Two Adaptations I Liked, and all that

I revisited some remakes and retellings this week and wanted to compare and contrast them, but mostly just ramble about them. One is Aladdin (2019) and the other is Emma. (2020).

Always a topic of interest here, I think it’s kind of easy to disparage remakes and new adaptations – especially of the Disney variety. Yes, Disney makes them mostly as an excuse to print money, and it is not wrong to be cynical about that. I still find value in seeing the differences of the new version. If a remake offers absolutely nothing else, I’m still always fascinated to see what Disney finds important to delete, redo, shift, and rewrite. How they update LeFou – problematic, sure, but worse than the original? And how about compared to the staged version? It’s a nuanced topic and one I’d love to discuss in horrifying detail if you have a spare five hours! I remember thinking, while watching new Lion King, “how is this movie, which is going for ultra-realism (for reasons I don’t really understand) but also functions as something like a beat-for-beat remake of quite an unrealistic movie, going to do the ‘dress in drag and do the hula’ scene?” And then, Timon started singing “Be Our Guest.” Delightful. Obviously the original is way better. But if you ignore that, there are worthwhile tidbits in any of them for you if you’re a nerd, is what I’m saying.

I understand why some people aren’t interested in this. It can be tiresome to watch Disney create new plot holes while “fixing” earlier ones. Disney, please, EMBRACE THE PLOT HOLES. It’s about the message, not whether the movie make 100% real-world sense the whole way through. Also tiresome is watching them try to sanitize earlier films. It’s offensive, even, in some situations, but I think that permeating the anti-remake thought process is also a belief that because the originals were already made, that’s it, and now there’s nothing else to say about them, ever. But that’s not how story-telling works. There’s always a new avenue to explore in any story.

Unfortunately there are only certain stories that get this kind of treatment, and it’s based on which ones studios think many people will pay many dollars for. But even the most lackluster remake is going to, at the very least, give you remastered classic disney songs and score. Always worth it.

Aladdin of the year 2019

This version of “Arabian Nights” is better than the original.

Understandably, Disney changes some lyrics. “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face; it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!” is gone. If the 90s were a kinder and smarter decade that wouldn’t have been there to begin with, but, growth and change, I guess. Even in the original animated version available on Disney+, they’ve altered it – the “barbaric” part of the line is still there but instead of the de-earing, it’s “where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense.” In their 2019 version the lyrics have become: “where you wander among every culture and tongue, it’s chaotic, but hey, it’s home” – a significant departure/improvement. Does it solve racism? No. But that wasn’t the goal anyway. It’s just a small change that makes the final film slightly more welcoming to more people.

The other major lyric change is in “Prince Ali,” my favourite musical number from either Aladdin. The entourage now boasts: “he’s got ten thousand servants and flunkies” rather than the other thing, and, again, yeah.

There’s more focus on Jasmine in 2019. We spend time on her political ambitions, which I always felt the original is missing. She even gets a song that’s about vague female empowerment and not much else – and gets a reprise. The part where she intervenes and convinces Hakim to side with her and her father could have been woven a little better into the story, but as it is, it serves. It connects to the things she’s said right from the beginning about leadership and relating to the people at least.

Jasmine’s romance with Aladdin is given additional space to grow. It’s not that the 1992 version is missing that – Aladdin and Jasmine are just kind of cute there, and you don’t begrudge either of them falling in love so quickly. The new version’s romance definitely benefits from the extra bonding time. Jasmine also lies to Aladdin about her identity at first, making it a little less ridiculous when he’s doing all the lying later. In the original, Aladdin says she deserves a prince. In this one, he tells her that she should be the Sultan and I LIKE THAT BETTER, OK.

Jasmine gets a female friend, also a servant, also a major character, in Dahlia. Instead of being obstinate at the drop of the hat about suitors, she’s more focused on being Sultan than on being opposed to every offer of marriage. When Aladdin shows up with his parade, she is definitely unimpressed, but is watching politely until Genie says “heard your princess was HAWT, where is she?” My guffaw when I first saw it. Oh man.

If you’re not too busy laughing you are firmly on her side of this thing anyway during Prince Ali’s yam jam speech about purchasing her with expensive gifts. This speech includes the best line AND line reading of all time: “And, uh, THAT, over there, hidden, for suspense. Tada.”

Genie and Aladdin’s relationship is still adorable, and just like the Aladdin/Jasmine romance, this friendship gets extra space and time to develop. One thing the new version eliminates is the part where Genie gets frustrated when Aladdin goes back on his promise to free him. He does get frustrated, just, differently. He told him early on not to “drink from that cup,” and is now disappointed.

This is a strange change. It’s extremely understandable for Genie to be pissed in the original about Aladdin going back on this promise and NOT freeing him from eternal slavery, but in 2019 Genie isn’t even phased by that part. He’s just like, “So… you’re just going to lie to Jasmine forever?” This reminds me of the time we watched “The Beast Within” from Teen Titans and Beast Boy steals and eats Robin’s entire ham and eggs, and Robin just says, “But you’re a vegetarian,” (vegan, Robin, vegan) and three said “Robin’s such a good friend.”

Genie is a good friend too, and entirely selfless. Even the original Genie gets over it and is willing to sacrifice freedom if it means his OTP will get together, meaning Genie was always far too selfless for this awful animated/CGI-live action world. Freeing the Genie is just as moving in each version. Good for you, Genie. Everyone deserves freedom, but you most of all.

Speaking of everyone deserving freedom, then there’s Jafar. Jafar has traded in his fabulousness for mere temper-tantrums and scheming – that is, he’s a regular villain now, not so much a 90s Disney villain. Like Jasmine’s political ambitions and prowess, Jafar serves here, but probably could have been put to better use. I wonder if the de-fabulousifying is an attempt by 21st century Disney to leave queer coding of villains in the past. If so, what’s going on with King Candy from Wreck-It Ralph?

The 90s villains have a following. They are always more visually interesting than their very-conventionally-attractive protagonist counterparts. Their queer coding also makes them firmly present on screen. They steal the show, is what I mean. Acknowledging that the coding is problematic doesn’t mean people can’t or won’t enjoy those characters. Honestly, if Jafar was allowed to turn it out in this movie I think it would have been better for it. I think he would have really shone doing “Prince Ali Reprise” and I miss it in this version. On the other hand, if Disney is trying to move away from doing that (especially after the live action LeFou and Gaston), then, respect. Most importantly, this movie is for kids of today, and as this very good article that says everything I just said way way better than I did also says, kids of today don’t need queer coded fabulous 90s disney villains. [What they need are some overtly queer protagonists but that’s another topic.]

It could also be that they want the villains in their new versions to be scarier. “We’re going to take this villain 100% seriously, like the Horned King,” they may have said (verbatim, I’m sure). This potential reason is probably more realistic than Disney honestly considering whether queer coding villains is a good thing to continue to do. The result is kind of meh no matter why they’re making these changes. Scar in 2019’s The Lion King was boring compared to the 1994 version, also, I think, because all his fabulousness is gone. I guess it makes them scarier – if I had to choose whether to face off against a team of Animated Jafar + Animated Scar, or Live Action Jafar and CGI Scar, I would choose the animated duo. But honestly, it’s just because I’m going to have a better time since they’re more fun. That said, I much preferred the serious take on Shere Khan to the animated, but I was no great fan of Animated Jungle Book anyway, and I really liked the remake.

2019’s Aladdin has Disney deciding against Gilbert-Gottfried-trapped-in-parrot-body type of Iago. They went with a more realistic approach, which was a mistake. Wise-cracking Iago really makes Aladdin (1992), in my opinion. Although, the part where darker, slightly more realistic Iago laughs at Prince Anders sarcastically is hysterical, as is the part where Aladdin says “We have a north… and… a south,” and Iago croaks, “What?” I must also take a moment to appreciate the CGI animals Raja and Abu:

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Yes, I know, they do this, I’m sure, because it’s cheaper to pay low wages for CGI artists than it would be to pay for exploited animal labour. They don’t do it to spare animals from exploitation – and the low wages of CGI artists thing really does suck. But exotic animals used for entertainment suffer so I’m still happy to see these CGI guys, and the artists did a great job. Whether it’s more or less expensive should be a moot point here anyway (and the artists should be paid more) because you simply can’t get these performances out of real animals.

Real animals don’t act. For example, to get a shot of a real tiger looking that enraged – well. Someone would need to sacrifice themselves. You’d also have to actually antagonize an actual tiger into an actual state of rage, as they did for a few shots in Life of Pi, and that’s not OK either. That isn’t a tiger acting, that’s a tiger being deliberately stressed out to the point of violence. Stahp.

In conclusion: Aladdin of 2019 makes some key changes to the source material, a 1992 animated film. It adds a vague female empowerment song and reprise, adds some decent political ambition and will for Jasmine, and shaves off some of the racism of the original. It goes for a serious villain in Jafar, either to make him scarier or to reduce the overall amount of villain queer coding Disney has done as a corporation. Now let’s look at an adaptation that leans in to all of the problematic elements of its source material, and then some.

Emma. of 2020 (a year which, as we know, took place one million years after 2019)

Emma. is a fresh take on Jane Austen’s novel, managing to be as fresh as it is without changing anything from the story. The freshness may come from the moments the movie takes to highlight somewhat non-Austen things, like the hero ripping some sort of layer off and then lying on the floor in extreme frustration or the heroine lifting her dress up by the fire. Or maybe Harriet being… quite affected by Knightley checking her leg for breaks. There is quite a lot of overt sexuality in this movie (…for an Austen adaptation), but it never feels, to me, out of place. There is a moment in Pride and Prejudice (2005) in which Lizzie and Darcy are livid with each other. He just proposed. She just rejected him. They both have major issues with each other. After yelling a lot, once they’ve yelled everything they need to yell, they just kind of gaze at each other in the rain and it NEVER FAILS TO TAKE ME OUT OF THE MOVIE. I understand that it’s all about the tension with those two, but it doesn’t feel real to me that in the argument they’re having (which is: she’s furious that he hurt her sister; he’s self-righteous because he was protecting his friend; she’s hurt by the way he’s talking about how inferior she and her family are to him; he’s wounded by how disgusted she is by his proposal) they’d both simultaneously stop and think, “Hmm, maybe we should just have sex instead.” Maybe I’m just asexual but come on, Lizzie is sad for Jane, Darcy is sad for Bingley, and both have just been deeply, deeply insulted by each other. Now is not the time unless they both have a very specific kink.

