Despicable Me is about a Villian in an alternate CGI world. Unfortunately, he’s being one-upped by Vector, the new villian on the block who spectacularly stole a pyramid in Egypt. Gru, the main character, decides to steal the moon to top Vector. Gru steals a shrink ray gun from an vaguely Chinese lab in an Asian-like country, only to have it stolen by Vector. Now, in order to get a loan from a Villian bank, he has to steal the shrink ray back.

This is where the story “takes off”. Gru sees a trio of little girls gain access into Vector’s lair because they are selling cookies. They’re orphans and Miss Hattie,  the cruel headmistress of the orphanage forces them to sell cookies, and if they don’t make their quota, they get put in The Box. It’s literally a cardboard box, but it’s not funny. Gru goes in, adopts the girls as a sure-fire way to get into Vector’s lair, but along the way, he starts falling in love with them. You also learn that his mother has ignored all his childhood achievements, and that’s why he turned to villiany-to get the attention and a sense of accomplishment.

Gru’s villian-partner Dr. Nefario doesn’t like how he’s become distracted, and calls the orphanage and has the three girls taken back. Hijinks ensue with Gru stealing the moon, trying to make to the girls’ dance recital in time, and then has to get them back from Vector, who now wants the moon from Gru.

Despicable Me had its moments-there are a crowd of side-kick creatures who are bound to have their own series in the near future (but like the Smurfs, the females don’t exist). And Gru evolves in a sort-of sympathetic character. He’s a bumbler, and you can’t take him seriously.

My problem is with the role of the three little girls, Margot, Edith and Agnes. Gru’s and Vector’s and Dr. Nefario’s and the bank’s villiany is acknowledged and expressed.  While we’re shown the horrible conditions the girls live under, that is never acknowledged, not even by them. They’re abused, yet it’s played for laughs-given that this is a children’s movie (?isit?) that’s expected, but it has slid over into tasteless territory. Stealing a pyramid? Funny. Putting little girls in boxes in imitation of POW torture? Not funny at all.

The girls are sad when they’re booted back to the orphanage with the abusive head of the orphanage–but never express too much anger about it. Nor does Miss Hattie ever get HER punishment, and there’s not any thought about the other orphans in her orphanage, as some sort of wrap up in the plot. Gru rescues the girls from Vector-but not the orphanage and evil-but-”nice” Miss Hattie. Notice that the rescue is from HIS adversary, but not theirs?

Then there’s Gru’s Mom, voiced by Julie Andrews. The only time she gives Gru her approval is when she sees he’s actually made himself into an attentive parent, which is what she was emphatically not. It’s one of the punchlines-the parent willfully ignoring their own neglectfulness and incompetence, praising their child for qualities they didn’t possess, yet take credit for.

So the thesis of this movie is, if you’re a mother, you’re at fault for your adult child’s behavior because you were neglectful or not Mom enough. If you’re not the mother, you are cruel and hate children, and are put in charge and yet, are never called upon your abusive practices. If you’re a little girl, you’re the way a grown man can man-up and find his softer feelings, and that’s about it. Your needs are fulfilled as soon as he loves you. But if you’re a woman, and you’re in a parental role, you suck royally.

And just as in Up with the dog pack, the lack of female minions is a real trend. These are alien looking tubey creatures, so it’s possible they reproduce via parthenogenesis, or are both sexes and don’t look it. I suppose the filmmakers thought there were villianesses enough in the orphanage headmistress and Gru’s mother. She doesn’t even have her own name!

I’m starting to wonder why I paid money to see this movie. Oh, right: I have two children, and they liked it. I’m disliking it more and more.

1. Up – by Pixar–SPOILERS and a small rant
2. Alice in Wonderland
3. Review– Coraline (the movie)

I really loved this movie. I just tried to persuade my housemate to go see it with me — this would be my second time, and her first.

Basically, Alice is nearing 20 and is going to what’s secretly an engagement party to the somewhat annoying young Lord Hamish. As she’s wandering the grounds, she talks with her friends and family, all of whom offer varying views on marriage (it’s a pathway to happiness; it makes you less of a burden on your family; it’s a trick; it’s a duty and a set of duties; it’s something to wait for longingly) before she finally makes it up to the gazebo, where the lord proposes. When he does, everyone stares at her, waiting for her inevitable yes. Instead, Alice turns and flees, following the rabbit she’s glimpsed out of the corner of her eye down a mysterious rabbit-hole.

