If one is so lucky, they will be granted all eight stages of life. They will weave through the grandeur of age collecting landmarks of maturity and, even often, losing them simultaneously. They will ferment, find themselves, find each other, learn to love, learn to care, and then, when nothing more could be left to become or modify, they will lay their heads in complete finality. All eight stages, beginning from one’s very birth, according to psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, and portrayed in John Hubley’s animated film Everybody Rides the Carousel (1976), form the collective carnival ride one must endure in the course of the often cruel, often splendid psychosocial human development.
An entire life cycle is told over 72 minutes in Everybody Rides the Carousel; it teaches its audience the theory in watercolour animation, painting onto the screen a world made out of washed-out bright colour and smudged edges. It is messy, forgiving, insecure. It is the unrelenting murkiness to one’s orbit, slugging through unshaped desires and thick fogs of variables.
Several different muddy characters play out the individual stages during the film, divided by segments introducing the proceeding stage and their respective key principles. It is instructive in that way, setting the tone for a surrealist classroom of funhouse lecturers. The carnival barker a scholar.
Characters perform dialogue seemingly unscripted, mumbling through lines in the film still capable, if not more accurately, staging conflict and negotiation of newly developed, difficult to manage, milestones. Little animals dance around animating the conditions. A green rabbit is shame; autonomy a roaring lion. They jolt and relent in rhythm to the horns of Dizzy Gillespie. We are creatures of perpetual friction, we learn this way. First we trust, then we mistrust. Next, we shapeshift identity, but lack a coherent placement.
In stage 6, the characters, and I suppose we too, welcome friction with open arms, learning and navigating intimacy. Meryl Streep, in her first film role, voices a young woman, and Charles Levin as a young man delicately together portray how just-barely formed adults carry each others’ fragility and flexibility. In a rowboat, they take turns morphing into older and younger bodies, shrinking and contracting as they enact and require care. Indeed, we alternate roles in intimacy, regressing and nurturing through our profound desire to love and be loved.
The film ends the way, of course, life may: in loneliness or the embrace of a life partner for the last waltz. It is empty or it is fulfilling or it is patient—there are no wrong ways this may come. But in splotches of pigment in Everybody Rides the Carousel, one is a voyeur to their own fate, discovering how and who they may become in the circus of transformation.