Anyway. The overt sexuality here doesn’t creep into inappropriate moments. The one I could compare it to would be “Badly done, Emma.” Imagine Knightley: “How could you, Emma, you really hurt her, and you have a lot of privilege compared to her and people are influenced by the way you treat her, it was BADLY DONE.” And instead of Knightley (sorry to hurt her but sorely disappointed) storming off and Emma bursting into hysterical tears and screaming at the driver to go (rude!), they gaze at each other but make it sexy.

EXACTLY.

The pull of this moment is that it’s the real low point. The genius of it is that it provides an excellent foundation to climb back up from. I read this book at some point and can’t remember the finer details, but I did find Knightley pretty irritating a lot of the time. He’s a massive scold, more of a parent than a love interest (and I mean the age gap in the book definitely doesn’t help with that either). Filmed versions always soften their weird dynamic, and this version in particular does an excellent job of it. Here you can really understand what’s enticing about this – not that Emma is a silly girl who needs someone to humble, tame, correct her all the time. It’s instead that she has someone who will hold her accountable, as no one else does. Everyone else in the “three dull things” scene is horrified by what Emma says, and even though she has real enemies present, no one will actually call her on it, except Knightley. It doesn’t hurt that he acknowledges that she’s changed his opinions on one or two things, too. Something he does in the book as well, to be fair.

I also really like this moment where Robert Martin, who has been recently rejected by Harriet, tells her which way to get home safely and then just stands sadly in the rain alone with his thoughts after she has left.

Austen adaptations usually serve up lots of sad looking men. I haven’t done a thorough enough study on this but I’m pretty sure modern romance and romantic comedies don’t make use of this tactic enough. Odd, considering in your typical heteronormative romance, juicing BOTH leads for all the angst you can get out of them would probably be very engaging for the audience. On men’s emotions and Austen adaptations (this one in particular) showcasing of them, I watched a video essay recently which uses a clip from Emma and Knightley’s wedding in 2020. Knightley brushes away a tear at the altar. The essayist is showing it as an example of a man crying in a movie for something joyful (his wedding), and it isn’t used as a reason to mock or shame him and laugh at his expense, just simply showing his emotions because they add to the story being told. Which, according to that essay, is very atypical. Society, I tell you.

NOW. In direct contrast to Aladdin 2019, what on earth is happening in Emma. 2020 where the servants are ALWAYS THERE? OK, the servants in Aladdin are also always there. But Jasmine and Dahlia are more like friends than Princess and servant, and Aladdin and the Genie develop a friendship as well. All four of them truly treat each other as equals despite some very significant power imbalances. So what I mean is, this movie, unlike every disney movie ever and even unlike most Austen renditions, portrays a much more realistic servant-employer relationship. There are definitely moments where your attention is drawn to them in Pride and Prejudice 2005, but this is something entirely new. They’re everywhere. You can’t not notice them. They have names? Bartholomew and Charles in particular are always standing by, the picture of silence, misery, boredom, judgement. I can’t get enough!

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That last image there is Charles and Bartholomew walking away for discretion when Emma and Knightley are kissing. A lesser film would have them smile or something, some little acknowledgement that they, like you, the audience, are rooting for this romance but NO. They couldn’t care less and it’s amazing.

That’s all I’ve got. I like both adaptations. I think they are both very much worth watching. Watch them if you haven’t!

Encanto Again, or, Bruno Madrigal WAS Meant to be Screencapped

Spoilers for Encanto which is a movie I’m still obsessed with.

[screencaps from animation screencaps dot com]

A disorganized list of things that make Encanto so great:

• All the dancing, including Antonio’s new room dancing with most of the family, Dolores’s Bruno verse dance, Isabella rocking out with the flower mic, and obviously Félix and Pepa’s dance while not talking about Bruno
• Every single character, including but not limited to Coffee Child, Overly Excited Child, Guy Who Can’t Stop Talking Tactlessly, Guy Yelling About Donkeys, and Antonio
• Antonio (has to be included twice)
• The donkeys (especially the donkeys in the band on the Madrigal Titanic)
• Comedy toucan
• Comedy capybara
• “Helpful” coatis
• Helpful rats. Does affinity for animals run in the Madrigal genes? It certainly seems to. When the rats grab the shards of Bruno’s vision, I guess at his request, that’s pretty impressive
• The soup at the disastrous dinner, where there’s either half a corn cob or a whole corn cob in each bowl. I want to find a vegan recipe of that soup, it looks so good
• Men and boys being affectionate and supportive. I mean, Augustín? Félix? Camilo? Antonio? The adults show romantic affection for their wives which is nice, but then there’s also familial affection and general supportiveness all around. Augustín especially is a nice change of pace for a Disney dad, managing to be accident-prone but not useless, and even stands up to Abuela on behalf of Mirabel. Bruno, too, as soon as he comes back to the family, immediately goes into affectionate and supportive mode
• Compassionate examination of intergenerational trauma
• How is it so easy to ache for Mirabel, but remain understanding of Abuela, even at her worst? Ahh, nuance and no villains, I love you
• Connection within Pepa’s family: Félix barges into Mirabel’s hushed conversation with Pepa having overheard them through a closed door, and before that, Pepa comes into the room already upset because she overheard Mirabel muttering to herself about Bruno. These are the parents of Dolores, and that makes perfect sense. Dolores for her part can hear rats talking in the walls worrying about the house – so either that’s Bruno, or she also can understand animals, just like her brother. Camilo shifting into Mirabel and Bruno when he hears that Mirabel is in Bruno’s vision, shifting through all of the adults in his life after being zapped by lightning, and shifting into someone with a baby head reminds me of Pepa not being able to keep her feelings to herself, always with the weather overhead. Antonio being the cutest, most empathetic cousin and nephew reminds me of Félix always looking out for and pacifying Pepa
• Connection within Julieta’s family: All three sisters are being crushed under the weight of familial pressure, each according to her gift (or non-gift). Luisa is struggling to do all the heavy lifting and feels like she’d be nothing if she couldn’t keep up with the work. Isabella is struggling to remain perfect and pretty, which is an identity she’s been forced into, and to fulfil a vision of a perfect future she doesn’t even want. I think it’s deliberate that out of the grandkids, Isabella looks the most like young Alma, and Mariano looks a lot like Abuelo Pedro. Mirabel has to keep pretending that she’s fine even though she is NOT. When the sisters have brief but honest conversations, these things start unraveling almost right away. Mirabel is the key, a lot like Julieta, being a healing presence. Julieta is concerned about Mirabel the whole time, always knowing when something is wrong even when Mirabel insists she’s fine. Mirabel, after talking to Luisa, worries about her throughout the rest of the film, taking note whenever she sees her struggling. Once she tells Augustín about it, he does the same thing. Both Julieta and Augustín stand up to Abuela the way Mirabel eventually does, but, like, more
• The part where Antonio tells the jaguar not to eat the rats

In the past, we’ve made posts about how when you screencap certain goofy moves (Hercules only), the results are goofy. Looking at still images from Encanto featuring Bruno is a little different though. Some insights:

Bruno’s a Frozen fan

So there’s a bit of goofiness here. I do wonder why he’s still wearing the bucket, but then, he’s been in the walls for a while. Coping mechanisms become habitual. But there are more interesting insights to be gleaned than occasional goofiness.

This scene where Bruno revisits his vision goes by pretty quickly but when you slow it down, you can see some clear enthusiasm here, uncharacteristic for Bruno (or at least for what we’ve seen of him so far). His perpetual sadness makes a lot more sense when you consider that he might truly enjoy having visions, but the way everyone always reacts in such negative ways eventually ruins his enjoyment of his own power.

Eeeevery time.

He was so happy to come up with a clear and “easy” solution for once: hug your sister! “That’s great!” But Mirabel is furious with that result. Poor Bruno.

It adds a layer to the general sadness of Bruno, who lives in the walls where he can sort of sit with his family for meals but not really.

Lay it on thick, Encanto.

But there’s also reunited-with-family Bruno:

All right, enough, we don’t talk about him for a reason and the reason is that IT’S TOO EMOTIONAL.

That’s it. Will try to blog about something else next time.

Encanto

Last time on Owlmachine, I’d barely started watching Encanto at the theatre before the power went out. Today I saw the whole thing and jsfdnojawiouwnqfjncsjdk njgkrwdfjjfvnsjdfnvk. So.

will be dancing to this for weeks, thanks LMM and Carlos Vives

I’m of the Disney musical proclivity anyway, so obviously I was going to love it. Apart from being typically great animated fare, Encanto is special because, to me, it seems like out of all the Disney musicals, this is the one that would make the most sense on stage. I know The Lion King killed it, and I’ve never seen any of the others but I’ve heard good things, and some “meh” things, about all of them. I’m not sure how Frozen’s stage version was received generally, but that one likely ended up on stage more because it was a guaranteed money-maker than its material being well suited for live stage production. I’d still have gone to see it if it came here because I’m exactly that sucker, and also who wouldn’t want to see Frozen performed live?