When she lands, she finds a land that’s oddly familiar — it’s like the recurring dream she had as a child, only realer and bit scarier. She finds the Dormouse, the Tweedles, and the Caterpiller, all of whom insist that there’s no way THIS Alice can be the Alice they need… the one that can kill the Jabberwocky, the Red Queen’s fearsome beast keeping the rest of Wonderland intact. Of course, Alice IS the right Alice… just not yet. What follows isn’t a return to childhood. Instead it’s a coming of age story about loyalty, love, and what it means to accept (and thereby take charge of) one’s destiny.

Clearly I’m a big fan.

What I especially liked:

1. THE DORMOUSE. Voiced by Barbara Windsor, the Dormouse is a fierce warrior who STEALS every scene she’s in. She goes for the eyes. She’s as big as my thumb, and took down the Bandersnatch, a slavering beast tasked by the Red Queen to find Alice, buying Alice enough time to escape. She launched a single-mouse expedition to save the Mad Hatter when he was taken captive and did all this while being nicely idealistic and sardonic. I got the impression that the Dormouse wasn’t going to wait for Alice to grow the hell up — she was actively working to bring the Red Queen down, and just invited Alice along for the ride.

2. THE WHITE QUEEN. I was set to dislike the White Queen for being a pretty pretty princess, until I realized that Anne Hathaway was physically parodying Glinda’s arm motions in the original Wizard of Oz, including the off arm crook, which other bloggers have called at as bearing a striking similarity to Lady Gaga’s weird “Bad Romance” dance. Part of this is because the White Queen has taken a vow to do no harm — she’s literally a fairy queen who is unable to defend her nation. At the same time, the end of Alice illustrated that her refusal to break her vows had more to do with her mettle as a queen than with the delicacy of her sensibilities, especially since she is a kind of necromancer. The Red Queen has dominion over living things (which is why she can kill them) and the White Queen has dominion over death and dead things (which is why she cannot kill, but is still a powerful magician).

3. ALICE. Mia Wasikowska owned this role. At times, it’s a little Luna Lovegood, what with the blonde airiness… but then there are moments Alice’s facade of vacancy cracks, particularly when she begins to regain her “muchness” and grows back into herself. She’s vacant because she forgot herself, not because she’s totally a spineless dreamer. Plus, at the end, when she issues her “OFF WITH YOUR HEAD!!!” war cry to the Jabberwocky and that beast goes DOWN? Look, all I’m saying is that Alice is picking and choosing between types of femininity, and with integrating these different versions of self into one coherent person. She’s a bit of a dreamer, a bit like the gentle White Queen, and handy with a blade like dear sweet Red. None of this is contradictory. Don’t believe me? Better get some practice believing six impossible things before BREAKFAST, fool.

4. THE CINEMATOGRAPHY. Look, Avatar was a very pretty film… but Alice in Wonderland is more narratively sound. Plus, each part of it, including the use of 3D animation, worked to build on its themes regarding adulthood, wonder, and care of the self. It’s a beautiful film, AND a well-crafted one.

5. THE ONGOING CRITIQUE OF MARRIAGE. I don’t care what anyone says. I’m glad Alice doesn’t get with the Mad Hatter at the end. I’m glad this is one of the few films out there that doesn’t end in a marriage plot or a heterosexual coupling or hinge on true love. The critiques the film offers of marriage at the beginning all focus on losing one’s sense of self, one’s “muchness.” They focus on submitting to fashions that are uncomfortable, demands that are unpalatable, obligations that deaden one’s sense of humor and wonder, and other things that take one off the trail towards one’s fullest self. I loved that this theme was reiterated in the Red Queen’s murder of the King, and Stayne’s manipulation of her emotions so that the Red Queen was constantly paranoid about her courtiers’ love and affection. I loved that Alice didn’t need to stay in Wonderland to become her truest self, and that she could leave the Mad Hatter behind and have that not be a tragedy, or like, a thing where he secretly appears in “our” world, like that scene at the end of Labyrinth. Instead, she returns to our world, declines Lord Ascot’s marriage proposal, and becomes an apprentice to the financier who bought her father’s investment business.

