Rise of the Slightly Rubbish Guardians

“It is our job to protect the children of the world. For as long as they believe in us, we will guard them with our lives.”

Rise of the Guardians (2012)

How has Dreamworks Animation managed it? The studio behind such exceptional motion pictures as The Prince of Egypt, Shrek, and – a film which for some time enjoyed the status of being my absolute favourite – How to Train Your Dragon, has proved unable to persuade me, an unabashed fan of all things animated, to pay money to see any of their original-story releases (i.e. not including the sequel to HtTYD) for nearly the whole of the past five years. Trailers for such titles as Turbo, Home, and The Boss Baby have left me altogether uninspired to take a trip to the cinema.¹ It probably doesn’t help that the last original-story release from the studio that I did see, Rise of the Guardians, was … well, it was all right. Nothing special.

The moon that constitutes Dreamworks Animation’s company logo appears in Rise of the Guardians practically as a character, which is entertainingly meta.

Rise of the Guardians is a dissonant, sprawling, hyperactive sort of a film featuring a coalition of childhood myths – Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, and our protagonist Jack Frost – who collaborate in defence of the joyous, carefree nature of childhood against the newly-intensified fear-inducing activities of the Bogeyman, otherwise known as Pitch Black. Our heroes possess, between them, a wealth of highly powerful magic, so one wouldn’t have thought, perhaps, that one solitary adversary would present all that much of a threat, but the trouble is that the Guardians’ power has one fundamental weakness: it depends entirely on children believing in them.

Pitch’s strategy, therefore, is to sabotage the Guardians’ efforts to carry out those activities by which they make their existence known to children: he kidnaps all the Tooth Fairy’s subordinates so that they can no longer flit round collecting children’s teeth, he destroys the Easter bunny’s stock of painted eggs so that children attending Easter egg hunts are uniformly disappointed – and every time a child stops believing in a Guardian, said Guardian is weakened. So Tooth’s feathers begin to moult, and the Bunny is reduced from the size of an adult human to that of an ordinary rabbit.

The big final showdown of the film sees our variously dilapidated heroes confront Pitch in a darkened suburban street. Beside them are a young boy called Jamie and a collection of his friends, whose help the Guardians have enlisted along the way.²

“You think a few children can help you?” Pitch mocks, backdropped by an army of shadowy nightmares. “Against this?”

Father Christmas attempts to lift his staff against Pitch, but stumbles. Jamie gasps, anxious, but Jack Frost and the Easter Bunny are quick to reassure him. “We’ll protect you, mate,” asserts the latter, rather incongruously in view of his puny size.

“Aw, you’ll protect them?” echoes Pitch. “But who’ll protect you?”

Nobody seems to have an answer, until we see a new resolve in Jamie’s eyes and he steps forward: “I will.” The other children soon follow his lead until there is a whole line of them standing in front of the Guardians.

Pitch, unperturbed, sends a stream of nightmares straight at them – but when Jamie thrusts out a hand against the nightmares, they turn into the golden good-dream sand of the Sandman, familiar to us from earlier in the film. The process continues and soon all the Guardians are looking a lot more like their usual selves, upon which they start employing the full force of their magical abilities against Pitch until he is defeated. The fact isn’t made totally clear, but I think we have to assume that when the golden sand goes whizzing all over the sky, it’s also causing numerous children to have dreams of such a sort that they start believing in the Guardians again, thereby empowering the Guardians to fulfil their duty of protecting those children from Pitch.

 

And this is probably about what you’d get if Father Christmas and the Sandman were for some reason conflated into one character...

In short, the Guardians are just as reliant on the children they are sworn to protect as the children are on them. This, indeed, forms the heart of the film’s storyline. And in this way, although the Guardians’ purpose, as stated in my opening quotation, may sound terribly grand and assertive, the gist of it turns out not to be ‘so long as the children of the world are young and naïve and vulnerable enough to have need of us, we will guard them with our lives’ so much as ‘we are literally entirely dependent on the children of the world believing in us in order to be able to exercise any of our powers of protection over them’. Which being so, is it even the Guardians who are really doing the protecting? Or are they arguably just a convenient external agency by means of which the children are, after all, able to protect themselves? One might, perhaps, characterise the relationship between the Guardians and the children as a mutually beneficial partnership, or even as a contract of service: the currency of belief buys the service of protection. In any case, it’s with the children, and their ability to choose to believe or not to, that the real power in the equation rests. All of which surely renders these supposedly mighty protectors called the Guardians a bit … well, a bit rubbish, frankly, doesn’t it?

