inbarfink:I wanna talk about one of my fav bits of visual symbolism in Megamind!So, during the happy
inbarfink:I wanna talk about one of my fav bits of visual symbolism in Megamind!So, during the happy Mr. Blue Sky montage, Roxanne inspires Megamind to start cleaning up the city, which has become dirty and neglected during his reign of terror. He does it by shooting all the trash with a mech-mounted dehydration gun. As you do. THEN after Megamind’s facade as ‘Brenard’ is revealed, Roxanne runs outside into the rain - which also re-hydrates all the trash that was still lying around in the street.The rain itself is a super-obvious and super-common metaphor for sadness and inner turmoil, but I wanna focus on the re-hydrated garbage.The garbage is sort of a stand-in for all of Megamind’s various misdeeds and crimes. It literally only got piled up like that because Megamind took over the city. And Megamind cleaning it, to show that he’s slowly turning good - he’s literally cleaning up his past crimes. As well as cleaning up his image to Roxanne, who started not only liking him as Brenard, but even wondering if Megamind isn’t all that bad. But… Megamind didn’t ACTUALLY clean up the city, did he? The streets look clean because all the trash is dehydrated, but it’s still there. Turning the garbage into easy-to-handle cubes is a good first step toward cleaning it, but…Megamind hasn’t picked up the cubes And as soon as the rain starts, the streets look as flithy as they did before. Megamind’s been moving toward the side of good, he’s being making a couple of things you could consider ‘a good first step’ but… he’s still in control of the city, he’s still hasn’t truely shown *remorse* for all the bad things he already did, he’s still lying to Roxanne! An act he himself admitted is Evil!When Megamind said “Maybe I don’t want to be the bad guy anymore!“, I don’t think he meant becoming… well, becoming the sort of person he became at the end of the movie. He wasn’t looking to confront his misdeeds or prove himself capable of change, I think he was just thinking of retiring from villainy and living as Brenard full-time. Which is just… dehydrating the garbage - it’s just hiding his villainous past away without confronting or fixing anything (and he would be still be doing Evil by stealing Brenard’s life and lying to everyone) As long as he keeps lying to Roxanne, and until he’s actually remorseful for the things he did wrong, he still hasn’t actually *picken up* the garbage. And as soon as his ruse as Brenard is exposed, all of that garbage comes right back to bite him. Roxanne’s opinion of him completely to shift to… probably the worst she ever thought of him. She assumes he dated her just for the sake of manipulating her and playing with her heart!It’s really only after he imprisons himself that he starts confronting his own misdeeds, and shows that he does actually intend to pick up his metaphorical garbage. -- source link