But with Encanto, the way a larger cast participates in multiple numbers, and how Mirabel’s two sisters get songs of their own, and how the most popular song features a healthy chunk of the family singing about another family member, it just feels like this was meant to go on stage eventually. “Dos Oruguitas” could easily be sung by one or more of the children or grandchildren, the way Angelica sings “It’s Quiet Uptown” in Hamilton. (DO NOT listen to “Dos Oruguitas” in advance if you plan to watch the movie ever. Hear and see it first in its proper context.) And “Colombia, Mi Encanto” could easily fit in anywhere sung by anyone or, better yet, everyone.

Animation is probably my favourite medium for visual story-telling though, so as much as I would see Encanto on stage 36 times in a row and then some (if the funds for me doing that existed somehow) if the stage version existed this animated version would always be superior. As much fun as “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” would clearly be performed live, in the animation it was transporting as only animation can be.

It’s good, music is obviously amazing, the animation is amazing, the characters are instantly adorable, parts of it are REALLY sad and the resolution hits the spot. It has a fantastic message. Also the intergenerational trauma raccoon short that plays before it made me ugly cry, twice. The first time I saw it I ugly cried just because it was raccoons. I CAN’T DEAL with raccoons. The second time it was because the actual story that’s being told is very moving, and also again just because it was raccoons.

The Family Madrigal: The Strange Predicament that I Now Find Myself In

Heads up: personal ridiculous story time. Spoilers (not really though) for the first 30 minutes of Encanto because THAT WAS ALL I SAW.

On one of my days off, having failed to convince anyone to come with me to see Disney’s new Encanto as it’s the busy holiday season and I guess no one I know has time for a new Disney musical, I decided, hey, there’s a showtime in the afternoon and it’s still the week before school lets out for the holidays, so it won’t be too crowded. Let’s go!

All was going well (movie seems to be great, no surprise there) but then the power went out.

The small number of other people in the theatre and I had just gotten past the I Want song, called “Waiting on a Miracle,” when the theatre went black, and then emergency-light bright. I liked the song, but I preferred the upbeat introduction song “The Family Madrigal” the way I preferred “Where You Are” to “How Far I’ll Go” in Moana, the other Lin Manuel Miranda Disney musical. “The Family Madrigal” is fun, with a lot of punchy lyrics, multiple laughs, full of trivia, communal and familial – perfect for this particular moment in this province, when the cases are exploding exponentially and the very real possibility of a locked down Christmas is looming again.

I went home, annoyed, and bought the only songs I’d heard so as to not spoil myself and noticed that the most popular song, which we hadn’t gotten to, has a name that’s also a lyric (the most intriguing lyric!) in “The Family Madrigal.” I became even more annoyed.

Now I’m in this bizarre limbo, playing and replaying “The Family Madrigal,” and occasionally “Waiting on a Miracle,” but personally I’m just waiting on my next day off so I can try again to see it – provided we don’t lock down in the meantime.

That evening the universe seems to have felt that I hadn’t had enough Disney, so I heard the telltale sounds of one of my foster kittens doing a good impression of Mufasa’s last moments between the rails on the second floor. I’ve heard those specific scratchings before, maybe twice, with previous foster kittens. I’ve either managed to push those kittens up and back through the rails or they manage to scramble back up on their own. In this case I hurried over but I wasn’t even in time to see him dangling. This small white body just fell right in front of my face. Reader, I couldn’t freaking tell you how, but I snatched him out of the air. He would have broken at least one of his legs. Maybe pelvis or mandible. For an animal that likes to impersonate Mufasa a lot, cats are too fragile and not nearly as good at falling as we as a society think they are.

Anyway he realized a split second later (and too soon for me to react and set him down gently) that I was holding him and I guess this was the worst possible outcome in his brain, so he panic-launched himself out of my hands and I got scratched minorly. You’re welcome?

What I learned from this experience is that The Lion King just needed me. I’d have to be the size of a giant but I could have caught Mufasa. Could I explain wtf the plot would be after that? No. It would probably be very bad. There would suddenly be this giant human who had shown up without explanation. You’d have no need for Timon and Puumba so we’d lose out on “Hakuna Matata.” Basically everything would change. Perhaps the lions and hyenas would actually band together to kill and eat me. I mean. I’d watch it.

I’d rather watch the rest of Encanto though.

I Liked Luca

Ahh what a sweet movie. I mean. I could have done without all the dead/dying fish, but otherwise, it was very cute.

I just wish I’d seen it in theatres. I can’t even remember what the last movie I saw in a theatre was, but the experience of a new Disney/Pixar/any animated movie really in theatres is unbeatable and it has been too long.

I Liked Raya

Watched Raya and the Last Dragon, liked it, and mostly I didn’t want the meandering blog post about that which will not be spoken of to be the first post on the page anymore.

Observations in no meaningful order (but sort of spoilery):

• I ship it? But if they want to be platonic friends I’d also FRIENDship it (I’ll stop)
• I do think the redemption arc needed to be way more fleshed out, but OK
• I love Sisu’s entire approach to life
• The one part where she said cats don’t have souls destroyed me, but at least it was funny
• The con baby, omg, and as soon as that happened I said “oh they BETTER join the team” and what do you know, thank you Disney movies for being predictably warm (um, even in a con baby scenario)

OK that’s it.

Romance of Deception in Animated Movies

A new romance blossoms. But alas, it is threatened. Danger and power-hungry villains trashing monuments lurk in the shadows, but the tender new romance’s main foe is something much smaller, much more personal, and, with much more specific stakes.

The man has been lying, the whole time, to the woman.

It’s OK, though, she’s bound to forgive him.

I wanted to look at the sometimes bizarre, potentially weird, probably problematic dynamics of a couple of deception romances that occur in some animated classics. Just for fun. Not to judge anyone for liking them (I like them too), nor to suggest that these romances have produced a problematic blueprint that vulnerable child viewers might use when forging their own relationships. I do think media representations matter, but I also think that interrogating media you engage with and enjoy is the best way to make sure you don’t replicate its problematic elements. Also I doubt anyone is really trying to emulate someone like Dimitri IRL, but then, who knows.

Speaking of which…

Anastasia and Dimitri

Let’s set aside the objective fact that this movie really shouldn’t exist and that even the way it does exist, with blatant reimagining of real historical events, it’s eyebrow-raising at best. The characters are likeable. Some of the songs are good. The outfits rock. We can set the real history of it aside for 90 minutes.

What I can’t set aside is my befuddlement at the love story. I remember quite enjoying it when I was a kid and a teenager. Back then, if a romance wasn’t enemies-to-lovers or didn’t involve belligerent sexual tension, I wasn’t interested. I’m not sure why that held appeal for me, though I am inclined to think it’s because those tropes are kind of juvenile. I’m still down to engage in some slow-burn misrepresentation, miscommunication, misunderstanding, and mind-changing, but the clear dislike and trading of insults that happen between Anastasia and Dimitri when they are new acquaintances no longer does it for me.

That’s not even the issue. If it were, I might say, “Well, I don’t really understand at what point they stop hating each other’s guts. Is it when Anya wears a dress? When he sees her in something not ridiculously oversized he falls in love with the shape of her or whatever? And she reciprocates because she likes dancing with him? That’s kind of weak, but, OK.” And that wouldn’t be worth a blog post.

No… it’s more the fact that Anya overhears her grandmother reaming Dimitri out for being a heartless con man, having held auditions for someone to play Anastasia only to take the grieving but hopeful Dowager’s reward money and run, which is exactly what he was planning on doing. This is his plan literally all the way up until he realizes that Anya is actually Anastasia, not just a good lookalike with convenient and manipulatable amnesia.

At that point, he forgets all about the reward money, because suddenly a future with Anya isn’t possible so it no longer matters. I understand why this changes things for him, but I do wonder what his plan is before he realizes the truth. Does he really think Anya would be fine with their scamming the Dowager, or that she’d never realize what they were doing? I guess it doesn’t matter, because Anya is Anastasia, so we never have to find out.

“Princesses don’t marry kitchen boys,” Dimitri laments. Right, but big-hearted women marry con men who deceive them and any other nearby emotionally vulnerable women for cash? Sounds plausible.

As a random aside, I hear a lot of complaints about Naveen from Princess and the Frog. Personally I like Naveen, but I guess I see where those complaints are coming from. OK not really. Flynn/Eugene from Tangled is pretty much the same person, just minus the royal blood and adding in thievery and one brief anecdote about being a poor orphan, and everyone loves him. My semi-relevant point is, Naveen, who has personal growth, who demonstrates an actual change in heart over a prolonged period of time in his movie, is waaaaaaaaay better than Dimitri here. I do get what Anastasia is going for and it has limited time to truly flesh it out, but I’m struggling to think of one Disney dude who starts out half as bad as Dimitri. Not even Nick Wilde, or Kuzco, for that matter. OK. Maybe Kuzco. But his ENTIRE movie was about making him into a better person. Dimitri gets one line.

Dowager: Why the change of mind?

Dimitri: It was more a change of heart.

He fell in love and is now a good person.

Well gosh golly me. That’s not how that works.

It’s particularly annoying because all Anya wants is to find her family. Now there is that “found family” element to the Dimitri thing, sure, but I’d buy that more if she ran off with Dimitri plus Vlad and… Sophie, I guess. Or if she ran off just her and Pooka, which would be the ideal ending in my opinion. Instead she just gets married, promising to see her grandmother again soon, and it doesn’t feel great from my perspective.

