Factorium
Factorium is directly characterized as “the world’s biggest food company.” This description is immediately altered to dispense with the fundamental truth of the situation: they are “the only food company.” This is the dream of every capitalist enterprise: the ultimate monopoly producing not just goods with no competition, but necessities with no competition. Factorium symbolizes capitalist evil at its most elemental.
Spectrum Hall
The official name is Spectrum Hall Academy for Challenging Children. That is not intended to mean that it is a place for challenging kids, but rather a prison-like institution to send kids who have been deemed a challenge. It is a school for “troubled youths” and its very name hints of its symbol as the institutional inability of society—still—to figure out how to deal with kids who can’t be easily made to conform to psychological and intellectual expectations.
The Plague
A plague called Red Eye is wiping out the animal population as well as crops. This provides the means for Factorium to gain its wicked monopoly. The plague acts as a sharply defined symbol of all various environmental ravages created by modern man which is leading the world toward a similar mass extinction.
The Animals
A stag, a cockroach, pigeons and various other assorted animals all possess a personified sentience and advanced communication skills which help to facilitate the protagonist on his journey. The animals as a collective unit are symbols of the urgency to start listening to what wildlife and nature is trying to inform us about man’s impact on the environment.
Adults
With the very precious exception of the parental figures of the protagonists, there is no positive adult role model in this story. Actually, it goes beyond that: the adult humans are a sinister and malevolent lot that ranges from the authoritarian figures at Spectrum Hall to the “cullers” working in terrible league with the Factorium. Taken together as a unit, this overall quite negative portrayal of the older generation becomes a motif that symbolizes the bad decisions made since the dawn of the Industrial Age.
