Trans tarot scholar Rachel Pollack writes of The Fool trump card: “Imagine yourself entering a strange landscape. A world of magicians, of people hanging upside down, and of dancers in the bright air. You can enter through a leap from a height, through a dark cave, a labyrinth, or even by climbing down a rabbit hole…Whichever way you choose, you are a fool to do it.”[1]

NiGHTS into Dreams is a 1996 video game developed by the 26 members of Sega’s Sonic Team studio. Released for the Sega Saturn platform, it plays out as an acrobatic action game where you control a pair of children who overcome their daytime anxieties by finding strength in their dreams. Specifically, each night of the game they fall into a world called Nightopia. There, they dissolve into the mysterious flying jester named NiGHTS and fly through dreamscapes to recover their spiritual energies—the Ideya—by soaring through obstacle courses of rings, treasures, and hostile creatures within a time limit. For the player, the joy of NiGHTS is a growing sense of mastery as one learns to navigate each stage with greater proficiency, chaining together dashes, circular swoops, and aerial dance motions to achieve high scores. Eventually, the children, as NiGHTS and as themselves, confront the archetypal patriarch Wizeman and bring peace back to the world of dreams while banishing their fear of failure.

Explicitly inspired by dreams and dream interpretation, NiGHTS into Dreams draws on Jungian archetype theory to imbue its protagonist and the rogues’ gallery with a purportedly universal significance. Producer Yuji Naka describes the team’s sense of duty “to give dreams to children all over the world,” and character designer Naoto Oshima mentions their desire to give the dream figure a “‘sacred’ image,” who “would be ready to greet the 21st century.” Director Iizuka brings us closer to our central concern when he writes, “There’s another ‘you’ inside yourself that you may have forgotten or buried. You can go on adventures with this dream persona, and through them, you can reconstruct your own self-image.”[2] NiGHTS—typically given “it/its” pronouns in the English game manual— is the angelic trickster, the “dancer in the bright air” as Pollack would put it, dissolving the children’s bodies and their assumptions about their capabilities. Receptive to the dreams of all children—I often saw NiGHTS appear in my own dreams as a young teenager—this figure of transformation and initiation carries a potent transsexualizing power.

Before I substantiate that claim, I want to revise my description of NiGHTS’ gameplay as a means of opening the discussion of its animation per se. You see, although the main hook of the game is the player’s use of memorization, reflexes, and precise inputs to chain deterministic actions and achieve high scores, this is also almost completely optional. Simply clearing a level only requires the player to collect twenty chips and deposit them in a goal. Whatever remaining time the player has in that part of the level is their own to use. The score-focused player will continue chaining actions and going as quickly as possible, but it is also possible to play with the Nightopian denizens of the world. You can find their eggs hidden here and there, hatch and breed them, look for secret passages, or just do nothing and enjoy flying freely before moving on to the next stage. NiGHTS’ animation, while suited to the strict gameplay tasks one must complete, also includes a huge number of moves that usually do nothing at all. Tumbles, somersaults, cartwheels, and spins can be activated with the trigger buttons, showing off the team’s lavish animation work. NiGHTS is a character of excess and feel, animated far beyond the requirements of the basic gameplay systems.

More importantly, the lands and waters of Nightopia work a kind of magic on NiGHTS as well. In underwater segments, NiGHTS sprouts a dolphin tail. In the Soft Museum level, NiGHTS bounces off of warping platforms and becomes round and bouncy like a ball. Some enemies can shrink NiGHTS, which demonstrates the playful nature of scale and the instability of NiGHTS into Dreams’ world. The aforementioned Soft Museum level is the best example of this. Whenever NiGHTS approaches the ground, which is both above and below NiGHTS, the polygonal framework of the level warps and shifts. Walls bend like rubber and snap back into place. Rather than rendering (literally in this case) a world of rigid boundaries to navigate, Sonic Teams’ staff succeeds in making the entire frame animate. No player action goes unrequited. Similar to the two children who inhabit NiGHTS in the dream world, the player is, oneself, enraptured by NiGHTS and encouraged to explore the boundaries of its powers within an enlivened landscape.

Though grounded in the gender-polarized and cissexual precepts of Jungian archetypal myth, the game’s animation opens up its trans possibilities. Language plays very little role in NiGHTS beyond the lyrics of its cheesy pop credits song and some fragments of unintelligible speech from one boss. Its moment-to-moment actions are free of commentary, playing out in pantomime even in its pre-rendered CGI story cutscenes. Gesture, then, and the animation itself, serve as NiGHTS’dramatic structure. What I saw as a young adolescent was the boy, Elliott, vanishing into a new spectacular body. His daytime, terrestrial limits ceased to matter through not an encounter with an exotic genderless being but a becoming-thing beyond language and organization. As the bædan collective notes in their second journal, the “real body” that is the material of transsexual desire and revolt is marked by “incomprehensibility” in the world of symbols and names.[3] While I would not claim that a video game could represent this real body either, NiGHTS did, for me, coax that body out of dormancy and lay bare the dismal domestication of the gendering I was undergoing as an ostensible boy-becoming-man. This is a mystery of initiation, aligning with what Pollack said about The Fool as the patron of blind leaps (I read: transsexual transition) and unaccountable choices. Animation, as a trickster’s art and an animacy of deception, at its best invites the spectator or player to doubt oneself, and to trust one’s courage as that doubt deepens and unsettles all symbolic systems and materialist reason. To fly, one must first fall.

As I’ve demonstrated, NiGHTS into Dreams is a landmark work of interactive trans animation. In their attempt to make their protagonist a sacred vessel for all children, Sonic Team created a character capable of attaining a kind of reality unavailable to most fictional beings, making visible our own trans potentials.