Before the murders, she’s shown making promises with her grandmother to be “together in Paris.” This phrase turns into the only clue she has about her family after she suffers from amnesia. When she learns that she really is Anastasia, she has to contend with the fact that her parents and siblings are dead, not that the movie is all that interested in that. Still, she has finally found what she says she wants in her “I Want” song, “Journey to the Past.” Comrade Phlegmenkoff says she always acts “like the queen of Sheba,” and high society walking, dancing, eating, and giving orders come naturally to her throughout. Are we really supposed to believe this girl doesn’t want the royal life the second she gets it back? “Once Upon a December” displays the luxurious parties that, by the end, she for some reason is no longer interested in. It also shows her enjoying herself with (I think) her sisters, and dancing with her father. Even if she doesn’t care about parties and gowns, she has found the one surviving member of her family and has only just got back the confidence to believe the memories that are now coming back to her, and she leaves her and everything else instantly to elope with the con man who spent most of the time they’ve known each other so far lying to her and manipulating her so that he could scam money off an old lady.

What.

What we see in this song? This is a character AND a movie that deserves a different love story and a different ending.

Megamind and Roxanne

My feelings towards Anastasia might be lukewarm to vaguely/nostalgically fond, but I LOVE Megamind. Does that love I have for it mean that I’m less weirded out by Megamind’s deception of Roxanne? No. But the fact that the movie frames it a little bit differently than Anastasia does… does.

A) There’s a lack of (real) belligerence. This may be enemies-to-lovers, but it’s a pretty unique version of that in that Megamind likes Roxanne from the beginning. Does he know he likes her? Probably not. Self-awareness is definitely not a strength Megamind has. But everyone else knows he likes her, or, at least, the audience does. For Roxanne’s part, she’s shown being not at all afraid of Megamind, even when he has kidnapped her, even when he’s finally succeeded and has taken over the city. She’s irritated, amused, and then sad and angry, but never scared.

“Please talk slower.”

B) He doesn’t set out to deceive her, he’s just stupid and ends up piling on the lies because he has no reason to tell her the truth. Or does he? Roxanne blatantly asks him, “Do you really think that I would ever be with you?” And he says, “No.” (It’s a very good scene). Minion previously tells him, “The bad guy doesn’t get the girl!” a statement Megamind echoes later (“I’m the bad guy. I don’t save the day, I don’t fly off into the sunset, and I don’t get the girl”), not long before he does save the day. To Minion, before his disastrous date, he says, “Maybe I don’t want to be the bad guy anymore!” But instead of doing the right thing and telling Roxanne who he is, he just carries on as he is, pretending to be a Metro Man historian or whatever that dude is supposed to be.

While he doesn’t mean to deceive Roxanne, there’s a point at which he decides to carry on the lie because it’s rewarding for him – specifically because he knows he actually has a chance at romance with Roxanne while he’s not the supervillain.

C) There’s a much more prolonged “crap I screwed up” part in this movie, compared to whatever strife Dimitri goes through. He loses everything except his terrible plan to turn Hal into a hero. He leans all the way into it, and things get even worse. He finally has to seek out Roxanne just to fix his mess. (Though he does bring up their catastrophic “breakup” at this point. Just once. Maybe the thing he says about not getting the girl is a second mention of it. Maybe he is a bit mopey. But allegiance-changing and heartbreak are tough.)

D) Though it’s not explicitly stated, when Roxanne asks Megamind to save her and he does, I think he does it without expectation that she’ll take him back afterwards. My justification for this belief is that he seems surprised when she turns off his hologram/deception device and is happy to see him. It’s minor but it exists.

(1:59)

E) It’s Megamind’s story, whereas in Anastasia it’s not Dimitri’s story. Megamind is a supervillain who slowly turns into a superhero. We expect him to misstep on his way to becoming good, so his follies are easier to forgive than Dimitri’s are as far as I’m concerned.

Aladdin and Jasmine

I had forgotten about this one, as the deception in this romance barely registers, but it’s definitely there, so let’s discuss.

When Aladdin first meets Jasmine, he likes her right away, and she lies by omission by not just telling him she’s the princess. He does find out shortly afterwards. When he next meets her, he’s dressed as a prince and pretends to be a whole other person. She shortly afterwards figures out she’s already met him, at which point he makes the frankly ridiculous choice to continue to lie to her. “I sometimes DRESS as a commoner.”

As the audience, we know that Jasmine doesn’t care about prince pedigrees. She does live under a law that requires her to marry a prince, though. Does this mitigate the lying? Maybe. Might not Jasmine have worked with Aladdin to keep up the façade, if Aladdin had told her the truth? Probably. Also, the Sultan just changes the law in the end so… what was the point?

The movie makes it clear that Aladdin’s deception is a bad thing, but it’s only partially about building a healthy foundation for their budding romance. The rest of it is that Aladdin is determined to continue to use the Genie to continue to deceive everyone into thinking he’s a prince, which means reneging on his promise to free the Genie. “She has to marry a prince.”

Of the three movies I’ve talked about so far, this is the one with the least reaction from the lady. Jasmine is just like, “Woah, didn’t see that coming,” and then she never mentions it again. It sort of makes sense, because, as stated above, she doesn’t care about royal blood. Jafar tells her in his irritating but amazing “Prince Ali Reprise,” so there’s a good chance that the medium is more infuriating to her than the message is. It does really seem that Jasmine doesn’t care that Aladdin lied to her. But. Who could stay mad at that face?

Conclusions

Well.

Deception in romance goes down easier if the main character is the deceiver. In both Aladdin and Megamind’s cases, it’s easier to empathize with their deception as they are the protagonist.

It’s sort of contradictorily better both when the woman doesn’t seem to care at all, and when she’s mad for a longer period of time. Jasmine is barely phased, and Roxanne is mad about it until the final showdown with Hal.

In Megamind and Anastasia, forgiveness is sped along because of the villainous guy trying to ruin everyone’s day. In Aladdin there is also one of those but there seems to be nothing to forgive from Jasmine’s point of view.

But really, the only interesting conclusion I have to draw is this:

“Princesses don’t marry kitchen boys.”

“I’m the bad guy. I don’t save the day, I don’t fly off into the sunset, and I don’t get the girl.”

“I’m a street rat, remember? And there’s a law. She’s got to marry a prince.”

Megamind can choose to become a hero. Neither Dimitri nor Aladdin can do anything about the class structure (but the Sultan can) (awkward but I’m going to say it anyway… so can the Bolsheviks). All three feel that they are something that is unchangeable, but the reality is, all three of them are in stories that are about (or adjacent to historical events that suggested that) people can be more than what society tells them they are. In Anastasia’s case it’s just sort of incidental, but still.

Megamind is clearly the winner here. Believing that since infancy he has been destined to battle Metro Man on the side of “evil,” losing his nemesis and later losing his chance at romantic love compel him to rethink his identity.

Aladdin runs a close second. He’s the “diamond in the rough,” someone who is much more than what he seems. I believe this is about how he uses his third wish to free the Genie because the Cave of Wonders had decided that Genie enslavement isn’t cool anymore, but in any case, people tell Aladdin he’s a worthless street rat and the movie says, “he’s poor and almost homeless but that’s not the same as worthless” which is kind of nice.

And Anastasia has Dimitri start as a kitchen boy, but he’s not really a kitchen boy in the end. Not anymore. But that’s awkward because the teenage girl who was a real live person and who this is loosely based on was murdered in the power struggle, so let’s just end the post.

BEEE YOURSELF.

The Genie

The Flat Guy in Fellowship of the Ring

It’s Valentine’s Day of 2021, and I hear it is a particularly stressful moment in the pandemic for a lot of people – likely mainly because of how long it’s been. I have the stress too, so here is something that shouldn’t make me laugh, and yet, it does.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, the four innocent hobbits go to the Prancing Pony, which is located in a gated community of human males, for some drinks, and also to expose themselves as having the ring in their possession to spies of Sauran or whatever. Fortunately only Aragorn notices, so they escape.

The nazgul do hear all about it and rush over. When they arrive, the gatekeeper is shocked by their sudden and swift appearance and doesn’t have a chance to get out of their way, and then they knock the door on him.

It starts at 1:29

Since the first time I ever watched this movie, I always noted that the door falls on the guy and he is presumably crushed by the weight of the nazgul and their horses, but he is crushed so severely that the door just falls completely flat on the ground. There’s nothing underneath that. He is paper thin.

I know it’s a cinema trick (kind of a lazy one at that… no disrespect though, I like some lazy cinema) but I can’t not look, and as time has marched progressively on (it came out in 2001) it has only gotten funnier to me.

In fact, if you watch carefully, you notice that he is squashed flat before the first horse even really gets in there, so just the weight of the door itself was enough to immediately turn this gatekeeper into Flat Stanley.

RIP flat gatekeeper man.

(The featured image is someone’s pet ferret at the Prancing Pony, and I never noticed the ferret. The guy becoming flat instantly I noticed, but not the ferret. Sigh, brain, sigh.)

Why is Robin Hood a Villain in Shrek?

This is a rhetorical question. I doubt there’s ever been an answer.

Shrek turns 20 this year.

Untamed Heart – a post, apparently

Tis the season for Untamed Heart, a strange Christmassy romance/drama movie that I have a soft spot for.

I don’t know how to sum it up in a way that might help someone decide if it’s something they’d enjoy watching, but here is a paragraph copy-pasted from the “reception” section of its Wikipedia article:

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that the film was “kind of sweet and kind of goofy, and works because its heart is in the right place”.^[5] Hal Hinson of The Washington Post said that the film “is hopelessly syrupy, preposterous and more than a little bit lame, but, still, somehow it got to me”.^[6]Vincent Canby of The New York Times, said that the film “is to the mind what freshly discarded chewing gum is to the sole of a shoe: an irritant that slows movement without any real danger of stopping it”.^[7]Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B−” rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Tomei’s performance: “With her flashing dark eyes and libidinous overbite, Tomei is adorable — she looks like a flirtatious bunny rabbit — but what’s astonishing is the range of expression that passes over those delectable features”.^[8]Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers wrote, “The Rain Man–Dying Young elements in Tom Sierchio’s script are pitfalls that Slater dodges with a wonderfully appealing performance. His love scenes with the dazzling Tomei have an uncommon delicacy”.^[9] In his review for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane praised Tomei for bringing “startling high spirits to a dullish role. She snatches moments of happiness out of the air and shares them out to anyone who’s around”.^[10] Mike Clark, in his review for USA Today, wrote, “Director Tony Bill (My Bodyguard) is adept both in the yarn’s meticulous buildup and in his handling of the actors”.^[11]

– Wikipedia

I don’t think that helps either. And that one sentence, you know the one – OK I’ll be specific it’s “[the film] is to the mind what freshly discarded chewing gum is to the sole of a shoe: an irritant that slows movement without any real danger of stopping it” is really something. I’ve personally never thought to describe a movie with such a simile, but then I’m not a movie critic. Also I don’t like that one buddy’s description of Marisa Tomei. Just say you want to have sex with her think she’s pretty and is also a good actress, and for some reason this surprised you, and move on.