On the one hand, I want to be annoyed that in this film, Alice’s dreaminess and heroism is located as her inheritance from her father. She’s the daughter of a man with vision — not the daughter of a woman who managed to keep herself and her daughter safe, clothed, and wealthy after that man died. At the same time, I really fell in love with large parts of this story, particularly that moment when the Hatter tells her that she won’t remember him when she leaves, and she leaves anyways, and the Caterpillar totally validates that as the right decision to make!! God — what an antidote to Twilight.

Jezebel offers a link round up of the critics’ reviews, and has a somewhat less enthusiastic review up as well.

I got a kick out of this review as well.

1. / Slant / — Greg Bear
2. The sexual tension that wasn’t
3. The Red Wolf Conspiracy — Robert VS Redick

First of all, let me introduce one of my new favorite movie characters: Edna Mode.

Have you ever wondered where super-heroes get those fabulous costumes? Well, wonder no more! They’re designed by Edna Mode.

Edna is brilliant, clever, powerful, and — surprisingly for a movie — not particularly glamorous. As I’ve said before, I don’t object to female characters being beautiful, glamorous, sexy, etc. What I don’t like is that in movie-land practically all sympathetic female characters have to be beautiful. It gives a weird message that women don’t count for anything (or don’t exist) unless they’re pretty, whereas males can be any size shape or form. I love that Edna’s own personal glamor is a non-issue because it’s overshadowed by how amusingly eccentric she is. She’s the sort of “funny little character” that the typical screenwriter-on-autopilot would have made male by default.

But as a mom, I love the mom (Elastigirl) even more. I think the character gives a positive and (crazily enough) realistic portrait of a successful woman making typical sacrifices (expected of women) when raising a family.

I particularly like the scene where Elastigirl is flying a plane (where she has discovered two of her kids have stowed away) and suddenly finds the plane under attack. Obviously this specific scenario doesn’t happen much in real life, and yet it was a great portrait of what maternal multi-tasking is like in a moment of danger: dealing with the danger itself with one hand while dealing with the frightened children with the other.

I’ve become so jaded by all of these kids’ films with the disposable mom character that it was absolutely thrilling for me to finally see a kids’-movie scene where the mom takes control in a time of crisis, and saves her kids and herself.

This is probably my favorite line in the movie:

Everybody calm down. I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to panic, we’re not going to — Look out! [She quickly pushes them out of harms way before resuming her pep talk.]

My kids love to watch all of the extra material on the DVD (deleted scenes, etc.), and the transformation of this film provided a fascinating contrast with the transformation of the Jungle Book II. As you may recall, in the Jungle Book II, they started with a potentially interesting female character who was systematically reduced to the point where there was no danger of her distracting the audience from the all-important male character. Surprisingly, the transformation of The Incredibles went the other way. Originally, the flight-under-attack scene had a male pilot flying the plane for Elastigirl and the kids. He was axed because introducing (and killing) his character added irrelevant complexity. I’m glad because the final version of the scene is a lot more dramatic than the original (unused) version.

The other bit that mercifully got the axe was a scene where a mean, bitchy career woman disses Elastigirl for being a stay-at-home-mom, and they get into a fight. Here’s what the director says about it:

This is based on a thing that my wife has had to go through. She worked in film editing, and when we first had our kids there was a decision about whether or not she should continue working (because she made good money) and I said that as long as we can bring in enough money, it would be great to have a mother around all the time. And we made it work, but one thing she noticed was that when you’re talking about work, everyone could connect with that, everyone got it, everyone was like “Hey, you’re another working person, isn’t this difficult and all that?” Once she said that she was a mother and worked in the house, their eyes glazed over and they kind of dismissed what she did.

