Up was a heckuva lot of fun.
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.
I was wondering what the general feeling on Brave is? It seems — difficult to tell from the trailer, I know — to be focused on a girl having a proper adventure.
I haven’t actually seen Up, just read the screenplay, so I don’t remember the all male dog pack. But it could be worse. It could be male worker ants. (How did that ever happen???)
I recently came across a site that claims to be able to quantify whether a film will do well or not, including a system for casting correctly (I think Jodie Foster was miscast in The Brave One). I think they’re on to something, and if it catches on, it will become harder and harder to make excuses. (They do claim that female and POC leads don’t draw as large an audience, but I’m ok with that – that just means they need smaller budgets to make a buck.)
Anemone: (They do claim that female and POC leads don’t draw as large an audience, but I’m ok with that – that just means they need smaller budgets to make a buck.)
I’m okay with that too – but only as long as they acknowledge that this is not consistent on every film, and therefore it can’t simply be a uniform preference for white males. Some analysis is required, because other factors are at work.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, a few months ago I examined several female-led movies – two flops, and three big successes that led to franchises. Both flops had heavily sexed up leading ladies; two of the successes had women who weren’t so sexed up; and the final one was Lara Croft, a success with a very sexed up lead, but that’s the sort of movie I classify as “would you like some story with your soft porn” and compared it to Point Break. And then Anemone set up a poll to quantify the phenomenon.
https://thehathorlegacy.com/if-audiences-dont-want-women-as-leads-why-did-aliens-succeed/
https://thehathorlegacy.com/dress-for-success-does-it-work-for-women-in-movies/
I wouldn’t argue that this is the ONLY factor – it certainly wouldn’t explain why some PoC films do just great while others flop. But somebody with some clout needs to be looking for REAL patterns. “Had a woman lead” isn’t a pattern, or Aliens and Underworld never would’ve spawned sequels. “Had a PoC lead” isn’t a pattern, or Eddie Murphy never would’ve had multiple franchises. And hell, I still don’t know what we’re supposed to do with Keanu Reeves, who is part English and part Hawaiian Chinese. When we brought this up in a screenwriting class at UCLA, there was a suggestion that most audience members mistake him for a plain ol’ white guy, so his success didn’t really venerate MoC leads. Really? His first agent persuaded him to use “K.C. Reeves” at first, to mask his incomplete whiteness. Why do that, if “Keanu” didn’t suggest non-white heritage? I think it does, and I think his success is indicative.
So, whatever. The general numbers do suggest that “women and PoC leads draw less box office”, but the actual reason why is not simply the presence of women or PoC, and I’d want to see some acknowledgement of that.
A few things I wanted to say:
– I can see why having an old man and a little girl would have been problematic in our culture, at least to risk-averse Hollywood. But you know what, in real life, women have a life expectancy of 6 years more than men, and there are a lot more elderly widows than widowers. Why couldn’t the elderly person have been an old woman, whose dead husband encourages her to go on adventures, and who goes on them with a little boy? It’s like, when real life favors there being a woman in that position, the filmmakers want to go all edgy and transgressive and subvert the dominant paradigm, and when real life favors there being a man, the filmmakers go all traditional and realistic and stereotypical.
In other words, in real life, there are a lot more women raising children alone than men. So filmmakers write about men because that’s unusual and different. There are also a lot more men being firefighters than women. So filmmakers write about men as firefighters because that’s realistic.
Heads men win, tails women lose.
– Along a similar note to the dogs, in Toy Story 3, it is extremely important to the plot that the villain, his sidekick and another character were all the favorite toys of a child who lost them. The child was a girl. All the toys were presented as boys, INCLUDING THE BABY DOLL. I’m sorry, baby dolls are almost never male, and you have to work hard to find one who’s male, and they generally have “I am a boy” markers painted all over them so the little girls who buy them can tell that they’re male. And the average little girl genders most of her toys as female, especially her favorites. The villain could realistically have been a favorite toy who was male, but Big Baby and the other lost toy who isn’t living at the child care center, the one who tells Woody and co the story, should both have been female, BECAUSE THEY WERE LOST BY A LITTLE GIRL, and also because BABY DOLLS ARE GIRLS EXCEPT UNDER EXTREMELY UNUSUAL CIRCUMSTANCES. Yes, Big Baby was muscle, because Big Baby had a different form factor than the action figures and Barbie dolls, and was much larger. This doesn’t change the fact that Big Baby would logically have been female! A baby doll who is three times bigger than a Barbie is *still* a girl baby in the eyes of approximately 99% of the children who play with her.