So it’s a very good thing that in the real world, we have a protector whose ability to do what he does has absolutely nothing to do with how many people believe in him. God’s relationship with his people is altogether different from the Guardians’ with the children: it is not a mutually beneficial partnership, because there’s no contribution we for our part could offer God that he might possibly lack without us. He is the self-sufficient source of everything that is, the eternal Trinity, the uncaused cause, satisfied in himself before anything else existed, necessarily greater than all of it, and with absolute power over every atom. How could the Creator of all lack anything, such that he would be dependent on his creation to provide it? Such a thing would defy all logic.

And for this reason, it’s not on to approach God as if our belief in him, or any practical manifestation thereof, could function as currency, in the same way that the children’s belief in the Guardians does. The following is from Psalm 50:

Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you;

your burnt offerings are continually before me.

I will not accept a bull from your house

or goats from your folds.

For every beast of the forest is mine,

the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know all the birds of the hills,

and all that moves in the field is mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you,

for the world and its fullness are mine.

Do I eat the flesh of bulls

or drink the blood of goats?³

Of course, we don’t make animal sacrifices under the new covenant with Christ, but that was what obedience to God’s commands looked like according to the covenant with Israel as laid out in Torah, and so the same point applies now to any kind of obedience we undertake with the expectation that we are somehow doing God a favour, or presenting a bargaining chip, when in actual fact everything belongs to him already. In fact, it strikes me as even more ludicrous to have this kind of attitude about a prayer or a Bible-reading session or a morally sound decision or the mere reality of belief that underlies all such things, than about a blood sacrifice. After all, blood sacrifice was and remains the necessary means by which a holy God’s relationship with unholy humans is established; these other things are actually privileges bought by the establishment of that relationship – in our case, perfectly and permanently through Christ’s death and resurrection. And yet I know I am guilty of getting it in my head – vaguely, subtly, so that it’s hard to acknowledge and reject the fact – that deigning to access such privileges represents my giving God something he lacks. How mad is that? And how utterly arrogant? Granted, it is of course true that God wants and desires and asks obedience of his people, but the key thing to realise is that this is because he has chosen to achieve his purpose of increasing his own glory through us, not because we have something he needs in order to achieve that purpose. Indeed, Psalm 50 continues:

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,

and perform your vows to the Most High,

and call upon me in the day of trouble;

I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

The way we glorify God is when he delivers us. He asks of us thanksgiving, which by definition is an acknowledgement of our dependence on him rather than the meeting of a need that he has. When the children in Rise of the Guardians make a point of the fact that they believe in the Guardians, far from testifying to the greatness of the latter, it exposes that the former are the ones who really hold the cards; and likewise, if we think that our belief in God or the obedience that follows therefrom is fulfilling his needs, we don’t glorify him, but only fashion a false glory for ourselves. We reduce him – to a greater or lesser extent – to a convenient external agency whereby a power that really belongs to us might be exercised. If, on the other hand, we recognise that we have nothing to offer, that all we can do is give thanks for good and cry out for deliverance from evil, we witness with great clarity to the absoluteness of God’s power, the willing generosity of his grace, that he is the only Saviour, needed by all, needing none – and a much better guardian than anyone else could ever be.

Footnotes

¹ Although actually I just read the description for The Boss Baby on the Dreamworks website, http://www.dreamworksanimation.com/film/, and the mention of the words ‘unreliable narrator’ has already caused me to think it might be worth a look after all…

² Some kind human has uploaded the scene to YouTube – in HD, indeed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-rBH4qSF0w.

³ I’m a big fan of this one right now: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+50&version=ESVUK.