There are a couple of things that give me pause about this movie:

1. The portrayal of Adam is weird

He’s very childlike. Not quite Elf childlike – maybe more like Forrest Gump childlike. This is sometimes fine but in scenes that get sexual it’s a little bit bizarre (like in Forrest Gump tbh).

This video essay is about the same sort of thing but with the genders swapped. It seems that childlike women are portrayed almost entirely (if not just entirely) as sex objects for the gratification of the male protagonist. When the childlike love interest is a man, the tone of the relationship and entire film tends to be completely different, and they’re not portrayed as sex objects, but it still is kind of weird.

Edward Scissorhands is one more example. Caroline from Untamed Heart, Jenny from Forrest Gump, and Kim from Edward Scissorhands are worldly (for lack of a better word) compared to their male love interests. Jenny definitely is, and Kim only is because Edward is a humanized cookie robot who has lived in isolation until the beginning of the movie, but, still. Edward Scissorhands is super innocent* in its portrayal of the romance. They kiss once; it’s almost a chaste kiss. Both Forrest Gump and Untamed Heart portray some sexual stuff between the main characters; both seem really aware of how innocent** the male leads are in these situations (at least at first), and design the scenes around that fact.

It’s not what I would call “bad,” exactly. The innocence*** of these characters isn’t sexualized. It MIGHT be romanticized, though. It’s DEFINITELY romanticized in Untamed Heart, especially in comparison to the other two. It mildly weirds me out, and maybe one day I’ll be able to articulate clearly why.

*I hate the word “innocent” used to describe romance stories (that don’t feature sexual content). Other words used to describe them are similarly bad (“clean,” and I can’t think of others), but we need some way to describe them, I guess. I don’t know how else to describe the romance between Kim and Edward. Just know I hate it (see below).

**I also hate the word “innocent” used to describe a character and their relationship to sex and sexuality. I used it, I know, but I struggle to find another word to describe Adam, Edward, and Forrest here. “Childlike” is super gross specifically/especially when talking about sex scenes, “vulnerable” is, in my opinion, a closer description, but it’s also weird and not exclusively descriptive (you can be the most sexually-experienced person ever and still be extremely vulnerable), and “inexperienced” might be true but it’s also not quite enough (there are inexperienced people who aren’t necessarily vulnerable or randomly act like children), so, “innocent” it is. I just want to say that the use of this word, whether describing fictional male characters or anyone in real life, implies that the opposite of “innocence” is “guilt.” First of all, sex and sexuality is just not that badass. It’s also not bad, full-stop. Sexuality can and should be a healthy part of being human, and forcing fictional and real people into a dichotomy of innocence/guilt or clean/dirty or madonna/whore, no matter what their sexuality/sexual history is, is unnuanced, gross in some instances, and harmful in many ways.

***Ughhhhh to sexualizing (and romanticizing) “innocence.” But specifically what I mean is, in one scene, Caroline takes her shirt off and we have what seems like it’s planning to be a sex scene, but it turns into a romance scene instead, because Adam is overwhelmed by her heartbeat (or something, look, I don’t know). In a movie where the “innocent” love interest is female, you’d not have this same thing happen (prove me wrong, cowards). Romanticizing it is also weird, though. It’s just… differently weird. Maybe because culture views women as being all but incapable of victimizing men, even boys, and I’ve internalized that a little bit so I don’t as readily get creeped out as I do when I see a born sexy yesterday lady getting jumped by the male protagonist.

2. The whole… attempted rape… thing

There’s an attempted rape in this movie that goes on for quite a long time. It’s very unpleasant to watch.

Because it happens to the protagonist, and it happens early on, it’s not really a misused plot device as many rapes and attempted rapes are (COUGH GAME OF THRONES and A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE COOOOUGH) This way there can be a focus after the fact on the impact it had on Caroline (protagonist). For a while. At some point it becomes more about Adam. The men who did it, who Adam previously beats up when he saves her, come back and stab him and then end up arrested for it. But for a short while at least, the focus is on Caroline. She’s shown calling in sick for a week, walking through the mall looking depressed, jumpy, and insistent on being picked up after work at 2 AM so that she doesn’t have to walk home again. It seems real, and not just a brief incident done to build up the romance later that has no other impact.

Of course shortly after that the romance happens and all of the impact stuff pretty much disappears, but, I’m still more or less OK with this. It does help that there’s a scene where Caroline tells Cindy (female friend and coworker) about it. She tells her mainly to explain why she’s dating Adam but still, it’s a good scene and shows real care between the two women.

The main reason I really like this movie…

…is that it’s about a waitress and a busboy.

Really.

It seems like a minor thing but it’s really not. It’s pretty unique. I can think of a few other stories of working class romance (Brokeback Mountain is the only one coming to mind, and it’s much more of a tragedy than this) (yeah, Untamed Heart doesn’t end happily, but it’s no Brokeback Mountain), but I do think it’s not typical of a movie like this. Isn’t there usually a high power job involved? Maybe ’tis just the season to mistake all romances and/or romantic comedies for Hallmark movies, I don’t know. In any case, both of the mains are young and there’s always the chance that they plan on doing something other than service industry stuff as a career instead, but Adam’s not in school, Caroline is in beauty school but is not taking it seriously at all, neither of them talks about “saving up so they can do xyz instead” or anything. It’s a romance with a lot of drama on the side about two working class people.

There’s even a short part where Caroline tells Adam about her stepfather. She says “Step to the rear!” while pantomiming someone opening a bus door, then, because Adam doesn’t get it, explaining, “He’s a bus driver.” She goes on to describe him as “a really good guy” who was on Candid Camera once, describing the scenario he was put in and how “he was really great about it.” That little part stuck out to me from the first time I saw the movie. After watching this for the first time I completely forgot about it, until it randomly came back into my mind and I went on a quest to find it again. When it got to that part, I immediately knew what she was going to say. Any indie movie would kill for such a colourful tidbit, is all I’m saying. It’s so quietly brilliant, mainly because of Marisa Tomei, but still.

The diner setting is a huge draw for me too. There are those two guys that seem to be there all the time; they’ve noticed that Caroline called in sick for an entire week and know all the happenings every night. For some reason, diners that serve as home base in movies or TV are always a pull for me. I like the breakfast place in Dead Like Me, and the one in Groundhog Day is fun, when I used to enjoy Friends I liked Central Perk. Real life diners, bars, coffee shops and so on are not nearly so homey or magical – at least, they’re not in Canada.

I like that the boss is irritating. I like that the waitresses’ daily irritations are shown. I like that they’re tired after work and have fun while they close.

Merry Christmas, and/or Happy December 25!

Watching The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

For the first time!

There’s a lot of old Disney animated (and non-animated) movies I’ve never watched. This one is logged under “Halloween” movies, so let’s go.

I like Sleepy Hollow, I guess. Mr. Toad is the only thing I liked about The Wind in the Willows, so I have high hopes.

The most fabulous character in English literature, you say? Yeah, Mr. Toad seems about right.

And of course, it’s animals acting like old men. Redwall does it better. (Ooooh, Disney’s Redwall. I’d watch that.)

Toad and Cyril the horse’s song is good. “Though the roads are perpendicular.”

I was not prepared for this

So, I’m sorry, am I supposed to be sympathizing with Rat, Mole, and MacBadger? Because I’m not. Except Mole, maybe. He’s cute.

The court case has started, and with all of Mole’s waving and tongue-sticking-out at the prosecutor, I now love him.

My new animated crush.

I don’t actually understand being attracted to animated anthropomorphic animal characters (no, not even the fox Robin Hood). To each their own, of course, but it’s not for me. Though I do have to admit that this Mole guy is a charmer.

Now Cyril is on the stand, interrogated by the prosecutor about where Toad got the car. “The only way a gentlemen gets anything. The honest way.”

“And what is the honest way?”

“Ha ha, I thought you wouldn’t know that, guvnor!”

Roast him, Cyril!

Yeesh, the speciesism re: “deceitful” weasels. I well remember it from Wind. And Redwall, to be fair. The weasels should be allowed to keep Toad Hall and I bet they don’t. It’s a shame.

Ah, you see, the human barman is actually the evil one. Humans are the only species worth distrusting. And the overreaction to Toad’s prison escape is a poignant reminder that the criminal justice system all over the world has been in dire need of reform for a long time.

Oh wow, Toad just almost drowned himself. He is stupid.

WTF is that roast Rat and Mole are eating? That’s not a thing. Neither is MacBadger’s Scottish accent, lol.

Why didn’t they just confirm that the weasels bought Toad Hall? Yeah, the criminal justice system in Wind in the Willows land is bad.

There was an extended action sequence and after that I must say that Toad doesn’t deserve Mole and Rat as friends.

OK that was good. Sleepy Hollow time.

Ichabod is described, rudely.

Some guy named Brom gives a horse and dogs beer. Don’t do that.

And now a song about Ichabod, also rude.

Now this happens:

What. Am I watching.

Katrina’s introductory song is also kind of rude.

And it’s over!

