INSPIRATION - “Little Matchstick Girl Meets WWII”

Unlike my previous project, Guardian Angel was primarily inspired by a piece of music.  Thomas Bergersen’s music track Empire of Angels provided much of the backbone of the story’s gestation and development, as I relied on the soundtrack for action cues, scene moods, and pacing.  This unfortunately makes it difficult (if not impossible) to separate the film from the music piece.  

While listening to Thomas Bergersen’s Empire of Angels while on the the train, the song’s opening reminded me of the ending of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Matchstick Girl”, in which the spirit of a dying girl’s grandmother takes her soul away to heaven.  I had read multiple illustrated iterations of the story when I was young, so immediately I could clearly imagine what the scene would look like.

Although The Little Matchstick Girl was an excellent source of inspiration, it ultimately remained nothing but a springboard for my imagination, as the characters and settings gradually expanded and morphed into something almost entirely different; the opening scene is the only scene that bears any sort of congruence to the original material.  In the original story, the matchstick girl is fully cast as a victim of fate--her father beats her, and she is forced to sell matches in the biting winter barefoot after a bully attacks her; her role is passive as the story writes her only reacting, but not affecting the environment (an exception is made at the end, where passerbys express grief and regret for allowing the child to die).  

Guardian Angel subverts this by giving the little girl agenda; she does not just react passively to the environment.  Rather, Soul’s decisions end up carrying dramatic consequences for herself and those surrounding her, as her decision 1) to chase after the toy airplane during the bombing raid and 2) chase after the ghost fighter during their spiritual ascension both resulted in substantial suffering for the Angel; Soul earns her “happy ending” only after she personally realizes the effects of her actions and 3) chooses to abandon the toy airplane on the beach in favor of the Angel’s embrace.

Creating a well-balanced story was also an integral part of the scriptwriting process. Although I knew the story that I wanted to tell from beginning, it was only so in an abstract sense, and the script went through a great number of rewrites to bring out the motifs and themes I wanted to explore. Although I knew from the beginning that I wanted to juxtapose the tranquil beauty of the little girl’s ascension with the desolation of the world she had been living, it was only until the last few rewrites that some of the thematic details were put into focus. For example, the toy airplane the little girl chases after was originally a doll. Originally, I had figured that girls realistically would have preferred dolls over airplanes, but having the little girl running back to retrieve a toy aeroplane as enemy warplanes rain bombs from the sky creates a much more jarring contrast instead of a simple doll. This harsh irony strengthens and unifies the motif in the film as it is now intimately tied to the little girl’s character; this in turn strengthens the ending, where she decides to let it go.

Recently, I became interested in WWII military aviation--coupled with the fact that the story featured elaborate scenes of city-wide devastation, Guardian Angel was certainly destined to be set during somewhere between 1935 – 1945, or at least a combat situation involving propeller planes. Although I was personally more interested in Japanese military aviation of the time (I paid special attention to the A6M Zero Fighter), I felt that the nature of the story, as well as the visual images in my head were more fitting to that of the European theater. Second, I felt that setting the story in the Asian theater would have made the film unnecessarily controversial.

Prior to the decision of basing the story near the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, I had toyed briefly with the idea of designing my own featured aircraft instead of following historical accuracy. However, a few factors influenced me otherwise:

1. A videogame that I used to play, War Thunder, featured historically accurate 3D models of most WWII-era warplanes, ranging from bombers to fighters. Choosing real-life planes and being able to view said plane in 3D would eliminate the need to create my own concept art of the aircraft
2. Friends who were attracted to the Guardian Angel project due to the fact that it featured WWII-era warbirds were upset by my intention to design my own aircraft designs and thus depart from historical accuracy. I was therefore “persuaded” to make the easier choice and retain historical accuracy.
3. Personally, I read up on how Michael Bay received a lot of flak for taking “artistic liberties” while making the Pearl Harbor movie, and I did not want to make similar mistakes.