The Enchanted Forest

Let us imagine an enchanted forest of fables, where plants, trees, and animals can speak, feel, and sing; a remote and lush magical forest where imagination can roam free. Galician literature since Romanticism has imagined and re-imagined this fantastic magical forest: from Rosalía de Castro and Eduardo Pondal in the nineteenth-century Rexurdimento Galician revival to Álvaro Cunqueiro and Wenceslao Fernández Flórez in the post-Civil War period to Manuel Rivas and Miguelanxo Prado in our day: all have inhabited this forest of the poetic imagination, redoubt of pan-Celtic romanticism or peripheral magical realism, that identifies this natural enchanted forest precisely with Galicia.

In this magical and timeless fable, one good day the peace and quiet of the forest is altered with the appearance of a new kind of tree, a dry tall tree with long thin branches and no leaves, which is soon followed by many others of the same kind. These new trees could transmit voices very far from the woods and communicate with other faraway lands. This audio/visual image representing the arrival of the first telephone post to the forest symbolizes the late arrival of modernity to Galicia, with new technologies and means of communication, a complex reality reflecting its inescapable transformation by the forces of modernity and the possibilities of progress and improved living conditions. But this image also symbolizes the anxieties produced about the destruction of its natural habitat and its cultural traditions, including the most basic form of communication, language, and the uncertainties about the future of the forest that is Galicia in this new historical era.

This narrative is the main story line of the Galician animation feature El bosque animado (The Living Forest, 2001), widely considered as the beginning of the animation cinema boom in Galicia. As a self-reflexive metaphor, it seems to me a suggestive starting point from where to speak about the animated digital forest that has been growing in Galicia in the last decades. Immersed in an environment of global economic and cultural trends and new technological developments, this remote forest away from the center aims to embrace modernity while keeping its roots firmly planted on Galician soil.