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Magic Realism: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise...to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight.''|'''[[Gabriel Garcia Marquez]]''' (after the arrival of the railroad, when dozens of new inventions—the phonograph, the telephone, the electric lightbulb— flooded Macondo), ''[[One Hundred Years of Solitude]]''}}
It definitely isn't [[Science Fiction]] and not quite [[Urban Fantasy]] and yet... stuff happens. Unlikely stuff like tchotchkes telling the heroine what to do (''[[Wonderfalls]]'') or the ghost of your father showing up at odd intervals to offer personal and/or professional advice (''[[Due South]]'') or perhaps it's just a quirky vibe that infuses the environment (''[[Northern Exposure]]'' or better yet, ''[[Twin Peaks]]'').
One of the easiest ways to distinguish magical realism from other genres is the use given to the omniscient/omnipresent narrator device which can be used one way or another. Should the story be told from a first person perspective, then the work in question tends to side more with other genres. Another feature is that the magic which affects reality comes either from a plurality of sources, such as god, black magic, spirits, all at the same time; or from no source at all, being like the weather instead. It might be worthwhile to point that usually there is a strong correlation between magical realism and [[Surrealism]].
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Magical Realism can also be interpreted as a very progressive form of [[Speculative Fiction]], showing that elements of Science Fiction and Fantasy can be used legitimately in literary fiction. In other words, a great way towards getting out of the [[Sci Fi Ghetto]]. Also, it should be noted that [[Speculative Fiction]] is not the only genre fiction. Romance, mystery, horror, and the like are also genre fiction that literary snobs enjoy looking down on as well.
When Magical Realism applied to a long-ago historical setting, compare [[Demythtification]], which involves a "quasi-realistic" retelling of a [[Twice-Told Tale|popular legend]] in a historical setting. When fantastic elements are more and more outrageous, see [[The Time of Myths]]. Not to be confused with a [[Fractured Fairy Tale]], where the fantastic elements may be parodized as [[Mundane Fantastic]].
From another perspective, it's a given that any non-fantasy [[The Musical|musical]] is by definition magical realism, since spontaneously breaking into song with invisible accomaniment gets taken as a perfectly normal thing, although there are a few exceptions where the incongruity is [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]], the most notable recent example being ''[[Enchanted]]''. (See [[Musical World Hypotheses]] for other interpretations.)
Not to be confused with [[Urban Fantasy]]. [[Urban Fantasy]] is an [[Fantasy|old genre]] in a [[Present Day|contemporary]] setting, Magic Realism deals with a different set of genre rules.
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* ''[[Serial Experiments Lain]]'' might fit into this category better than [[Science Fiction]]. Among other things, it seems that dead people go to (or through) the Wired after they die, computer equipment can grow like vines, and the physical reality is as much "data" as the computer-world and can likewise be programmed by gifted individuals.
** And it's perhaps the only cyberpunk, or scienfictionish narrative to convincingly do so, The reason why Serial Experiment Lain might be an example of this trope {{spoiler|it's because it basically deals with the digital world, merging with the real world. Thus creating a hybrid where the rules of this reality don't apply}} The problem with this theory is that people do seem to take notice of the change {{spoiler|one guy even shots himself in the head because of it}}
** Perspective is everything. Lain's point of view perhaps flips towards [[Urban Fantasy]] in the end, but Arisu's remains in the field of [[Magic Realism]].
* ''[[Haibane Renmei]]'' also fits. Yoshitoshi ABe is a huge fan of the genre.
* ''[[Nagasarete Airantou]]'' is a comedic first-class example. Ikuto, young man of the modern age and the main character finds himself on an island stuck -culturally, at any rate- in the late 19th century. Normal enough at first but before long he's rationalizing away the more... unconventional aspects of his new home, like magic, talking animals, youkai, etc.
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* ''[[A Hard Day's Night]]''. Most of it is realistic enough that viewers have mistaken it for a real [[Documentary]]; but there are a couple of segments which just cannot happen in even [[The Beatles]]' real life, and (this being a comedy) there isn't even a [[Hand Wave]] for why they happen.
* Nearly every film the Coen brothers make has at least some [[Magic Realism|Magic Realist]] elements, with ''[[O Brother, Where Art Thou?]]'', ''[[The Hudsucker Proxy]]'', and ''[[Barton Fink]]'' being the most obvious examples.
* The [[Film of the Book]] of ''[[Being There]]'' diverges from its source novel in this manner. Hal Ashby, the director, came up with {{spoiler|a different ending than the one scripted}} as a salute to how believable the actors were - since the audience would already accept Chance the Gardener becoming one of the most important men in the world in a matter of days simply through misunderstandings, then they would also accept {{spoiler|the final shot's revelation that he can literally [[
* ''[[Groundhog Day]]'': [[Bill Murray]] gets stuck in a [[Groundhog Day Loop|weird time loop]], for which no explanation is ever offered.
