“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
―
C.S. Lewis
This is Bibliophile.
I've skipped Bibliophile for two weeks now; in my defense, they really, really take a long time to do. And between Demon's Souls and Magical Diary, I've been way too busy going to Prom and fighting leech demons to bother. But familiarity with what's new in the academic world of books isn't going to create itself, so here we are.
For those new to the blog, the idea behind Bibliophile is that I peruse the new books acquired by a Canadian university, and comment on the ones that appeal to me. It's a tough job, but no one really has to do it. As always, a bold H marks the books that are also in my local university library system. Join me for a glimpse into Vancouver Island University, after the break.
Showing posts with label Disney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disney. Show all posts
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Monday, December 31, 2012
Movie Buff: Big Hair
After a brief sojourn for the holiday proper, Movie Buff is back, with the 2010 Disney Princess Flick, Tangled.
Thoughts, numbered, but in no particular order:
1) I thought the male lead was voiced by Owen Wilson, for a little bit, and thought he was smug and annoying. Then I realized it was Zach Levi of Chuck, and thought he was charming and flamboyant. I am fickle.
2) By taking a story that features a heroine raised by a magically knowledge woman posing as her mother, Disney has combined the evil stepmother with the evil witch. Slow clap.
3) In case you're unfamiliar, the film is essentially the Rapunzel story, with added overtones of defying overprotective parents. Disney takes a bold stance against satellite parenting. Also a stance against literally sucking the youth out of your children.
4) It also added animal sidekicks, because... Disney. If there aren't animals slavishly dedicating themselves to largely oblivious humans, then how we will be able to sell toys based on them?
5) On a related note, I kind of want to see a version of Les Miserables where the part of Javert is played by a horse now.
6) Early in the film, they show Rapunzel's growing dissatisfaction with her tower home via a montage of her doing all her daily activities: cleaning, swinging, ballet, reading, murals, etc. While it's an effective scene, a part of me was actually thinking, "sounds pretty sweet to me."
7) A note to would-be tower prison wardens: if you don't want your captive daughters to yearn for the outdoors, you should probably not include open windows in your tower design.
8) It's surprising how aware I was of gender roles in the film. I've watched a few animated kid flicks recently: How To Train Your Dragon, (obviously, since I did a review on it) Paranorman, and Brave. But even Brave, which was explicitly about a girl's relationship with her mother, didn't quite scream "pay attention to gender roles" like this film did. I think it's because the film isn't just a kid's film that happens to feature a princess as the lead; it's because it is a Disney Princess Film, and as such, it seems to funnel itself into such an interpretation above all else. It's not bad on that score, really--the princess and thief pairing brings to mind Aladdin, but Rapunzel is much more the lead here than Jasmine ever was, and she isn't anyone's prize. At the same time, I think I'd really like to see a Disney movie that featured a girl with other female friends.
9) On the note of gender awareness, it plays kind of weird in retrospect that the male lead, Eugene, voices the narration in the intro and outro. Narratively, I can see the point, in that he won't show up for a while, and it's important that the audience realize he's coming. And he explicitly says this is Rapunzel's story, not his, which is also important. But at the same time, making him the narrator makes him, in a strange way, the author of her story, and that doesn't seem right. And in another film, I may not have noticed it, but here... Disney Princess Film. Gender spotlight.
10) There have been no good songs in a Disney film since they switched from 2-D animation. This is probably not a coincidence.
Conclusion: I liked it better than Brave. Not better than the dragon one. Probably equal to Paranorman, but only because Paranorman had such a great climax.
EDIT: It's been pointed out to me that the movie is actually called "Tangled," not "Twisted." The mix-up is clearly Gregory McGuire's fault, not mine.
Later Days.
Thoughts, numbered, but in no particular order:
1) I thought the male lead was voiced by Owen Wilson, for a little bit, and thought he was smug and annoying. Then I realized it was Zach Levi of Chuck, and thought he was charming and flamboyant. I am fickle.
2) By taking a story that features a heroine raised by a magically knowledge woman posing as her mother, Disney has combined the evil stepmother with the evil witch. Slow clap.
3) In case you're unfamiliar, the film is essentially the Rapunzel story, with added overtones of defying overprotective parents. Disney takes a bold stance against satellite parenting. Also a stance against literally sucking the youth out of your children.
4) It also added animal sidekicks, because... Disney. If there aren't animals slavishly dedicating themselves to largely oblivious humans, then how we will be able to sell toys based on them?
5) On a related note, I kind of want to see a version of Les Miserables where the part of Javert is played by a horse now.
6) Early in the film, they show Rapunzel's growing dissatisfaction with her tower home via a montage of her doing all her daily activities: cleaning, swinging, ballet, reading, murals, etc. While it's an effective scene, a part of me was actually thinking, "sounds pretty sweet to me."