I hate to have to explain what’s wrong with this. It’s not that he’s evil or deliberately sexist or anything like that. It’s that he has obviously never been in a position where he has to choose between career success and the needs of his kids — and, really, has no empathy for what it’s like to have to make such choices. I totally relate to the invisible woman hidden in his comment. Juggling career and family typically entails a lot of sacrifices for women (and regrets, regardless of which choices/sacrifices they make). It’s infuriating to see a man who has asked his wife to sacrifice her career turn around and glibly pin the resulting stress on his fantasy bitchy career women who (supposedly) just don’t value motherhood enough.

The other thing that jumps out at me about his comment is his definition of the word “everyone.” If you happen to be talking to a group of stay-at-home-moms, then you absolutely will not get the reaction he describes above! So his definition of “everyone” doesn’t include SAHMs. Wow, way to stand up for moms!

After watching this deleted scene, I’m actually surprised that the character of Elastigirl was portrayed so well.

Then there’s the other exceptional scene that makes this film pass the Bechdel test with flying colors:

Violet: Mom! What happened on the plane, I’m sorry. I mean, when you asked me to… I’m sorry…
Elastigirl: It isn’t your fault — it wasn’t fair for me to suddenly ask so much of you. But things are different now, and doubt is a luxury we can’t afford anymore, Sweetie. You have more power than you realize.

A mom acting as a mentor, giving her daughter advice on how to succeed and build her talents. Again, this is the sort of thing that shouldn’t be unusual in movies, but it is.

Of course this film has plenty of all-male buddy-buddy and hero-villain action. Despite what I’ve said so far, the star of the film really is Mr. Incredible. I’m just glad to finally see a big-budget kids’ film where the female characters are really characters, not just props and scenery.

1. City of Ember: Worth Watching
2. Up – by Pixar–SPOILERS and a small rant
3. I’m Not There: How to Write a Good Female Character We Rarely See

It did get a little toothgrinding, though, that Ellie, Carl’s wife, ended up dying before she could have HER adventure, and it was a little too pat that, once he actually looked through her adventure book, he discovered all the pictures she of the two of them together with a message to him “I’ve had my adventure [being with you], now go on and have some of your own!”. As if THAT hadn’t been an adventure for him, also?

I’ll admit that I cried a fair amount..okay, an effing lot, because Pixar manages to push all the right buttons of, “They Really LOVED each other“, and okay, that’s fine. That’s what these movies are supposed to do.

But it rankled afterward upon reflection that there were no other women in the movie until the very end, when Russell’s stepmother? mother? nanny? –it’s never made clear– makes her presence known in the audience at the very end when he gets his Explorer Badge. How hard could it have been for Russell to be a little girl? After all, Ellie was a spunky, lively, funny, intense and amazing little girl (we only get to know her as an adult through a montage). Did the filmmakers think they shouldn’t repeat it with a different little girl? I guess that’s what they were going after. Why not have the boy’s troop be a Campfire troop with both girls and boys in it? Only boys are allowed to have real adventures that take them all over the globe? Girls are satisfied with the adventure of marriage and relationship bliss?

There’s a huge pack of dogs in the section of the movie that takes place in Venezuela. Can you believe that the dogs were all male, too? How did they make more dogs? Where did the puppies come from for all those years? Were they all hidden in some secret whelping cave dutifully making puppies by the score?

I don’t want to make it sound like I hated this movie: No, I liked it, a lot, and it’s gorgeous and the story just whisks you along with poignant character moments. And it is nice to see Carl’s devotion to Ellie, his dead wife, throughout the movie.  I think it is wonderful that there’s a decent animated movie with a geriatric main character. It was also great to see them meet as children, and then spend their entire lives together. That’s the kind of marriage that I think everyone who’s married wishes they could have.

But I am disastisfied, once out of the theater, at the message below all the fun in this movie: Girls, you can dream about having an adventure; Boys, you can actually LIVE the adventure.

1. Watchmen: The Silk Spectre (Major Spoilers)
2. Review– Coraline (the movie)
3. Open Thread: Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian

I thought it was funny, but I didn’t like it much.

The main change in this sequel is there’s a female costar. Amy Adams plays an effervescent Amelia Earhart. I won’t quibble too much with the immense difference between this adventurous, bubbly character who doesn’t appear to have much of anything in common with her namesake other than the name, accomplishments and drive. Adams steals the show from Ben Stiller’s Larry Daley, who is as directionless as he was in the previous movie. Only, this time, his character arc didn’t hold water.

