Dear Insane Children,
I thought he was dead! You did too! We all saw Alice push him under that train…
But don’t worry! We will NOT be bringing Bumby back to life in Alice: Asylum. I promise he’s dead and will remain so. Except… The Dollmaker. He’s going to make an appearance. Yikes.
This will happen when Alice explores the memories stored in the Memory Mines (temporary name for this location). She will discover a number of critical memory/scenes including…
A) Scene: Early Life. Home, family, and fire-related. The Fire. Alice’s family. Burning toys and beds. Children playing and laughing. Memorable moments from early childhood. Scenes with characters who once visited and left an impression – Bumby and Radcliffe take center stage. Alice overhears conversation critical to her quest.
B) Scene: The hospital. Flashes of the night Alice was taken to the hospital. Scale is distorted to create a sense of disorientation, smallness, and distance. Giant beds, warped hospital rooms, giant scalpels, her family (relatives) tiny and far away (in the sky looking down on her among lots of other giant faces), massive pill bottles. Gauze for clouds. Trolleys. Dead bodies under covers. What did Alice fear most about this period, these scenes? The lack of family? Not knowing where she was? Feeling lost and alone? Feeling small. Again, Bumby and Radcliffe take center stage, saying, “insanity is the best option.” Alice overhears conversation critical to her quest.
C) Scene: The Asylum. Long, dark corridors of prison-like doors. Straight jackets. Screaming. Padded rooms. Strange “mental health” contraptions. More assortments of “tools” and nurses, doctors, inmates, etc. Bumby and Radcliffe take center stage. Alice overhears conversation critical to her quest.
D) Scene: London/HFMC related. Insane Children, broken children, broken toys, therapy (infernal train, forgetting, seeing something strange happening with other children in the home).
E) Scene: Bumby related. Dollmaker stuff, scissors, thread, needles, tools of his trade. Combined with brains, open skulls, other concepts related to brainwashing and prepping these children for his plans. All of this takes place inside an environment of dark woods, open black spaces, and conveyor belts of children’s dolls. (See the dark dollmaker illustrations from AMR).
F) Scene: London and the Train Station. Elements from the London street; butchers, police, thieves, filth, and depravity in the East End. Alice pushing Bumby under the train.
The images in this post are focused entirely on the recollection of The Dollmaker encounters.
The idea being that these powerful negative memories have been saved from recycling by Shadow Alice.
She visits these painful scenes over and over – feeding off the negative emotions they generate.
Another amazing batch of illustrations from Adam!
Since these are “just” memories… should Alice be able to destroy them? That might be a bit of fun – we could construct these out of some flimsy-magical material and allow Alice to bash her way through these areas… ensuring that the dark energy they contain can never be used again. Hmmm.
Let us know in the comments below what you think of Alice revisiting these dark scenes.
From The Shadows,
-American