It was bizarre, and entertaining, and it didn’t end like I thought it would. I’m actually surprised to find it’s pretty much loyal to the source material.

Well, that was fun. But I preferred Toad’s part.

Unlikable Women: Briony Tallis

Unlikable women: short list; Elle Driver

**Having never read the book the movie Atonement is based on, I can only talk about the movie version of the character.

**I only have jumbled thoughts about her as well, so, proceed at your own risk.

**spoilers for Atonement

I don’t really think Briony is an unlikable woman, but I’m not sure that’s how viewers of the movie broadly feel about her. Nuance apparently doesn’t exist, even for viewers of a film that asks you to understand multiple perspectives of the same event, and asks you to understand, and even like, three people, one of whom has harmed the others without any chance of ever repairing the harm.

But this is Owlmachine and I can say what I want about Briony, so there. Here are the facts about Briony Tallis, re: false rape accusation:

• she has a crush on Robbie, a groundskeeper or something at her family’s home
• she and Robbie have some sort of friendship, where she gives him all of her stories to read and he does so and is generally encouraging
• at one point she jumps into a river and he saves her – she does it out of vanity, and he gets really mad because they both could have died
• she witnesses three moments between Robbie and her sister Celia over the course of one day, and thinks he is some sort of sexual predator
• one of the aforementioned is consensual sex, but she thinks it was rape
• she witnesses a friend of her brother’s raping her cousin later that day and is sure, though she saw someone else, that it must have been Robbie
• she lies to the police that she saw Robbie with her own eyes, believing that it was him, and that he is dangerous
• she is thirteen at the time

Her lie ruins Robbie’s life, and Celia’s life, because the two of them had just begun a romance. Also WWII happens shortly afterwards so Celia becomes a nurse, and Robbie becomes a soldier so that he can get out of prison. Both of them die.

There are mitigating factors here. I think I’ve laid them out, but again, if you please: she’s young, she doesn’t understand the full consequences of her lie, she had no idea everything between Robbie and Celia was OK and that Celia wasn’t in danger, etc. In the moments before Briony walks in on the two of them having sex in the library, she is shaking with fear. She is legitimately disturbed by what else she’s seen that day as well. Nobody talks to her. There’s a nice moment where Robbie pauses before leaving the library, almost like he’s thinking about saying something to her, but then doesn’t. None of the three have a chance to talk to each other afterwards, because two of the girls’ cousins run away and during the search party another cousin gets raped.

[Now is as good a time as any for me to just briefly mention that I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about the way this story is constructed, and what it is ultimately about. Pain, I think. Mistakes. Bad choices. Misunderstandings, miscommunication. The inability to connect. Authorship. Atonement.

We linger on the pain of the three main characters. Robbie and Briony in particular get a lot of screen time during which they are in pain. By contrast, Lola, the girl who gets raped – and who later marries her rapist, seeming to both know and not know, or maybe not wanting to know, that he’s her rapist – gets very little screen time in which to be in pain, or to do anything, once she has been raped.

I’m not sure I’ve watched any movie or TV show that actually took on the impact rape has on victims. There’s a recent police procedural I liked, Unbelievable with Merrit Weaver and Toni Collette, but that mostly focused on the police. I haven’t seen a drama like Atonement which shows the effects of rape on someone’s budding/passionate/inappropriate romance, for example. It’s not that I want to, but I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with the focus being only on Robbie, and not on Lola. I realize Lola didn’t have to go to prison or to the war, buuuut she did later marry her rapist, which can’t lead to much happiness. My point is, there’s a lot of sad things that come out of Lola’s rape, but I’m not jazzed that Lola’s marrying the rapist is mostly portrayed as sad because that means she can’t testify against him and clear Robbie’s name.]

That said, I can also list some things about Briony that may signify her as an unlikable woman:

• “asexual” – not as a sexual orientation, though. I remember director Joe Wright describing Briony this way, talking about both her costumes, which are always loose and shapeless and cold-toned, as well as I guess the fact that she doesn’t have sexual partners
• her hair, clothes, and jewelry never change from when she is thirteen to when she is a much older woman, like she is frozen in time to when she was thirteen, never moving past her mistake in any way
• she gets old, gets sick, and writes her last novel as a way to atone for her mistake, fictionalizing an encounter where she struggles to apologize and gets yelled at, as well as moments of happiness for Celia and Robbie who didn’t live long enough to actually have them

While I don’t personally think of any of these things as unlikable, again, I’m not sure that our society agrees. Let’s talk about points 1 and 3 (I don’t have anything to say about 2).

Asexual: First of all, Briony lives a long life. We see her for brief moments as a thirteen year old, an eighteen year old, and a seventy-seven year old. For all anyone knows, she had multiple strings of lovers from age 19 on. She could have been married, she could have been divorced, she could have remarried, and so on, and so forth. I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to think she hasn’t, though, and that she hasn’t because she’s punishing herself for her mistake at thirteen. I’m not sure what I think about that, except that mostly I think it’s stupid.

Denying herself sex might be a way of atoning, but sex isn’t the only way to connect with others. She has a family, a brother, possibly nieces and nephews if she never has children of her own. We see her as a nurse at eighteen, and though she keeps her fellow nurses at a distance, she connects easily and with feeling and warmth to her patients. The only people she can’t really connect with are Celia and Robbie, and even then, there’s another nice little moment where Celia watches Briony try to apologize and is clearly feeling something – maybe not forgiveness, but compassion, at least.

I’d be less weirded out by the “Briony is asexual because she falsely accused a guy of rape” take if not for the weird moments during the scene where she confesses and tries apologizing to Robbie and Celia. She stares at their bed in a kind of pervy way, and later at them, when Robbie attempts to attack Briony and Celia stands in front of him and calms him down “romantically.” Both moments strike me as unnecessary. Do you really stare at your sister’s bed and your sister and her lover as they have some sort of intimate “feminizing the masculine violence out of him” moment – because – I hope not.

I have similar feelings about Darcy’s proposal to Elizabeth in Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice. Every time I watch it, I shake my head when there’s this weird, out of place moment where they kind of look at each other like they want to just start fucking. At least, that’s what I think they’re thinking. In that moment they truly hate each other. She hates him for all the reasons she’s had before, and he hates her for rejecting him. It is just inappropriate. You can put sexual tension in Austen, but not in that part. At least, in my opinion.

Similarly, though, I don’t think the moment where she stands in her sister’s apartment and struggles to apologize is the moment Briony Tallis would choose to write about herself having multiple moments of horniness directed at her sister and her sister’s boyfriend. But what do I know.

Old: In the same scene I was just complaining about, Briony looks out the window and sees an old woman walking down the street with a walker. It nicely mirrors a scene where Robbie looks at an elderly couple while he and Celia awkwardly have tea. Robbie looks at them and seems to know that he will never get there. Briony looks at this old woman and seems to know that this will be her fate, to be an old woman.

I think the implication goes further than, “I’m going to grow old.” I think “alone” is in there too. This irks me as well, because neither we nor Briony know anything about this woman. She’s just alone as she walks down the street. She could have friends. She could have family. She could have a dog. She could have a lesbian lover at home. She could have multiple ghosts haunting her. YOU DON’T KNOW.

Anyway. Briony has gotten the better end of the stick. Objectively. Celia and Robbie die young and that is the tragedy, not that a woman grows old. But, again, I’m not sure society broadly would agree.

To be fair, it is more that she grows old and never moves past the guilt she feels. But still. She gets to become a successful writer, and she uses this gift to atone.

Transformative Works

3!

Disclosure

This Netflix documentary, produced by Laverne Cox, discusses portrayals of trans people in media over the last ever, basically. It features a whole bunch of trans actresses, actors, and various culture critics. They talk about the films and TV shows they watched growing up and how those portrayals made them feel, both the positive, and much more often, the negative.

I love stuff like this in general – the ways media changes people and makes people feel will always be fascinating to me. Regarding portrayals of trans people specifically, I’d started thinking about how Sense8 came out and its complete humanizing of Nomi was so different from a lot of the throw-away portrayals of trans people I’d watched in the 90s and 2000s. Watching this documentary, I noted how many terrible portrayals I’d (thankfully) missed. There’s some discussion of an arc for a trans woman on Nip/Tuck which looks truly awful. I’d seen a few episodes here and there, but missed that whole arc. And whatever Ace Ventura movie I saw, it thankfully wasn’t the garbage one featured in this movie. I was a young, impressionable cis, and I don’t honestly know what kind of impact the overt disgust these fictional trans women characters were treated with would have had on me.

This documentary asks questions about those things. How do cis people view trans people, how do media portrayals of trans people affect their empathy for trans people, and most importantly, how do media portrayals impact trans people, and especially young trans people? They do also make the important point about how elevating a few trans actors in the eyes of society won’t actually liberate trans people in general.

Do you watch/have you watched media, possibly with trans people in it? Without trans people in it? This documentary is for you.

But if you’re not already very familiar with the works discussed and shown in this movie, then content warning for severe transphobia.

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

This documentary follows Victoria Cruz, a transgender women from the Anti-Violence Project, attempting to get the Marsha P. Johnson case reopened. Her death had initially been ruled a suicide, but it’s hard not to believe that it was probably a murder.

In the process she speaks with friends of Marsha’s, and the history of the Gay Right’s Movement and Stonewall features as well. One important takeaway is that sex work, especially for trans women, and especially for trans women of colour, is dangerous work, and it’s still today the way it used to be in the 90s, and in ever – when trans sex workers disappear or their bodies are found, not enough is done to give their families and friends closure, and not nearly enough is done to keep them safe in the first place. And even for trans women of colour who aren’t sex workers, there’s not enough done to keep them safe either.

