Friday, April 10, 2020 — 6
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

There’s no better time to play “Animal Crossing: 

New Horizons” than when you’re trapped at home 

with little to do. The same can be said for most video 

games, but especially so for “New Horizons”; no 

better game could have been released on March 20, 

2020.

Animal Crossing is often called a “life-simulation” 

game, 
but 
calling 
it 
a 
“personalization” 
or 

“customization” game would be just as accurate. The 

game revolves around your character transforming 

a deserted island into a thriving village from the 

ground up, and customizing everything to your 

liking: your character, your home and as you 

progress, the island itself.

The distinguishing detail is that the game is 

played in real-time. A hallmark trait of the Animal 

Crossing series, gameplay is dictated by the clock: 

You can only catch a guppy during the day, while 

tarantulas only appear at night. The main item 

shop is only available from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. 

in the time zone you live in. Special characters 

visit only once per week; one character can only be 

found Sunday mornings from 5:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. 

Variety is the spice of life in Animal Crossing, and 

that variety is derived from when you choose to play. 

For many, quarantine amid coronavirus has opened 

the opportunity to play Animal Crossing at any time 

on any day, eliciting maximum variety.

“New Horizons” expands on its predecessors with 

more new villagers to befriend and invite to your 

island, more new bugs and fish to catch and more 

new items, styles, fashions and customizations. 

The biggest new addition is the ability to modify 

the island terrain, raising mountains and creating 

rivers to your heart’s content. That’s the core of 

Animal Crossing: creating a world to escape to. It’s 

a platform for more creativity and self-expression 

than ever before in the series’ history.

Beauty doesn’t come easy — building your dream 

island takes time. “New Horizons” makes it a 

winding journey. The game forces players to take 

everything slowly, even down to the most basic 

functions. Accessing a shop, store or service requires 

going through the same dialog over and over. Picking 

up items from the ground or depositing items into 

storage must be done one at a time. Advancements 

like recruiting a new villager, upgrading your home, 

building a bridge or ordering new items all take at 

least one day to be fulfilled. There’s very little in 

the way of immediate gratification. For some, it’s a 

way to slow down, unwind and relax. For others, it’s 

unbearable tedium.

Animal Crossing isn’t for everyone. There’s a sense 

of progression to the game, but one that’s stretched 

out over a long time. The island terrain editor, maybe 

the game’s biggest selling point, will take at least two 

weeks to unlock, even for the most optimized Animal 

Crossing aficionado. For the average player, maybe 

much longer. New crafting recipes are tantalizingly 

drip-fed, just a few each day. Commitment to daily 

play is rewarded with various bonuses and perks, 

while your villagers will make sad remarks about 

missing you when you spend long periods away. 

Many customizations are exorbitantly expensive, 

requiring lots of in-game time spent earning money 

for sometimes minor changes; if you’re no longer 

happy with where you put your house on day one, 

expect to shell out 30 thousand bells to move it.

All of this can infuriate some, but for others, it’s 

tranquility. The long-winded path to a flourishing 

Animal Crossing village creates an organic and 

natural feel to the game, encouraging your island 

to grow over time and build around early decisions 

you made much like a real-world town. There’s no 

getting straight to the point — that’s the point of 

Animal Crossing.

When I first walked into GameStop to preorder 

“New Horizons” the night before it came out, I was 

ecstatic to walk out with a copy of the game a day 

early. Ten days later I sold it to my brother at a $20 

loss. It was too easy to sink hours into the game that 

I would never see back. But if you’re looking to make 

quarantine feel a little faster, Animal Crossing is an 

addiction that could make it go by in a blur.

‘Animal Crossing’ makes life cozy

DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer

VIDEO GAME REVIEW

FILM REVIEW
Your vote in ‘Slay the Dragon’

EMMA CHANG
Daily Arts Writer

At its best, politics is stressful. At its worst, it’s a mind-

boggling maze of rules and red tape. And, as we get older, the 

messiness of our current bureaucracy becomes increasingly 

obvious, revealing a system that is much more complicated than 

Schoolhouse Rock! makes it out to be. The power we hold as 

voters is daunting to most, but to a select few, it’s a threat to their 

livelihood. Politicians are meant to be held accountable by the 

public; any AP US History student could tell you that. 

Enter the convenient practice of gerrymandering — a district 

drawing technique that takes away the threat of public opinion. 