7) A note to would-be tower prison wardens: if you don't want your captive daughters to yearn for the outdoors, you should probably not include open windows in your tower design.
8) It's surprising how aware I was of gender roles in the film. I've watched a few animated kid flicks recently: How To Train Your Dragon, (obviously, since I did a review on it) Paranorman, and Brave. But even Brave, which was explicitly about a girl's relationship with her mother, didn't quite scream "pay attention to gender roles" like this film did. I think it's because the film isn't just a kid's film that happens to feature a princess as the lead; it's because it is a Disney Princess Film, and as such, it seems to funnel itself into such an interpretation above all else. It's not bad on that score, really--the princess and thief pairing brings to mind Aladdin, but Rapunzel is much more the lead here than Jasmine ever was, and she isn't anyone's prize. At the same time, I think I'd really like to see a Disney movie that featured a girl with other female friends.
9) On the note of gender awareness, it plays kind of weird in retrospect that the male lead, Eugene, voices the narration in the intro and outro. Narratively, I can see the point, in that he won't show up for a while, and it's important that the audience realize he's coming. And he explicitly says this is Rapunzel's story, not his, which is also important. But at the same time, making him the narrator makes him, in a strange way, the author of her story, and that doesn't seem right. And in another film, I may not have noticed it, but here... Disney Princess Film. Gender spotlight.
10) There have been no good songs in a Disney film since they switched from 2-D animation. This is probably not a coincidence.
Conclusion: I liked it better than Brave. Not better than the dragon one. Probably equal to Paranorman, but only because Paranorman had such a great climax.
EDIT: It's been pointed out to me that the movie is actually called "Tangled," not "Twisted." The mix-up is clearly Gregory McGuire's fault, not mine.
Later Days.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Friday Quotations: Think Hitchhiker's Guide meets Glinda's Great Book of Records
"The nephews, moreover, hold the key for entry into the adult world, and they make good use of it: the Junior Woodchuck (Boy Scout) Handbook. It is a Golden Treasury of conventional wisdom. It has an answer to every situation, every period, every date, every action, every technical problem. Just follow the instructions on the can, to ge4t out of any difficulty. It represents the accumulation of convention s permitting the child to control the future and trap it, so that it will not vary from the pat, so that all will repeat itself. All courses of action have been pretested and approved by authority of the manual, which is the tribunal of history, the eternal law, sponsored and sanctified by those who will inherit the world. It's all written down there, in that ridig catechism, just put it into practice and carry on reading. even the adversary is possessed of objective and just standards. The Handbook is one of those rare one-hundred-percent-perfect gimmicks in the complex world of Disney: out of forty-five instances in which it is used, it never fails once, beating in infallibility even the almost perfect Mickey Mouse." --Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to read Donald Duck; Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.
Later Days.
Later Days.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Friday Quotations: Like Rickey Rouse or Monald Muck
"Juvenile literature is a father surrogate. The model of paternal authority is at every point immanent, the implicit basis of its structure and very existence. The natural creativity of the child, which no one in his right mind can deny, is channellled through the apparent absence of the father into an adult-authoritarian vision of the real world. Paternalism in absentia is the indispensable vehicle for the defense and invisible control of the ostensibly autonomous childhood model. The comics, like television, in all vertically structured societies, rely upon distance as a means of authoritarian reinforcement." --Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.
Later Days.
Later Days.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Mermaid Meanderings
All right. Once again, I, your eminent blogger, have fallen somewhat behind in regular postings. To make amends, I’m going to embark on a daily blog, until… well, until I get distracted by a pretty ribbon or an interesting smell and lapse once again. But we should have enough fodder to keep things going for a while. I’ve got games I want to write about, some TV shows I want to review, various theoretical meanderings, and a new segment-type to try out. For now, though, I’d like to start “the return” with a three-parter on a gender near and dear to my own heart, the female.
Specifically, I’d like to open with a comparison between two different stories featuring a female protagonist: the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, and Hans Christian Andersen’s original. We’re comparing the two in a graduate course on aesthetics that I’m auditing, but before we discuss them there, I wanted to jot some ideas down here. (And if you to brush up on the original Anderson, it can be found here.) One of the more obvious differences between the original and the movie is that the movie adds a lot of musical numbers. However, the addition works really well with the themes of the original, in which the mermaid’s voice was treated as a commodity—just as in the movie version, she traded “her most valuable possession” to be human. And, at the end of the original story, she is left completely formless, so that all she has left is a disembodied voice. (I’d say “spoiler,” but I already included the link. You had your chance.) The same commodification is in the movie: one of the film’s first scenes is a symphony held in Triton’s honor, where Ariel’s voice is literally presented as a gift for her father. (Her absence from the symphony is symbolically an early break from her patriarchal repression.)
