Well you found exactly the site: the blue/gray dragon on the lower right is a more completely realized being, with an arm that stretches along the bottom of the frame, The 'pearl of wisdom' is the small, roundish form just beyond its 'claws.' This one even bears the little cloud tendrils as they are usually shown in oriental art.
The way the 'golden' dragon is shown, mostly head, was in fact the first clue to me to Ennis's personality - the Earl incident was so severe that it drove Ennis to live his life mostly in his head, which is a common process following exactly the way severely traumatized people behave 'after.'
The first year of the UBbF, I was not on line, able only to read. It was incredibly frustrating, and terribly enlightening, and I accepted things proposed by other members quite literally: Mr. Gyllenhall and others familiar with Mr. Lee's work stated that he was one of the most intensely detailed directors they'd ever come across, that he was aware of every detail in every frame. I took that ball and ran with it: if everything means something, everything is purposeful, so I started looking for things that were not immediately attention-getting. There are other things in the film which are there, plain as day when you know where to look, but in order for them to be significant, the viewer has to be ready to accept that Mr. Lee is in fact a filmmaker who gets incredible mileage out of his pictures as well as the dialogue, settings and the skills of his collaborators. There are other images which have gotten short shrift from some of the people I admire most in this Forum. I don't understand why some people don't seem to get it that films are made of pictures, and some of these pictures really offer clues the written word cannot - try imagining the outcry if the 'clouds as dragons' scene was actually written into the script! I suspect that there would the blood spouting out of 'purist' noses...
It could be that the film is just so perfectly made that an explanation can be found where none was intended, and that argument might be acceptable if we hadn't be assured so strongly that the director is a fanatically detailed creator. More to come if you find this interesting enough...