Both political parties are guilty of dividing voting districts in a 

way that ensures them seats in state legislatures and, though 

a little bit of innocent gerrymandering might be considered 

part of the rat race of the government, such is not the way of 

politics. If your hands aren’t dirty and your inbox is clear of 

incriminating emails, you’re not doing it right. But what happens 

when citizens are fed up with the system? Is there capacity for 

change? The newest documentary from Magnolia Pictures, 

“Slay the Dragon,” answers these questions with a captivating 

story about those working to fight the corruption rampant in 

our governing bodies. 

Before considering the political connotations of “Slay the 

Dragon,” however, it’s important to note the actual storytelling 

ability of a documentary like this one. Often, these films toe the 

line between informative and boring, intriguing and emotional. 

Most run the risk of losing their audience’s attention, especially 

in these streaming-heavy days of quarantine. But “Slay the 

Dragon” weaves a fantastical tale about gerrymandering 

beginning with impressive visuals and graphics that highlight 

the strange nature of strategic redistricting. 

As the opening credits roll, “Slay the Dragon” forces its 

audiences to consider what it actually means to “re-district” 

with an animated line carving its way through a city. The 

image establishes the concept of gerrymandering as something 

concrete, setting up the intimate relationship between an 

audience and a major character of the film. As the story 

progresses, the visuals become ever more important in showing 

the increasingly questionable practice of gerrymandering. At 

one point, watching “Slay the Dragon” was similar to trying to 

find the constellations — the audience stares at indiscernible, 

odd shapes that take on no meaning until a detailed drawing is 

put over it. But the effect remained. “Slay the Dragon” was able 

to emphasize the absurdity of gerrymandering with a few well-

placed examples of specific districts. 

Beyond the graphics, “Slay the Dragon” also provided an 

excellent story. There were many beginnings to this story — 2016, 

when Katie Fahey started her quest against gerrymandering; 

2010, when Project REDMAP began flipping state legislatures; 

even 2020, the first census year since many of these anti-

gerrymandering laws were put into place. However you decide 

to define the start, it’s obvious what “Slay the Dragon” is about: 

the rise and hopefully coming fall of gerrymandering in the 

United States. 

 But is it really that simple? In an age of political unrest, “Slay 

the Dragon” provides a hopeful message for those of us just about 

to come of age in this important election year. In a speech after 

the anti-gerrymandering proposal was passed in Michigan, 

Katie Fahey is seen telling her campaign team how important 

every one of their actions is. The underlying message that every 

action, every vote is essential to the success of democracy is one 

that we could all stand to remember, regardless of what year it is.

The eye-opening moments of a documentary should be 

few and far between — a good documentary should make its 

audience reflect and question what’s presented to them. The 

immediate nature of an “eye-opening” moment is the opposite 

of conversation-sparking. “Slay the Dragon” understands 

this and, though it is very left-leaning, it still manages to 

present its audiences with a strong and informative message 

about gerrymandering. It highlights the importance of every 

citizen’s participation in democracy, making it one of the better 

documentaries to watch. 

LITERATURE COLUMN

EMILY YANG

Daily Literature Columnist

Witches, spinsters 

and lesbians

Sylvia Townsend Warner, “Lolly 

Willowes”

The cover of my copy of Sylvia 

Townsend 
Warner’s 
first 
novel 

is decorated with a drawing of a 

witch by August Neter. Neter was 

an outsider artist, one of Hans 

Prinzhorn’s “schizophrenic masters,” 

whose art was an attempt to capture 

his hallucinations. The image depicts 

the profile of a short-haired woman 

covered in plants, roads and animals, 

an effect that suggests a map. It’s an 

apt choice on the part of the publisher: 

Warner’s style resembles Neter’s 

double image in its porous curiosity 

and naturalistic oddness. It’s also apt 

because the novel is about a witch. The 

witchiness here is less Shakespearean 

and more ordinary, spinster-ish; 

Warner suggests that the closest 

relative to the witch is the unmarried 

tradeswoman or the country wife who 

prepares her own dandelion wine. 

Written in the 1920s, the novel seems 

to suggest that someone can become a 

witch simply by refusing the trappings 

of polite society, by “politely declining 

to make the expected connection with 

the opposite sex,” as John Updike (of 

all people) puts it on the back cover of 

my copy. 