Big Baby being male is actually so weird it requires an explanation… like if Big Baby had had rocket hands (something baby dolls would pretty much never have) or something. But we don’t get an explanation. Big Baby is male because Big Baby is a thug, muscle for the bad guy, and that’s a male role. Well, you were *already* going for something weird and transgressive by making a beaten-up baby doll into the muscle, and having the heroes defeat the villain by convincing said muscle that its lost owner really loved it, whereupon it cries (like a baby) and lets them go. But at least, that was weird and transgressive in a way that made sense, because baby dolls are in fact often much bigger than action figures, so Big Baby being much stronger than most other toys and therefore being able to be the villain’s muscle makes sense. Big Baby being male… does not.
Pixar isn’t completely horrible… the dinosaur who lets one of the toys use her computer is female, the random child who rescues and plays with Woody is female (and doesn’t just make him go to tea parties), and Barbie actually gets important stuff to do in this plot (and besides the very existence of Barbie in a collection of a little boy’s toys is unusual). But the failure to have female characters in situations where both stereotype and basic logic suggest the character *ought* to be female annoys the shit out of me.
Fairfield,
Haven’t seen it yet, but my two cents is that a big part of what’s driving the plot is that SHE’S A GIRL OMG WHO WANTS TO DO BOY THINGS (WHICH ARE CLEARLY MORE WORTHY THAN GIRL THINGS). That’s one of the reasons Tamora Pierce’s stuff is so interesting: there are several types of POV female characters who approach femininity in different ways, AND definitions of masc and fem change based on class identities. So Beka being a member of the Watch, for example, and her girlfriend who’s a baker/baker’s wife/small business owner are doing things that in “our” present day imagining of the Middle Ages we associate with “man stuff” even tho working class and middle class women challenged what we imagine labor norms to have been.
Right now, Brave does not even look as transgressive as Mulan (…which wasn’t a transgressive film) since Mulan was not good at being a boy OR a girl, and where her victory was achieved by becoming fluent in both roles (…except then there was drag!fail), and without insulting other women’s life choices.
Maria,
Yes, yes, I love Tamora Pierce’s approach to femininity and its variations.
Another red flag with Brave is that Pixar has said it will be focusing on the mother-daughter relationship which, you know, at least it’s not romance – but when you make the mother the embodiment of patriarchal oppression, there’s always the temptation to let men off the hook and play it like “silly wimminz are always catfighting with each other and dudes are totes hot for anti-feminine girls anyway”.
Like I said, this is just a red flag – they might be able to pull off a nuanced discussion of how the mother is genuinely trying to prepare her daughter for the realities of life in a male-dominated society. I just suspect they won’t.
I have my concerns about Brave as well. Don’t get me wrong; it looks beautiful and I’m dying to see it, but, in the back of my mind, I’m concerned. There are elements of the movie that I love, but I’m afraid that they are going about their first (hopefully really) female-centered story in the wrong way. I mean, of all the main characters introduced so far, only two – Merida and her mother – are female (correct me if I’m wrong); which means it will barely pass the Bechdel test. Plus, it’s a little irritating that Pixar chose to make their first female lead…a princess…in a fairytale. I love fairytales – I find them fascinating, especially because there are so many different versions of them; plus, the capacity to rewrite them and retell them to critique and reflect cultural values is awesome (Jim C. Hines’ Princess series is a great example), but…really, Pixar? The male leads in your movies are all types, ones that haven’t been done to death (I don’t hear the words “male lead” and automatically think of a fish, or a toy, or an old man)…but you’re first female lead is a princess? Really? (I could also go on a rant about how Celia, the “nagging girlfriend” figure in Monster’s Inc, was the only monster to have a traditionally-feminine-humanoid character design – complete with breasts, hips, a mini-dress, pale purple skin, and Medusa hair (oh, the Medusa hair…)! – while all of the other (read: male) characters had character designs completely anatomically unrelated to their gender, but I won’t) I feel like Pixar can do better than that, and I wish that they would take the same diversity of character that they give their male characters and extend that to their female characters.
Something else: Merida’s supposed to be a “strong female character”, but I get the impression (and I desperately hope I’m wrong), that the only reason she’s “strong” is because she does traditionally “masculine” things. I appreciate that she is not traditionally “feminine”, and that she will actually DO something instead of waiting for some guy to do it for her. I also love that she’s an archer. But does she DO things, is she strong, because that’s just who she is? Is she an excellent archer because she likes it and practices her butt off? Or is this a return to the “spirit of a man in the body of a woman” philosophy? Is she strong and skilled only insofar as she acts “like a man”?
This whole movie is shaping up to be an “I like this, but…” sort of thing. I hope Pixar won’t let me down, but, considering that their female characterizations are the weak links in their storytelling…