The stranger within is a wonderful lyrical exploration of how identity, how civilization and its shaping of ourselves and our groups through the ordering of potential, can lead us to unforeseen heights while possibly dragging us into the darkest of places. The vision of reason, purity and hierarchy is a type of shining, that bright spark, that sharp point, the aha moments which stand out in the darkness. This place, this small epiphany is where reality seems to jump up from 2 dimensions into a 3rd higher one. The spark of order brings communities into a common vision and weaves us into overarching patterns of images and narratives, participation and play. If we are not attentive, we might not realize that the knowledge of the good and of purpose, the vision of light, also comes with a knowledge of evil and the possible negative shadows projected as a residue of identity and action. All identity must produce both an inside and an outside. All creative action leaves a dark remainder that does not fit. The same process by which we act together in groups, accomplishing civilizational wonders, is the one by which we marginalize, cast out and judge the outside. In the same way, the discovery of our own agency, that capacity to act in the world, to organize and focus ourselves, will awaken bad habits, dark possibilities and obsessions by which we can be destroyed, and by which we can destroy others. This process of identity and marginalisation scales at all levels, from the individual to groups to large nations. This is inevitable. It is so inevitable that the attempt to short circuit such a basic pattern will often produce even more radical versions of itself. So when the marginalized attempt to eliminate marginalization, they will unknowingly find themselves in the tyrantʼs shoes.

Through beautiful music, coupled with the freedom and lyricism of the animation, we enter an experience of the different aspects of this identity- forming pattern, its opportunities and dangers.

The music and the animation guide us into this cycle through the eyes of the main character, who ignoring and not taking responsibility for the dark sides of his being and of society, is finally swallowed by them. From a child, exploring, dreaming and watching in wonder at his paper aeroplane flying above, he becomes a monster capable of destroying all he cares about and enforcing a tyranny on the world. Luckily, we follow the main character through these dark waters over to the other side of the deep. In the end, we discover hope in his capacity to shed tears and repent of his evil, hopefully short-circuiting, in that humble moment, the pattern of tyrannical action.

Jonathan Pageau, The Symbolic World