There were too many heart-to-heart pauses breaking the action up and some excruciatingly overlong scenes between Larry and various other characters that may have been hilarious when they were filmed, but stumbled when overcooked on the screen.

Battle for the Smithsonian should have stayed in script development for a few more months, but I guess the studio isn’t regretting the timing of the release. It’s done very well at the theater.

The main characters from the first film are sidelined in this one, for the most part-but shown onscreen just enough to satisfy. I had to scratch my head at the juxtaposition of Sacajawea giving General George Custer lessons on how to charge. And Larry giving Custer a pep-talk about being a leader for their group, while Custer whines of only being known for his final failure and for being a coward (as he would never have thought so in real life)?

If I had to grade this one, I’d give it a C for effort, but a huge F for history and characterization. Give me a break: even a movie aimed at children and their parents should have *some* intelligence to it-especially if it takes place in the Smithsonian.

1. Open Thread: the new Star Trek movie
2. Open Thread: Precious
3. Open Thread: sex as a commodity in Hollywood

SPOILERS a-hoy! Do not read further if you do not want to be spoiled! You have been WARNED!

Assuming you haven’t read the book, know that the movie is faithful to the feel, spirit and mood of Neil Gaiman’s novella.

Aside from the masterful animation and color palate and use of space within the movie, the characters are true to themselves. Coraline is a sassy, sarcastic, been-there-done-that tween with parents who concentrate more on their lives on the computer (for their gardening business) than on her.

There is no doubt that her father loves her, distracted as he is with his wife’s competitive personality and his writing; but her relationship with her mother is the heart of the movie. How could it not be, when the main theme has to do with wish fulfillment of the Perfect Mother?

Coraline’s mother is competitive with her husband, brushes her daughter off with sarcasm that has rubbed off on her daughter, and is in a line of work she doesn’t really seem to enjoy. How can you enjoy gardening-growing things (like daughters, vegetables and flowers) if you hate getting dirty? Teri Hatcher’s voice work for Mother/Other Mother is excellent. At no point did she come across as shrill or completely unlikable; but mainly supremely impatient, self-centered and anxious and smart. There’s no doubt that she loves Coraline. But how she loves Coraline come into question, and is, of course, the opening for the Other Mother to exploit.

An addition of a young male character Coraline’s age was mixed into the story. I was gratified to find out that Wybie Lovat was at least as complex as Coraline, and more tragic, but was never allowed to overshadow her either in the real world or in the Other Mother’s pocket universe. I’m not sure if Neil Gaiman had input into Wybie’s character or his place in the revised movie version, but his presence was organic.

Other elements native to the book were minimized or absent for lack of time, but fortunately, the Cat was not one of them. Coraline’s version of the Cheshire Cat is still charming, though not quite as much as the written Cat. He’s still mysterious and still totally a cat.

Out and about the internet, I have heard some rumblings from parents about the burlesque queens old-ladies. In the audience I sat with, their scene was the only one that engendered any true screeches of “GROSS!” (from children and parents alike!) because honestly, who ever expects mostly-naked old women with enormous attributes and saggy bodies covered only by skimpy pasties and g-strings? Old women aren’t supposed to be sexy. Old women aren’t supposed to go back to their days of sexiness-but these two do. In the pocket universe, they unzip their old selves and step out of the baggage of their old age (which they don’t seem to resent at all) and Coraline and the audience gets to see them as they probably see themselves. Beautiful, lithe, sexy, and yes, classy at the same time, even with the button eyes of the Other Mother’s pocket universe. Their role is a key one. They’re the ones who give Coraline a magic stone to find things. How they know what it is is a mystery, but like many things in the Coraline ‘verse, it doesn’t need explaining. It just is.

There’s also the goofy attic neighbor with the sentient mice who warn Coraline. The total effect is to make Coraline’s Pink Apartment House (a divided up old Victorian) into a circus.