But there are big, big differences, and there are three I’d like to flag:
1) Soul Ownership. In the Andersen original, the nameless little mermaid is actually told she has no soul. In fact, no merperson does. They live three hundred years, and then dissolve into sea foam. The only way a merwoman can get a soul is to marry a human male, and then her husband’s soul sloshes around to fit her as well—in other words, a human male has a big enough soul for two people. And all of this information is very disturbing to a modern audience. What gets washed over, however, is that the movie version has its own disturbing equivalent. Where in the short story, the nameless mermaid discusses eternal salvation with her mother, Ariel is discussing the meaning of a fork with a seagull. The little mermaid’s desire for a soul has been replaced with Ariel’s obsession with collecting human artifacts. Disney has, in effect, replaced spirituality with accumulating a bunch of crappy junk with no real purpose.
A little too on the nose, yes?
2) And They All Lived Happily… Oh Wait, They Didn’t. The other obvious big difference is that the nameless mermaid DOES NOT get Prince Eric. Or any other named Prince. Rather, her time on earth ends, and she dissolves into sea foam. There’s a deus ex machina ending where she’s rescued from oblivion by being turned into a “Sister of the Air,” but the last-second salvation doesn’t alter the fact that “true love’s kiss” might swap some saliva, but it doesn’t turn a mute girl from nowhere into a suitable spouse for a prince. And she doesn’t even lose to the sea witch; she loses to a complete stranger that the prince assumes is the person who saved him from drowning. It’s a reminder how things have changed in our Euro-descended society; in Andersen’s time, you could still make the argument that spiritual salvation was more valuable than physical love, but now, Hollywood’s created a situation where the happy ending means the romantic ending.
The real salt in the wound for the nameless mermaid, I imagine, is when the prince declares “I want you to meet my fiancée! And I know you will love her, because I love her, and you love me!”. That’s cold, man. Even for a prince, that’s cold.
3) Female Shift. Disney’s made a lot of female leads over the years. I bet that, if pressed, you could name a few yourselves: Snow White, Cinderella, Belle, Pocahontas, Mulan… etcetra, so on, ad infinum. Now: name one female friend of any of them. …They don’t exactly roll off the tongue, do they? And Disney’s The Little Mermaid is hardly an exception. As much as it’s a story about a young woman finding her true love, it’s also a father’s story about accepting that his little girl is a young woman—and apparently, in order to tell that story, Disney decided not to tell a large part of the original. In Andersen’s version, the Little Mermaid still had her mother die a long time ago, and still has a father figure, but the father’s role is greatly, greatly reduced. Instead, what we get is a heavy supporting role from her sisters and lots of good advice from her grandmother (who is written out of the movie entirely). Even the seawitch gets a better rap. In the original, she isn’t scheming to cheat the mermaid out of her fair chance, or steal back a kingdom; she takes Ariel’s voice because that’s the way magic works—it always costs the thing most precious to you. Ariel’s sisters comfort her with their presence and song while she’s human, and sacrifice their own dearest possession—their hair—to give her a chance to return to them. And it’s not like their replacements are wonderful role-models for little boys, either: Flounder is a coward, Scuttles is scatterbrained, and Sebastian is fastidious to a fault. Admittedly, each will pitch in when the chips are down, but the message that’s left seems to be is that you can’t count on sisterhood, you can’t count on the boys, it’s up to you to make your dreams come true. I’ll admit, it’s still a better message than “the only options open to a young woman are self-sacrifice and marriage” and “you need a husband to get a soul,” but… it’s still an awfully bleak message to give little girls. (Not to mention it still comes down to “you need a husband.”) In separating itself from the original female bonds, it feels as if Disney really altered a part of the original story for the worse.
And that’s where we’re at. The whole issue got me thinking about another topic that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while: female role models.
Later Days
Specifically, I’d like to open with a comparison between two different stories featuring a female protagonist: the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, and Hans Christian Andersen’s original. We’re comparing the two in a graduate course on aesthetics that I’m auditing, but before we discuss them there, I wanted to jot some ideas down here. (And if you to brush up on the original Anderson, it can be found here.) One of the more obvious differences between the original and the movie is that the movie adds a lot of musical numbers. However, the addition works really well with the themes of the original, in which the mermaid’s voice was treated as a commodity—just as in the movie version, she traded “her most valuable possession” to be human. And, at the end of the original story, she is left completely formless, so that all she has left is a disembodied voice. (I’d say “spoiler,” but I already included the link. You had your chance.) The same commodification is in the movie: one of the film’s first scenes is a symphony held in Triton’s honor, where Ariel’s voice is literally presented as a gift for her father. (Her absence from the symphony is symbolically an early break from her patriarchal repression.)