** The original script had an ex-girlfriend curse him using a spell she found in a book.
** A possible example as [[Bill Murray]] often questions why it's happening and nobody believes him when he tells them.
* ''[[L.A. Story]]'', written by Steve Martin, applies many of the tropes of Magical Realism. What else can you call a story where a [[wikipedia:Variable message sign|variable-message sign]] on the highway offers a character advice on his love life?
* ''[[Liar Liar]]'': [[Be Careful What You Wish For]] forces [[Jim Carrey]] to tell the truth. [[Hilarity Ensues]].
* '' [[Pan's Labyrinth]]'' At first sight it might seem as a fairy tale, albeit not a happy one, once you take into account {{spoiler|that Orfelia might have just made everything up}} and add to the mix a mandragora... which is ignored by everyone since they are all too busy dealing with this little thing called the Spanish Civil War ... [[Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane|then it becomes less clear whether it's a straightforward fairy tale]].
** [[Word of God|Guillermo del Toro]] says that all the magical stuff actually happened.
* ''[[Stranger Than Fiction]]''. The movie is more or less like this, Harold is struggling with life, and the only magical thing is that he seems to be the main character of a book. The book in question also seems to have [[Magic Realism]] elements to it, as his watch becomes sentient for a second.
* The 1998 theatrical film based on the [[Cirque Du Soleil]] show ''[[Alegria]]''. It's obvious the world the characters exist in is a little more colorful and eccentric than ours, but possible magic comes in at the end when {{spoiler|the manager/ringmaster encounters and converses with his own stage character}}.
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* Michael Bishop's ''Brittle Innings'' is a coming-of-age story about a mute teenager who plays on a minor-league baseball team in the Deep South during World War II, when all the 'real' ball players are fighting the war. It's almost an incidental detail that the team's slugging first baseman is {{spoiler|Frankenstein}}.
* In ''[[The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To]]'', nobody knows why Eric can't sleep and doesn't have to (and very few people are even aware that's the case): most of the narrative attention is given to his and Darren's life as geeky high schoolers {{spoiler|until [[The Men in Black]] find out}}.
** Interestingly, there may actually be an explanation for it. [http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Sleep/medical-mystery-boy-sleep/story?id=4828035#.TzR7ulyJfNI Rhett Lamb] almost never slept, and [http://thexodirectory.com/2008/03/hai-ngoc-sleepless-man-for-more-than-30/ Hai Ngoc] hasn't slept in thirty years. It looks like this can be caused by odd, rare medical conditions, though it's certainly fantastic.
* Karen Tei Yamashita's ''Tropic of Orange'' proudly parades its magic realism and Gabriel García Márquez influence. Seven main characters in modern-day Los Angeles and Mexico's lives interweave in strange and not-very-satisfying ways when an orange causes a gigantic traffic accident, then firestorm on a major freeway. Meanwhile, another orange that happened to grow on the Tropic of Cancer (which was fertilized somehow by the woman who works on the property) causes the geography to shift completely when... well, it still doesn't make much sense, except there were lots of [[Author Tract|Author Tracts.]]
** Similarly, her novel ''Through the Arc of the Rainforest''. The plot revolves around a massive field of [[Green Rocks|plastic with seemingly magical properties]] being uncovered in the middle of [[The Amazon]], and the manner in which the main characters (including an American businessman with three arms, a Japanese railway conductor with a little ball floating in front of his face, and a Brazilian radio evangelist who thinks that the plastic is holy) interact with it.
* In ''[[Skellig]]'', ''a la'' the page quote, the eponymous character is a man with wings who might be an angel and who lives in the young protagonist's garage.
* Jonathan Carroll's novels, especially his earlier work.
* Zenia from Margaret Atwood's ''The Robber Bride'' has no provable supernatural abilities, but with her palpable aura of evil she reminds one of a fairy tale witch.
* Pretty much the entire output of both Kelley Link and her husband Gavin J. Grant. In almost all of the stories the two have written, really weird stuff happens (ghosts, zombie apocalypse, a handbag that holds an entire town, a stream-of-consciousness television show that appears on random stations at random times) but no one reacts as if it was at all strange.
* Anything written by Alice Hoffman. A good example is ''[[Practical Magic]]''.
* Sarah Addison Allen's books.
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* The ghosts that visit Tommy in ''[[Rescue Me]]'' may or may not be real.
* ''[[Night Court]]'' was packed with examples of this trope.
* ''[[Alias (TV series)|Alias]]'' does this with the Rambaldi artifacts with which Arvin Sloan has an obsession. They do things that are on the border of magic and technology, and are never fully explained. In the series finale, {{spoiler|the Rambaldi artifacts become clearly magical, as they preserve Sloan alive forever, trapped underground.}} J.J. Abrams, y'all.
* ''[[The Unusuals]]'' is an otherwise completely normal (if quirky) cop show that has a character who receives occasional prophetic messages from fortune cookies and, in the pilot, is the recipient of a ''[[Pulp Fiction]]''-style miracle. And then there's the episode "42," which seems to indicate that a psychic they question can really see the future.
* While ''[[The Suite Life of Zack and Cody]]'' was firmly based in reality, ''On Deck'' and [[The Movie]] started introducing more fantastical elements. Possibly to make it fit better in the same universe as the less realistic ''[[Wizards of Waverly Place]]''.
