The Tale of the Jellyfish Girl

The project received a "Consider" rating from Selling Your Screenplay.

This is a story about self-love, self-acceptance, founded families, and trying to find happiness through difficult times. Our protagonist, Elsa Ludgate, is a girl who has forced herself to be isolated as she has a very strange condition that causes her to create electricity with her skin whenever she feels anxious or excited. Imagine living with that. Imagine that every time you are happy or uneasy about something, your body becomes dangerous to those around you as you can electrocute them. It would be an awful thing, wouldn’t it? You probably couldn’t live with someone else because you would always be afraid of causing them harm, or you would end up blocking yourself from feeling emotions, which would also be a terrible experience because we can’t go through life ignoring our feelings and desires, right? That’s what Elsa goes through. She has dealt with countless uncomfortable, dangerous incidents all of her life and she has come to this point where she doesn’t want to cause problems to anyone. She has left home to not get her family into trouble and forces herself not to feel love, happiness, or fear… and she has succeeded for a while, but, ultimately, we can’t always ignore our feelings without blowing up eventually. In her case, this comes as a rather literal thing as her condition causes her to blow up a street lamp, which then causes her to become a subject of public attention and, to make things even worse, to lose any control over her condition.

This leaves Elsa with two options. One, to run away and hide again… or two, to accept a strange proposal from a circus owner to join their act and use her condition to create amazement among people rather than fear. Now, while this second option might sound appealing, for Elsa it means confronting her greatest fear: to be in the public eye. To show people her strangeness. But, at the same time, it could mean finding the place and family she has always been looking for. Ultimately, she chooses the second option, and so, her adventure begins. A sweet, crazy adventure that will also become what the circus crew might need to help them through the hard times they are facing. After all, the story is set in 1935 France… and the clouds of World War II are beginning to appear on the horizon, causing them concern about their future.

So, I think that all of these subjects are things a lot of people can relate to. To be honest, I came up with the whole idea as some sort of “love letter” to a friend who used to feel unsure about herself and out of place… but I’d lie if I said that I haven’t felt myself like Elsa at some point. Many times, we all feel unsure about ourselves or we feel like we don’t belong… and we also get to feel that the world is a scary place and we don’t know what can we do about it. How do we go through dark times? How do we face things that are beyond our control? In this time and age, the future certainly can feel that way. We can try making the world a better place… but there is just as much as one can do, and the way things are going, we might feel is not enough. So, maybe all we can do to not feel such despair is to go through those trying times in the company of those we love. Those who accept us.

Therefore, I think this is a relevant project for this time and age. It certainly is the kind of comforting piece we might need to feel some hope… and to accept ourselves a little more, as well.