that his fatherâs stories have sense. Moreover, he later thinks they are brilliant. That is why he decides to retell them to his son after his fatherâs death.
In both Metamorphoses and a Big Fish, the authors decided to analyze transformations using exaggerations. Ovid uses mythological characters and gods in his work. For example, he tells the story of Jupiter, who sends floods to the world. Edward tells more down-to-earth stories, like one in which he robs a bank and this bank appeared to be bankrupt.
In general, the sense of both works is in the idea of change. All of us can see transformations around: water becomes ice, baby grows up, leaves become yellow. Therefore, both authors want to tell us in similar ways that everything in the world experiences changes, goes from one state to another. This main idea of transformation unites Metamorphoses and a Big Fish.
Works Cited
Ovid, Innes Mary M. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Innes Classics Series. London: Penguin Classics, 1955.