I’ve left the Other Mother for last. At first, she’s everything Coraline’s real mother is NOT. She’s sympathetic. She cooks dinner, and makes Coraline’s favorite snacks. Her concern about Coraline knows no bounds. She’s about as June Cleaver as a mother can get. And Coraline, like any tween her age, believes in the Mom Myth and thinks a perfect mother will look to her every need. But the Other Mother forces Coraline to face reality; that as much as her real mother might not pay her the kind of attention she craves, at least she doesn’t try to actively kill her or make her choose between her soul and happiness.

Movies that feature mother-daughter dynamics like this are few and far between…even rarer than books that feature strong girls making tough or brave choices about what’s important and what’s not. I think Neil Gaiman’s Coraline does prove that girls have the same journeys of self-discovery as boys, and men-and Coraline was fortunate to have a production and animation team that appreciated her as much as her fans do (like my own 12 year old daughter, and me).

1. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline
2. Salt- a short movie review
3. Neverwhere: review, take two

1. Equal hero time shared between a male and a female lead. Doon Harrow and Lina Mayfleet are co-protagonists, and they each discover necessary information and do heroic things throughout the course of the film. Woo!

2. No romance between the male and female lead. In many movies, if there’s a boy and a girl of a similar age and they’re older than, like, six, they get together by the end of the film. It’s a little hard to tell for sure – particularly because Harry Treadaway, who plays Doon, is ten years older than Saorise Ronan, who plays Lina – but it seems that Lina and Doon are meant to be pretty close in age. And yet, no superfluous romance. I know! I was pretty surprised too.

3. Multiple female characters. Who talk to each other. I think there are almost as many supporting female characters in City of Ember as there are male characters, and I counted only two points – in a film full of conversation – where two female characters talked to each other about a male character. At one point, Lina asks an old friend of her father’s about him. Another time, a friend of Lina’s tells her about her new boyfriend. That’s it! All the other talk between women and girls was about the same sorts of things that men and boys talked about. Amazing.

4. This (post-apocalyptic) future has people of color. The bulk of the cast is white, but there are people of color living in Ember, and one of the important supporting characters is a black woman. Well, it’s a start.

City of Ember hasn’t done well at the box office, but I know I’ll be buying a copy when it comes out on DVD. This is the kind of film I’ll be happy to share with the kids I know.

1. Sex and the City 2
2. Film Review – Watchmen
3. Terminator: Salvation

This friendship is one of my favorite moments in the movie. It is so rare that love stories for kids are also stories about friendship. I mean, seriously, do you think Aladdin and Jasmine would have tea together if they weren’t “in love?” What do Ariel and Eric have in common? Or Snow White and Prince Charming?

Anyways, Wall-E and EVE don’t fall in love right away — they become friends first, which is so totally fantastic. Once they do fall in love, you get the sense that the sincere affection underneath their love makes it way more sincere than star-crossed lovers. What’s even more awesome is that this film incorporates all the elements of a fairy tale with none of the triteness. Wall-E ends up feeling like an awesome postmodern take on Sleeping Beauty, where the two robots exchange the roles of rescued and rescuer, and where falling into a charmed sleep is very much about the loss of the self. Both EVE and Wall-E both fall into this mysterious sleep — EVE, when her primary directive forcibly takes her over, and she’s reduced into a pawn of her programming, and Wall-E, when BnL’s planned obsolescence places his very memory in danger of erasure.

I also liked the film’s subtlety. There’s no real villain; instead, everyone’s trying to do what they think is right, or at the very least get by. BnL might have doomed the planet, but you feel like they’re sincere in their panicked attempts to save the world. Also, even though humanity’s now evolved into morbidly obese halo addicts, neither their weight nor their consumerism are used to condemn these far-flung remnants of Earth. Instead, the film judges them for their sheer inability to pay attention to the world around them — they’re divorced from one another through distraction, and not vice. Plus, this alienation is not treated as inevitable; both humans and machines are capable of being engaged in the future of their shared world.

*I do think it’s ironic that Pixar is releasing such an environmentally conscious film that then rationalizes a series of toys and disposable garbage that petpetuate the problem the film describes. BAD DISNEY!
*Purtek talks more about robots and gender here!