I would like to now watch a documentary made in 1992 called The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson, because I think it probably features more of Marsha herself. This one does have many clips of her, but I would like to see more of her life. That said, I liked the way it followed Victoria Cruz. I would like to hear more about her life as well – the joyful parts, the monotonous parts as well, if she wanted to share any of it.

Even this Page is White by Vivek Shraya

I’d already read this book, but felt it was time to reread it. It’s a collection of poetry, with a conversation between Shraya and a few white friends about racism in the middle.

This collection makes me uncomfortable, but that’s the thing about trying to commit to anti-racism: you have to be uncomfortable sometimes. You have to “sit in your discomfort.” Shraya has made herself uncomfortable as well, confronting her own internalized racism, and the ways that racism affects Indigenous people and black people differently.

I thought it was important to read something written recently by a Canadian trans woman of colour – while the reality of everything happening in the US is hard to ignore (and we shouldn’t ignore it), white Canadians need to reconcile with the racism that happens here and not just congratulate ourselves that we’re not American. Especially for any and all white Canadians, I recommend reading Shraya’s work, and in particular this one.

It’s Time to Give Up, Baby Pirate Man

(please excuse the title, i can’t and won’t attempt to explain myself, just place me under a rock and ignore everything i ever say ever again)

I watched Sinbad recently. I had a lot of thoughts about the titular character and how irritating it is that he doesn’t really ever grow up.

That probably requires explaining, because in this movie Sinbad actually gets down on his knees and puts his head on an executioner’s block, fully, legitimately, intending to die for a crime he didn’t commit, to spare his friend.

He’s still a baby man, though, and I would like to go into it. But it’s going to have to wait, because before I can focus on Sinbad, I want to discuss this movie broadly.

And by “discuss this movie broadly” – I of course mean “write gibberish about Eris.”

Eris. Is ALL. That matters.

Eriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis.

(eris)

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas has one of the best animated villains… ever.

Showing a still image of Eris is egregious. She has to be seen in motion to be truly appreciated, but this movie is one of the hardest to find clips of on Youtube (at least, it was when I stared writing this. Now there are a bunch! Go watch them).

Whoever animated her should have been given Oscars. They should simply have been handed Oscars. All of them – if The Academy actually cared or understood anything about animation, they would have done so, I say.

She’s also voiced by Michelle Pfeiffer, which is great because Michelle Pfieffer may actually be the best.

Well voiced, well animated, and, completing the trifecta: she’s well written. Somehow, miraculously, they got this character right.

Eris is the goddess of discord, and she has big plans to throw the world into chaos by getting the new heir to Syracuse wrongfully executed through a little manipulation of the flawed status quo. She flirts and whooshes around while she’s doing it all. She changes her size like Alice does in Wonderland – but she does it on purpose, to great effect. She’s murderous and sneaky and spiteful and extremely feminine, and the hero she’s up against who eventually gets the better of her is one of those *adorable* sexists, and yet, somehow, Eris works.

So Disney women villains.

Disney women villians, yes.

YES.

LET US COMPARE.

(the isolation delirium has set in, I believe)

The Powerful

I’m pretty sure Eris is more powerful than any Disney villain. Ursula is quite formidable once she has the trident and is not to be messed with even without it, but she’s a demoted goddess if anything, and she can be killed with a boat. Maleficent is scary and effective, but she’s no goddess. Those are the only two I’d say come anywhere close.

But Eris is the literal goddess of discord.

The Calculating

Nobody is more calculating than Lady Tremaine. The Evil Queen is a bit calculating for sure, but Lady Tremaine is maybe the only real match for Eris.

But Eris’s schemes are on a whole other level – Tremaine wants her grandson to be king, but Eris wants to topple whole governments, and her plan is way more sound than Lady T’s is.

The Sneaky

So… hold on to your hat, I have a bit of a revelation for you: all of the Disney canonical women villains are sneaks. I think we’ve found the answer to the “how does the culture view women” question.

The Evil Queen masquerades as a harmless beggar woman with a harmless basket of apples to appeal to Snow White’s kind heart.

Lady Tremaine does a lot of little subtle things that neither Cinderella nor any onlooker who isn’t a mouse can call out as unfair or straight up abuse without sounding at least a little bit paranoid.

Cruella sidles up to Anita and Roger trying to buy the puppies, and when rebuffed, hires people to steal them.

Madame Mim cheats in her wizard duel.

Maleficent, in the scene that is only not the standout scene because of the cake scene, pretty much seduces Aurora into touching a spinning wheel from the shadows.

Ursula disguises herself as Vanessa, but also, her entire deal is emotionally manipulating people into selling their souls to her so that she can put them in a garden for seemingly no other purpose than to be extremely fracking scary.

Yzma invites Kuzco to dinner to show there are no hard feelings – fully intending to murder him and take his place on the throne.

Mother Gothel steals a baby and raises her to be obedient because she needs her magic to stay young. She also very cleverly manipulates the Stabbington Twins.

And Assistant Mayor Bellweather! You know what she does.

There are plenty of male villains who are also sneaky. But there are also a lot of male villains whose sneakiness is 10000% bad-dad specific. They are just pretending to be a better person than they really are, to the complete and utter disappointment of whoever the hero of the day is (Pixar likes this one: Up,  Monsters Inc, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3, Coco, etc). Their de-maskings are often kind of devoid of flair, like Ernesto’s kind of was in Coco.

Some male villains are just evil, but with less lofty evil goals than the likes of Maleficent or even Mim (such as Ratcliffe, or Frollo). Now, those ones lie, and they emotionally manipulate, but it’s to serve their larger purpose of… genocide. So. And they really don’t sneak the way other villains sneak. They believe they are in the right and most of the bad things they do are them trumpeting all about how right they think they are.

Then there are just those who are not sneaky at all: Shan Yu, Callaghan (wearing a mask is just not fabulous enough to count as sneaky), The Horned King, and Gaston (“elaborate” plan aside. I don’t think he’s smart enough to truly be sneaky).

Some sneaky male villains include Jafar, Scar, King Candy/Turbo, Edgar, and Hans. Leaving Hans aside, what we have here are four rather effeminate male characters.

I’d love to go into great detail with all the Disney (and Pixar!) villains and discuss which ones are maybe feminine and which ones are maybe queer-coded, but for now, I’m going to leave it at this: the sneakier you are, generally, the more feminine you are, as well.

And that one holds for Eris.

What I like specifically about Eris’s sneakiness is that she delights in it. Playing Sinbad, she has this grin on her face that does the job of convincing the witness that she really is the devil-may-care thief, but she’s really just smiling because she LOVES PLAYING PRETEND.

The joyous female villain who has fun while she does villainy! So necessary. And I don’t think we’ve seen her since Snow White’s step mom laughed for forty years while she prepared a poisoned apple, in 1930.

The Sexy Ones

???

So………….

OK.

Disney likes to do a thing with their female villains, and that thing is that they desexualize them.

This can be a lot of fun, sometimes. Sexy female villains are often kind of upsetting to watch and/or read because as we have said so many times before, they are bad and badly written because sometimes you can’t help but pay some attention to the misogynist male writer behind the curtain who writes them as a weird kind of revenge porn, so, at least Disney doesn’t tend to do that. And throwing up a towering image of a powerful woman who is at the top on her own, without any sickly sweet romance, without some man – barking out orders, actually, at men – wielding awe-inspiring amounts of power – yeah, that’s fun to watch. That they all fail is less fun. That sometimes the desexualizing is done in the form of jokes about their appearances is also less fun. That their evil and their power is tied, inextricably, to their being sexless is not fun.

Of course, there’s Ursula*. Ursula is sexy. I don’t know that the movie knows that she’s sexy, but, she is.

But Ursula is unconventionally sexy. She’s fat, and wants to be fatter, and in 198whatever when this movie came out right through to 20whatever year this is now, “fat” and “sexy” – especially for women – only go together if you’re working against the overarching cultural narrative that there is one body type alone that can be considered sexy and attractive.

There are two women villains that are could be considered sexy in theory. There’s Madame Mim** in “beautiful” mode. She does a little dance and everything. I don’t think this counts because the point of it is that she turns back immediately into a shorter, fatter version of herself that we are meant to understand is the True Mim. Vanessa is another take on exactly this, but I kind of think everything Vanessa does is way less sexy than anything Ursula does, which is kind of cool.

There’s also Mother Gothel***. She’s like the Evil Queen in that she’s conventionally attractive, but the True Mother Gothel is old and aged. This is like how the “True” Evil Queen is sort of the form she both takes the most joy in and dies in, which is also aged and old.

Also I don’t know that Mother Gothel is animated in a sexy way at all. Her voice is certainly there, but she seems pretty asexual to me, and I’m using that term not as in that’s what I think her sexual orientation is (but, yeah, I do think that, sorry), but that she just isn’t doing anything sexual, at all, ever, on the screen. Even though she’s in love with her reflection.

*Ursula: unconventionally sexy and the movie either doesn’t think she’s sexy or is deliberately like, “yeah, she’s sexy, but unconventionally, OK.”

**Mim: she’s only doing an act; she pretty much states herself that it doesn’t count

***Gothel: she has time for one thing and one thing only: chasing, imprisoning, and keeping eternal youth even though she’s barely satisfied, and also her “true” form is old which, according to Disney and a lot of other jerks, can never be sexy

Eris is sexy in a way that doesn’t require an asterisk, because she’s got a conventionally attractive body type and she has a conventionally attractive face with conventionally attractive amazingly animated fluid lustrous beautiful hair AND Michelle Pfeiffer’s voice SO.

Ahem.

She might as well be in charge. We have basically arrived here as a society anyway.

Eris in her own right

OK so.

Eris’s elaborate scheme is ruined by Sinbad being simultaneously stupid and noble. His nobility: he decides to go and die for a crime he didn’t commit so that his friend, the heir to a throne, won’t. His stupidity: he never realizes that in doing so, he’s conning Eris into keeping her word and giving back the book of peace.

