Pjotr Sapegin's "Madama Butterfly"

      Sapegin's rendition of Madama Butterfly did a great job of condensing the whole opera into a ten-minute, dialogue-less, animation. I found the beginning of the animation very peculiar, and I feel like many people watching it may have overlooked the first scene, as I did the first time I watched it. In the first scene, the woman appears to be asleep in a dark room, and this caused me to wonder if Sapegin intended his rendition to actually have been a figment of a crazy woman's imagination. Even more peculiar, the next scene involves a vivid sex scene between Madama Butterfly and the captain. At first I was confused by this scene but then realized it was there to show the drastic contrast between love and lust; seen when the captain quite literally runs away from her as soon as he is done. Madama Butterfly's appearance progressively gets worse and worse eventually she looks like she is wearing rags, but when the captain comes back he appears to have not changed at all. Finally, the captain's wife his a literal barbie doll and their car is full of kids of all races, which led me to wonder how many woman around the world has this captain done the same thing to? and why is his barbie doll wife alright with it?

      What I truly found amazing about Sapegin's animation was his use of symbolism, music, and lighting to replace the need for a dialogue. The music playing during the opening intimate scene was full of passion and the lighting was very bright; afterwards, the music saddens and the scene becomes dark with clouds and storms. Furthermore, while Madama Butterfly is pregnant Sapegin gives life to the music, again quite literally, when the record player comes alive and looks at the woman pregnant stomach. Then when the child is born, the umbilical chord anchors her to her mother as the wind tries to blow her away; this symbolizes the nature of all mother-daughter relationships. The next scene shows how the daughter is actually playing and running around, while the umbilical chord is keeping her mother from flying away. The expression on Madama's face during this scene was not one of happiness or even gratefulness for what her daughter is doing, but instead her face looks quite empty as if her daughter is keeping her from flying away like a butterfly. This led me to find the overall symbolism of this animation, in the beginning a butterfly lands on Madama Butterfly's head, and she is full of beauty. Throughout the animation, Madama's appearance degrades until the captain "cuts the  chord" between her and her daughter; as a result, Madama sheds her skin and cuts herself into pieces that are blown away and become a butterfly. I believe most people saw this scene as a sad scene, but i realized that just as a caterpillar must break free of its cocoon, Madama was finally free of the last thing holding her to her past: her daughter. Then she shed herself of her old skin to become a beautiful butterfly, like she was prior to meeting the captain.

      I found this story quite amusing because it very vaguely reminded me of an event that happened to not only me, but to most of my friends as well. After my first deployment, I was afforded the opportunity to go to this thing called Fleet Week, in New York city. We all boarded an aircraft carrier in Virginia and floated past the Statue of Liberty and into a dock in the heart of the city. Throughout the course of the week we were there, almost all of my friends had found girlfriends, including myself. It was funny to see the captain give his hat to Madama Butterfly because we all would give our hats to our girls, in-fact it was tradition if a girl wears your hat she has to kiss you. While I didn't get my "fleet-week-fling" pregnant, we did plan on continuing a relationship, but sure enough at the end of the week we were forced to board the ship and we left. Shortly after I volunteered for my next deployment, and over the course of the next two deployments me and the girl I had met eventually grew apart. While we talked about how there is never a happy ending in life, which this story is a testament to, some of my friends eventually went on to marry the girls they had met during this Fleet Week. In a random side fact, a couple years later my photo was used as the cover of a Huffington post article.

In the photos above you can see the girl I met, Sofia, wearing my cover- and that photo is what really reminded me of Madama Butterfly as she wore the captain's hat.