But there are big, big differences, and there are three I’d like to flag:
1) Soul Ownership. In the Andersen original, the nameless little mermaid is actually told she has no soul. In fact, no merperson does. They live three hundred years, and then dissolve into sea foam. The only way a merwoman can get a soul is to marry a human male, and then her husband’s soul sloshes around to fit her as well—in other words, a human male has a big enough soul for two people. And all of this information is very disturbing to a modern audience. What gets washed over, however, is that the movie version has its own disturbing equivalent. Where in the short story, the nameless mermaid discusses eternal salvation with her mother, Ariel is discussing the meaning of a fork with a seagull. The little mermaid’s desire for a soul has been replaced with Ariel’s obsession with collecting human artifacts. Disney has, in effect, replaced spirituality with accumulating a bunch of crappy junk with no real purpose.
A little too on the nose, yes?
2) And They All Lived Happily… Oh Wait, They Didn’t. The other obvious big difference is that the nameless mermaid DOES NOT get Prince Eric. Or any other named Prince. Rather, her time on earth ends, and she dissolves into sea foam. There’s a deus ex machina ending where she’s rescued from oblivion by being turned into a “Sister of the Air,” but the last-second salvation doesn’t alter the fact that “true love’s kiss” might swap some saliva, but it doesn’t turn a mute girl from nowhere into a suitable spouse for a prince. And she doesn’t even lose to the sea witch; she loses to a complete stranger that the prince assumes is the person who saved him from drowning. It’s a reminder how things have changed in our Euro-descended society; in Andersen’s time, you could still make the argument that spiritual salvation was more valuable than physical love, but now, Hollywood’s created a situation where the happy ending means the romantic ending.
The real salt in the wound for the nameless mermaid, I imagine, is when the prince declares “I want you to meet my fiancée! And I know you will love her, because I love her, and you love me!”. That’s cold, man. Even for a prince, that’s cold.
3) Female Shift. Disney’s made a lot of female leads over the years. I bet that, if pressed, you could name a few yourselves: Snow White, Cinderella, Belle, Pocahontas, Mulan… etcetra, so on, ad infinum. Now: name one female friend of any of them. …They don’t exactly roll off the tongue, do they? And Disney’s The Little Mermaid is hardly an exception. As much as it’s a story about a young woman finding her true love, it’s also a father’s story about accepting that his little girl is a young woman—and apparently, in order to tell that story, Disney decided not to tell a large part of the original. In Andersen’s version, the Little Mermaid still had her mother die a long time ago, and still has a father figure, but the father’s role is greatly, greatly reduced. Instead, what we get is a heavy supporting role from her sisters and lots of good advice from her grandmother (who is written out of the movie entirely). Even the seawitch gets a better rap. In the original, she isn’t scheming to cheat the mermaid out of her fair chance, or steal back a kingdom; she takes Ariel’s voice because that’s the way magic works—it always costs the thing most precious to you. Ariel’s sisters comfort her with their presence and song while she’s human, and sacrifice their own dearest possession—their hair—to give her a chance to return to them. And it’s not like their replacements are wonderful role-models for little boys, either: Flounder is a coward, Scuttles is scatterbrained, and Sebastian is fastidious to a fault. Admittedly, each will pitch in when the chips are down, but the message that’s left seems to be is that you can’t count on sisterhood, you can’t count on the boys, it’s up to you to make your dreams come true. I’ll admit, it’s still a better message than “the only options open to a young woman are self-sacrifice and marriage” and “you need a husband to get a soul,” but… it’s still an awfully bleak message to give little girls. (Not to mention it still comes down to “you need a husband.”) In separating itself from the original female bonds, it feels as if Disney really altered a part of the original story for the worse.
And that’s where we’re at. The whole issue got me thinking about another topic that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while: female role models.
Later Days
Monday, August 31, 2009
Breaking News: Disney Buys Marvel
This will be a quick post: according to venerable news sources, Disney has just announced it's bought Marvel Comics for around $4 billion. As a dedicated comic reader, a lot of issues jumped to my mind: with DC owned by Warner Bros, this means that both of the two major comic publishers receive their marching orders from larger multimedia figures. Will Disney be insisting on some creative changes to bring Marvel characters more in line its other set? Will this deal have an effect on the rise in comic book prices? Will this have an actual, measurable change on the quality of the comics themselves, in the long or short term?
Well, to be honest, these questions were not the first thing to come to my mind. The first question was:
How long do I have to wait before I can go to Disneyworld and get my picture taken with Donald Duck and Wolverine at the same time?
Later Days.
Well, to be honest, these questions were not the first thing to come to my mind. The first question was:
How long do I have to wait before I can go to Disneyworld and get my picture taken with Donald Duck and Wolverine at the same time?
Later Days.
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