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* ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]''. Real world setting, real guns, walking robots, magical floating psychics, autotrophic snipers, bee men, ghosts, and a bisexual, flamenco-dancing vampire. The original title featured a collection of [[Charles Atlas Superpower]] bosses, the [[Ensemble Darkhorse]] of which was a floating, fourth-wall breaking psychic. Later games would expand upon this with a steady increase of [[Magic Realism]]. ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 4'' dabbled with [[Doing in the Wizard]], but official [[Word of God]] is that Vamp was still immortal in ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 2'' and Ocelot {{spoiler|''was'' possessed, but had the arm removed and started faking possession instead}}.
* ''[[No More Heroes]]'' seems to take place in a fairly dull Californian city. Except for the fact that the protagonist purchases a functioning lightsaber on eBay and proceeds to off progressively more bizarre assassins. At one point {{spoiler|his mentor dies, but afterward the mentor's ghost continues his job working at the gym.}} No one seems to find any of this at all odd.
** Of course, this is from the same mind that brought us ''[[
* In the ''[[Ace Attorney]]'' series, spirit channeling exists but is totally incidental to most cases and really just a way for Phoenix to get help from his [[The Obi-Wan|dead mentor]]. {{spoiler|Except in the cases where spirit channeling was directly involved with the murder.}}
** And then, there's Apollo and Trucy, who both have superhuman perception, which basically makes them living Lie-Detectors.
*** It's acually explained in the game that it's not a supernatrual power but {{spoiler|rather a biological gene passed down through the Magnifi family line}}. This is based on an acual biological gene that gives people more then average twitch and nervous detection, it exists, just look it up.
*** Though they may have the gene that permits advanced perception, Apollo still has a bracelet that reacts when it senses that someone is feeling tense.
* A recurring element in the ''[[Sly Cooper]]'' series. Mojo and ghosts exist, and raising the dead nets you a life sentence in prison.
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* The game of ''[[The Darkness]]'' is about a mafia hitman who just so happens to become possessed by a millenia-old demon that grants him superpowers. The main focus of the plot is still his quest for vengeance against the entirely mortal don who betrayed him.
* ''[[Silent Hill: Shattered Memories]]'' follows an ordinary man journeying through a realistic town... which periodically turns to ice and spawns hideous monsters. Exactly what is causing these things to happen is never fully explained (merely implied, and ambiguously so at that).
** Heck, the [[Silent Hill]] series as a whole. There are various explanations, but they're ambiguous, or contradictory, or there are elements in place suggesting that things aren't quite as they seem.
*** It's not [[Magic Realism]] at all. Regarding Shattered Memories, {{spoiler|None of it happened. It's a metaphor. Cheryl, the protagonist's daughter, is sitting on the couch in the psychiatrist's office. The real protagonist, Harry Mason, died in a car accident some time ago. The player's actions follow a symbolic - and absolutely not literal - [[Journey to the Center of the Mind]] of the conflict in Cheryl. The game uses the player's actions during that journey to try to guess the ''player's'' nature, and then tries to tailor that journey to pull a [[Player Punch]]. Whether it succeeds is up to each player.}} Also, the town and setting is clearly not realistic. The town's residents can be counted on one's fingers, despite some pretty big apartment buildings. There's quite a bit of [[Chaos Architecture]] in Shattered Memories (and the rest of the series). As for the others, Silent Hill I and [[Silent Hill Homecoming]] both have endings which could allow the events to have been fictional or a [[Dying Dream]], but if Silent Hill I is a dying dream, then Silent Hill III could not happen. Silent Hill II's, III's, IV's, and Origin's endings all accept that the events in question ''did'' happen, and only the final outcomes could be in doubt (joke endings excluded). They also lack the restraint that [[Magic Realism]] requires. Blood splattered trips to a hellish alternate reality populated by things which would make Giger wet himself are ''not'' a feature of [[Magical Realism]].
* ''[[Pathologic]]''. The setting is realistic, the characters are very human, one of the playable characters has [[Lovecraftian Superpower|Lovecraftian Super Powers]]. There are a bunch of medicine men wrapped head to toe in bandages who sell herbs that grow from blood. There are loads of children walking around without parents, and occasionally wearing the dead heads of dogs as masks. [[Nightmare Fuel|Disease clouds attack you. They come in the form of horrendous, symbolic abominations]]. We haven't even discussed the rather meta theater themes...
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* ''[[Penny Arcade]]'' is a [[Two Gamers on a Couch]] comic set in what is nominally the real world, although sometimes Jesus Christ comes over to play ''[[Mario Kart]].''
* In ''[[The Devil's Panties]]'', which is mostly slice-of-life, the main character occasionally chats with both Jesus and the devil, her shoulder angel and devil seem to have lives of their own and one of her roommates used to keep [[Lord of the Rings|Legolas]] naked and locked in a closet.
* ''[[Think Before You Think]]'' happens in a normal world, but the main character can read minds, and he is the only one, as far as we know.
== Western Animation ==
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