We first see the titular Laura 

Willowes (called Lolly by her niece, 

a nickname that sticks) moving in 

with her brother Henry and his wife 

Caroline after the death of their father. 

It’s a move from the countryside to 

London. Caroline describes Laura 

in passing as “a gentle creature” and 

then turns to logistics: a writing desk 

has to be moved, a bureau that another 

relative wanted is allocated to “small 

spare room” in which “aunt Lolly” 

will live. The rest of the novel is, in 

part, an elaboration on what Caroline 

missed. Laura won’t become a witch 

until the last third of the novel, but 

even before then she has a strangely 

textured inner life and a tendency 

to feel out strange essences from 

ordinary surfaces. We next see a very 

young Laura stealing into the room 

where her great-aunt’s disused harp 

collects dust and plucking the strings, 

which “answered with a melancholy 

and distracted voice.” She then dwells 

on the lock of her great-aunt’s hair 

that was embroidered into a picture 

of a willow tree as something of a 

memento mori. 

 Hints of morbidity and the occult 

are common in Warner’s evocation 

of English country life. Laura’s 

childhood with her father is quiet 

and practical, to be sure, but there’s 

suggestion of rural magic everywhere. 

She helps her father out in his 

brewery, gathers medicinal herbs 

from the forests, climbs trees, absorbs 

traditional remedies and age-old 

practices from the “country servants 

of long tenure.” While her brothers 

Henry and James get shuttled off into 

professional life, Laura stays with 

her father and notes how one servant 

makes traditional beeswax polish 

and fills the house with “a resinous 

smell” and how another recommends 

infusions of nettles and mugwort for 

longevity. She’s content to continue 

living like this, and has an antipathy 

toward marriage that she never loses. 

Her father doesn’t push the point. She 

becomes instead the mistress of the 

house with “an easy diligence.” 

When her father dies and Laura 

moves to Henry’s house in London, 

she brings her preternatural intuition 

to bear on the rhythms of life in the 

city. Henry and Caroline are people 

with customs and routines in place 

of personalities, but Warner still has 

a flair for catching the shadow that 

follows each gesture. At one point 

she describes Henry winding the 

grandfather clock in the hall — “first 

one and then the other the quivering 

chains were wound up, till only the 

snouts of the leaden weights were 

visible, drooping sullenly over the 

abyss of time wherein they were 

to make their descent during the 

seven days following.” This image, 

at once bleak and Carroll-esque, 

captures well the feeling of dullness 

that starts to weigh on Laura as she 

settles into her new life. Even so, the 

satire is even-handed and just. Laura’s 

relatives aren’t caricatures, they’re 

just ordinary middle-class English 

people, and that’s the problem. We get 

a sense of Laura’s strangeness, not the 

uniqueness of her quiet subjugation. 

 Laura is twenty-nine at this point 

and it’s 1902, meaning her prospects 

for marriage are increasingly unlikely. 

Caroline and Henry occasionally 

host Eligible Bachelors, but Laura 

determinedly ignores them or says 

eccentric things to them and after a 

while everyone involved stops trying. 

Laura 
then 
becomes 
something 

like an unpaid housekeeper to her 

brother’s family. There are long 

passages that list her duties, which 

range from the arrangement of 

flowers to embroidery to looking after 

her nieces. After nearly twenty years 

of this Laura starts to long for more, 

starts to feel tempted to leave. She is 

finally persuaded to do so after seeing 

canned fruit and homemade preserves 

in a “countrified” shop while running 

errands: she has a sudden vision of 

herself staring up at an apple tree 

late in the season, reaching up for 

the fruit outlined against the fading 

grey sky. That night, she announces 

to her relations that she’s moving 

to Great Mop, a small town in the 

Chilterns. She ignores their indignant 

protests (“now Lolly, what you want is 

absurd!”) and sets off the next day. 

Just as Warner avoids generalizing 

about her characters, she also avoids 

panoramas and self-conscious theses. 

It would have been easy to write this 

book in a manner that presented 

opposites — the stiflingly domestic 

world of Caroline and Henry’s house 

and the totally free world of country 

life. When Laura arrives in Great Mop 

her newfound independence is rather 

vexing. She spends her days exploring 

the area on foot for hours and ends up 

exhausting herself. “She knew in her 

heart that she was not really enjoying 

this sort of thing, but the habit of 

useless activity was too strong to be 

snapped by a change of scene.”

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