“…………… I didn’t lie!” No shit, Sherlock. Isn’t this man a cynical con artist thief type dude?

Anyway he had to be such a dummy, because if he had known that Eris was never going to let him die, so long as he went back and pretended to be willing to die, then he’d still be lying and she would have been well within her rights to keep the Book of Peace. In order for everyone to live happily ever after, the main character has to do a stupid, basically.

I’ll return to Eris’s palpable, beautiful frustration in this scene in a moment. First, I want to talk about her amazing plan before it was ruined.

Peace in Syracuse + Syracuse’s friends and allies is dependent on a magical Book. As soon as that Book gets stolen, everyone loses their minds. The criminal must be brought to justice so they can get their Book back.

Let’s see if I have this straight:

1. Accost the likely thief

2. Behead him when he won’t give up the booty

3. ?????????

4. Peace restored

It gets more hilarious, though. Eris’s true plan isn’t even about the Book. She knows that Proteus, noble heir apparent, was Sinbad’s childhood friend, and will believe him when he says, truthfully, actually, that he didn’t steal the book. He’ll step in, and the stupid laws of Syracuse will state that if the true criminal doesn’t return WITH the stolen object, the stand-in gets beheaded.

1. Imprison the heir to the throne as a stand-in for the likely real criminal who has refused to give up the booty

2. Execute the heir when the guy who already wouldn’t give up the booty WHEN HE WAS IMPRISONED AND HIS OWN LIFE WAS AT STAKE doesn’t show up with the booty

3. ?????????????????????

4. Peace restored

I’m not doing a CinemaSins thing. Yes, this makes no sense, but I think the movie is so much better because of it.

Sinbad’s whole deal is “the freedom of the sea” (and also “the freedom of a life of crime and casual misogyny” but we won’t talk about that), directly compared to Proteus’s life of noble duty and sacrifice. Proteus even discusses this with Marina, the principled and antagonistic love interest. The conflict is more pronounced in Marina – she loves the sea (and for some reason, Sinbad) but she also feels that she has a responsibility to stay on land and be a politician. In the end, boringly, she chooses Sinbad and the sea, while Proteus is happy for them from his life on land as a public servant monarch.

And before this, everyone, including the king, is super frustrated with the confines of the silly law that have them needing to execute their heir, who is a principled, good politician, even though it will right zero wrongs. But they still go along with it, because it’s “the right thing to do??????????!”

I’m going to suggest that it’s not.

The charm and romance of Sinbad’s pirate life is enriched by the restrictions apparent in civilized society, which is one great thing about this movie. Then at the extreme end of the spectrum, there’s Eris, in all of her chaotic glory.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t help sympathizing A LOT with her. She sees some silly rules and restrictions, sees how incredibly easy they’d be to shatter, and goes for it. She’s like a cat, spying a battable object close to an edge. Of course she’s going to swat it off and ruin everyone’s day.

Here’s a statement that I’ll apparently make: Eris’s attempt to bring down Syracuse is more fun, clear, engaging, and has way more to say than the Joker’s similar attempt at Gotham in The Dark Knight. (In my opinion. But I’m correct.)

If I’m only correct for one small detail, it’s this: Eris would absolutely have succeeded if not for the change of heart of one itty bitty man. The Joker is proven wrong by whole groups of people (some do try to prove him right, granted, but ultimately they cooperate and prove him wrong). If Sinbad hadn’t felt all his pesky feelings (and he tried really hard to not feel all his pesky feelings – EVEN MARINA, who is likely the reason he’s feeling all his pesky feelings, tried to convince him to not go back) Eris would have succeeded. Everyone else, all the principled political class of Syracuse and surrounding, were apparently fine to let the good prince die, because them’s the rules. They were apparently giddy to play right into Eris’s hands.

And this is why when Eris is fuming, sneering, scowling, and then, eventually, gracefully disappointed but moving on to new projects, it’s so easy to sympathize. You were so close, lady. I feel your pain.

BECAUSE NOBODY LEARNED ANYTHING.

Is it not, then, that it is you, Syracuse, and not Eris, who are the real agent of chaos????????

At least at the end of Aladdin, another story where some rando exploits the silliness of the ruling class for his own gains, the Sultan is like “Oh wait I can just change the law.”

There’s none of that here. I guess it wasn’t important.

That of course means that if Eris ever tried again, this time knowing not to rely on someone like Sinbad to stay selfish, she’d DEFINITELY succeed.

Dun. Dun. Dun.

(eris)

Onward!

Non-spoilers: I liked it. It was not as goofy as I thought it would be. I liked the raccoon-unicorns.

In fact, I really liked the raccoon-unicorns. Here is an example of an animal in a Disney-adjacent animated movie acting like a different animal, but instead of the equation being x=y where x is any animal under the sun and y is a dog, x=unicorns, and y=raccoons. How fresh and exciting! And also very weird. A very strange choice, overall.

OK spoilers underneath.

It’s typical Pixar – a detailed alternate universe/dimension world used to tell a poignant story about people’s insecurities and flaws. Specifically I’m thinking of Monsters University, where the alternate dimension was telling the story of Mike and Sully and their respective insecurities more than the ethics and energy story from the original. In Monsters U we see a slug guy being late for the entire semester. The librarian is very tall and the most terrifying person in existence, next to the Dean. Frazzled students build doors all semester and react exactly how you’d expect them to when they get destroyed.

I’m pretty sure The Good Dinosaur is that same thing but gosh golly me I can’t get through that one, which is, perhaps, my flaw. And insecurity. Toy Story is another one (that I don’t like) (but we don’t talk about that because I’m in the very small minority). Toys going through existential crises, cut in with clever explorations of how a toy society would even work. Onward does the same thing, sporting elves, centaurs, cyclopses, pixies, dragons, and so on, but it’s just a story about an anxious kid and his risk-taking DND enthusiast older brother trying to spawn the top half of their dead father before sunset. You know. As you do.

It reminded me of Wall-E with one very minor subplot. The modern day Onward universe has forsaken a lot of its magical heritage. The pixies not knowing how to fly and The Manticore turning into a frazzled businesswoman who only uses her flight power after a car crash forces her to reminded me of that “you may have experienced some bone loss” line from the Buy n Large propaganda/return-to-earth video. I don’t know how I felt about it – only that I’m glad it was minor.

I liked that the mom got to participate. She participated even more than Squishy’s mom and was similarly cute.

And then there’s the poignancy. All I can say about it is that I’m glad this movie exists. It’s doing good work. A lot of Disney/Disney-adjacent movies have dead parent(s), but this one, since it’s set in a modern-if-alternate universe, probably has more relatable things to say to actual kids who are missing a parent. And as a Frozen and Lilo and Stitch fan, I’m definitely not going to say no to brother love, which was happily the main point. More, animators. More.

I mean. I just watched it today. I’m sure my thoughts will evolve. But for now, it did my favourite thing that an animated movie can do: it surprised me by surpassing my expectations.

So thank you to all the creators out there, whatever it is you create. Someone somewhere is having an easier time because of you. Even when we’re not in a pandemic.

EXCEPT you, radio show hosts who do prank calls that I am forced to listen to at work. You can get furloughed. Forever.

Must Discuss Rise of Skywalker

Cursed be the day upon which I must discuss The Rise of Skywalker and yet, that day has arrived, and it is the wee hours of Christmas Eve 2019, and HUGE SPOILERS

Knives Out, Brief

No spoilers. My only thought is: welp, guess I have to see everything Rian Johnson makes from now on.

Holiday Busy Work with Jack and Sally

After a post about intrusive dark thoughts during this season, maybe it’s time to do a coping mechanism.

I like to watch fictional people do things carefully and log what they’re doing. Usually that just means I pay attention to what I’m watching, but this time, I’ll make an actual list of all the things they do.

Here’s Jack Skellington trying to figure out Christmas via science experiments.

He gets all of his equipment together. He starts with the microscope, looking at a holly berry. He cooks/electocutes (?) a candy cane, which loses its red stripes and becomes spaghetti. Cool trick.

Then he does a Nailed It challenge with cutting out a snowflake, but it turns out to be a spider. He incises a teddy, and looks at some fluff with a microscope. He crumbles up a red and gold striped ornament, places it in a thing of boiling water (?) and it flashes green.

This teaches him nothing.

Next is Sally:

She funnels some sort of liquid into a bottle. Then scoops a powder in as well, and corks it. She places the bottle in a gift basket with… I’m not sure what. Then she uses her sewing machine to drop the basket out the window safely.

She follows it by just jumping. To put herself back together, she pulls out needle and thread from behind her ear and pocket, then starts with her arm, and then her leg. Then she heads over to Jack’s.

It’s annoying that the part where he opens the bottle and there’s a smoke butterfly isn’t here, but that’s what happens.

This is a really menial thing, but it manages to focus the mind on something else. It’s not “just” a distraction – it’s a, “look, the thing you’re thinking about is self-destructive. There’s nothing constructive about it. Focus on something else and move on.”

Also, this task is helpful because Youtube will probably one day remove those videos, but there’s a full description of them there anyway, even if the videos are just grey space.

Maybe in the spring I’ll do this again with the cake and dress scene in Sleeping Beauty.

A Brief Frozen 2 Thought

Spoilers. Big ones.

A very brief Maleficent: Mistress of Evil thought

**spoilers**

 

 

 

One: If you’re trying to make an anti-war movie, it probably helps if it isn’t very fun to watch the title character straight up kill people with magic.

Two: Remember the rule of Shakespeare: a marriage only solves everything if “everything” has been harmless shenanigans*, not if it’s been a tragedy up until this point – family deceit and betrayal and massacre of the innocent included.

*except for the multiple instances of slut-shaming that end in pretend or real death, or both, but, “exception that proves the rule” or whatever.

(Just watch the first one again.)