1. Jane Lindskold — Nine Gates: Breaking the Wall
2. Thirteen Orphans: Breaking the Wall — Jane Lindskold
3. The Dead Girls’ Dance- by Rachel Caine

Overall, I really liked Wall-E, not least because it was exciting, funny and full of action while at the same time being sentimental and cutely romantic. Too often, the “romance” element of a storyline feels like it’s just been thrown in carelessly – it doesn’t feel real, it doesn’t have a significant impact on the main plot, and it’s treated as trivial. That’s “girl stuff”. In Wall-E, the love story helps to drive the plot and the action, and both elements are given equal weight in importance.

I also appreciated that even though the physical elements of “Eve” and “Wall-E” were drawn to clearly indicate specific genders (Eve being more smooth, curved, and having a higher-pitched computerized voice), many of their personality characteristics reversed conventional gender expectations. Wall-E was the naive one, the hopeless romantic, and the one who was portrayed as having something “missing” in his life without love. Prior to meeting Wall-E, Eve seemed to be doing just fine independently. As the story progresses, Wall-E is the one who most often needs saving, and Eve is frequently the one to rescue him.

These dynamics in the movie did get me thinking about whether or not Wall-E’s actions would have been interpreted differently if “he” had been gendered female. Movie tropes dictate that a male character who makes sacrifices for love is heroic and romantic, while a female character who does the same is needy and pathetic. One scene in particular – showing Wall-E clinging to the outside of a rocket that has absorbed Eve automatically and that is taking off with her inside, desperately shouting her name – had me asking whether I would have felt as sympathetic towards a female lead doing the same. My reactions are, of course, not universal, but I do think that the marketing strategies and movie conventions have a lot to do with how these elements would play differently. I strongly doubt that Disney would have felt comfortable with the idea that this same movie, except with a female “Wall-E” lead character, would have been quite so marketable to kids of both sexes, or could have had quite the same level of balance between action and romance. And that, in itself, emphasizes the unequal treatment of male and female characters, even when they’re robots.

–Ed. Note: Also see Melpomene’s review here.

1. Jane Lindskold — Nine Gates: Breaking the Wall
2. Thirteen Orphans: Breaking the Wall — Jane Lindskold
3. Gender segregating public schools does not work

Nim is a very believable little girl, and likeable and admirable as well.

The story, on the other hand, is frequently absurd. Sometimes it is cleverly so, giving the plot humorous twists, but often it’s just unbelievable and stupid. There’s too much going on, too many coincidences and too many weird and tacked-on-feeling resolutions to narrative problems (boats do not work that way, and neither does mental illness).

But this is the stuff of which children’s films are so often made, and is fairly ignorable for anyone with a little practice in the suspension of disbelief.

Less ignorable are the skeevy race issues. The three main characters are white, which, y’know, is unfortunate, but also typical and unsurprising. There are several other minor characters with multiple lines who are also white, and a smaller number who aren’t. These characters have varying levels of intelligence, poise and skill, but the small-speaking-role characters of color don’t seem to come off as noticeably less worthy than the white ones. So that’s good.

But then, there are the action-adventure fantasy sequences! Nim’s favorite book series is about a character called Alex Rover (who is a bit reminiscent of Indiana Jones), who mostly seems to get into adventures where dark-skinned evil people try to kill him for no apparent reason. Except that they’re evil, I guess. They’re also stupid and cowardly, of course.

It’s a pretty clear callback to the treatment of the Other in the long tradition of pulp adventure novels, but I don’t think that’s any kind of excuse. The novels are shown to be written by a modern (white) woman who is concerned enough about accuracy to research volcanoes before tossing her fictional hero into one. It’s important to know whether the inside of an active volcano actually has red, bubbling lava – but if you need a bunch of villains in a desert, some stereotypical Evil Arabs will do just fine! Ugh.

Oh, also: fat people are absurd, and this is hilarious.

Nim is fabulous. The rest of the movie… Not so much. Which is a major bummer, because I’d really like to be able to wholeheartedly recommend a movie with such a fantastic girl protagonist.

1. Up – by Pixar–SPOILERS and a small rant
2. City of Ember: Worth Watching
3. Open Thread: Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian