Recently, a manuscript was uncovered by Art Historians probing the depths of an image by M.C. Escher. Themanuscript, whose author is unknown, is reprinted in its entirety below.

Surrealism in Minoto: A Scholarly Treatise on the Influence of Surrealism on Minoto (or the other way around), Using Monkey and Secret Army 5 as a Model.

Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur.
-Wikipedia


“Get Uncle Combover out of the ground by setting his hair on fire with the fire fairy”
- kitkatfox, The Walkthrough

beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella
- Isidore Ducasse

Monkey and Secret Army 5 opens with the statement, “If the transmitter is stopped, the crab will regain consciousness”, followed by a scene featuring a shark swimming in a small pool flanked by a Medal Machine containing a miniature Air Balloon and an Artiste Elephant bearing a striking resemblance to Man Ray (one of thepioneers of Surrealism). One also must not neglect the overt reference to Salvador Dali’s Elephants Click here for an image

The use of the Shark imagery is not new to Surrealism. In 1938, Marcel Duchamps created an exhibit which opened with “”Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi (an old taxi rigged to produce a steady drizzle of water down the inside of thewindows, and a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back)”
- Wikipedia

In the third scene of Monkey and Secret Army 5, we unlock a box containing a fox dressed as a trainer who loves animals, and who proceeds to free the shark from it’s small pool. This shark goes on to perform several tasks that can only be described as Surreal. For example, use the shark on the log to get a round wooden piece
and Save the poor turtle from the house (saw him free with the shark)
- kitkatfox, The Walkthrough

The use of Surrealism in Minoto is not limited to plot, but extends to the way items are described, such as “Fairy of Fire: Fairy of reviving fire,” “Key: It is key,” and “Yellow Key: Key colored to yellow,” which describes the result of a Surrealistic transformation in which a key is used once, then painted yellow and used in an entirely different lock.
And who can forget the scene, so eloquently described by kitkatfox (above) in which Uncle Combover is removed from the ground by the use of fire and then described as “Uncle: It relaxed in the soil”?

(To be continued below)

zoz 12/6/10 2:33 PM

Lost Manuscript: Continued

These and many other descriptions remind one inevitably of the Rene Magritte paining, “C’est ne pas une pipe.” In which a painting of a pipe is captioned (translated from the French) “This is not a pipe.” Click here for an image

A particularly disturbing scene is the one in which Uncle Combover is placed on the gullotine, only to have “A little long hair” sliced off. The infamous Surrealist movie “Un chien andalou” (Andalusian Dog) by Luis Brunel andSalvador Dali opens with just such a scene. In the film, a knife is positioned in front of a living woman’s eye and the scene is cut jarringly to a shot of the knife slicing open an eye, which happens to be that of a dead cow. The impact of placing Uncle Combover on a guillotine operated by a very dark Satan is surely no less traumatic.

In yet another scene that could have been conjured by Dali or Max Ernst, the “little long hair” is painted red by the ElephantArtiste so it can be used as a wire to short out the transmitter. All of these non sequiturs ultimately lead to a scene where Girl Monkey, still sipping her refreshing beverage, is released by the Crab as Boy Monkey enters the scene in a Superman outfit.

The following conversation then takes place:
Girl monkey [Where had you gone?.]

Boy monkey [I was eating the banana. ]

Boy monkey [Why was it happy?]

Boy monkey [Are you a true culprit?]

Girl monkey [ ,,,,,,,,,,!!!! ]
Finally, the Girl monkey becomes silent, and we are left to wonder, “Who is the real culprit?”


Like Minoto, Surrealism embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. Later, Salvador Dalí explained it as: "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."

There is only one difference between Minoto games and all others. The others are not Minoto.

The manuscript ends here.