Moana the Mythic Hero-King

Moana was several different brands of delightful, but one aspect that captured my heart is that it draws its inspiration from mythology rather than from fairy tales—something Disney hasn’t really done since Hercules, and something that gives its heroine a very interesting dynamic. The movie features the trickster god Maui as one of its main characters and incorporates other elements of Polynesian folklore, but I was especially interested—and pleasantly surprised—to see that Moana herself has quite a traditional mythical hero’s character arc.

She is a leader, chosen by nature and destiny, who sets out on a quest surrounding an important magical object, where she ventures through the realm of the supernatural and tangles with gods. When it’s over, the balance of nature is restored and she returns to her people as a wiser and more capable ruler. It’s a quintessential hero-king quest narrative, which, incidentally, is also a quintessentially male narrative. But without so much as a shrug, Moana gives this archetype to its female heroine and sends her on her journey.

Remember how I said I could write a whole post gushing about Moana? I did, and you can read the full thing over at Lady Geek Girl!

 

That Thing with Disney and the Faces

Remember when Frozen first came out and the portion of the Intertubes passionate about such things got into a long and detailed fight over whether or not the two new princesses had exactly the same facial design, and as well as that, the exact same facial design as Tangled’s Rapunzel? Well, the argument is back with the newly released posters for Disney’s upcoming CGI movie Big Hero 6, which features all sorts of characters (many of whom have been race-bent away from their original ethnicity, but that’s another kettle of fish), including a white blob in a suit, some superhero kids, and a girl who looks almost exactly like Rapunzel.

Well. This is no longer something that even needs to be argued about, it’s just kind of awkward at this point.

There are some interesting things at play here. “Same Face Syndrome” is a well-known and somewhat damning phrase in the art and animation world, meaning, naturally enough, that all of your character designs have the same face. It’s something, as far as I understand, that’s either associated with beginning artists still getting comfortable with their style and reusing the strokes they know best (fair enough), or, at this point, big industry movies trying to make their princesses look pretty (less fair enough). As this artist points out, it’s much more associated with female characters—Elsa and Anna may look very similar, but the argument that the Frozen character designers were simply conforming to a certain aesthetic falls through a bit when you look at the two male leads of that movie, who are both meant to be handsome but ended up looking very different. So, what, princes and bad guys can be designed differently but pretty, likeable heroines can’t?

Disney’s Anxious Ice Queen

Are we still talking about Frozen? Yes? Excellent. Because I have something important to address about our much-loved, anxiety-riddled role model of an ice queen Elsa.

In early development Elsa, being the snow queen in The Snow Queen, was planned as the villain of the piece, but with some inspiration from her voice actor and a general sit-and-think of things she was reworked to flesh out her potential as a sympathetic, misunderstood almost-heroine. Her ice powers, while not conforming to a lot of logic, serve as a wonderful metaphor for issues of isolation and uncontrollable anxiety as well as being the cause of them in her case. Quite literally, she’s afraid to go out in public, even to her parents’ funeral, in case ice shoots from her fingertips (which to clarify is a very valid fear). Scarred after injuring her sister Anna when they were young, powers that would have otherwise made her super special now just terrify her, and her parents too, who understand them even less than Elsa and decide the best thing to do is to lock her in the castle and impose a ‘conceal it, don’t feel it’ mantra that evolves into Elsa chaining herself to the psychology that she can never reveal the tiniest fragment of her true self to anyone without freezing them.

It’s not fun, and this is made abundantly clear. Sitting alone in a room full of ghostly snowflakes is a pretty nice visual metaphor for having internal issues and not feeling able to talk to anyone about them. Her creators wrote and animated her with a desire to portray anxiety and depression, making her, whether you get clinical about it or not, a Disney princess with major neuroses. Which is not always the stuff of warm hugs, yet Elsa is everyone’s favourite at the moment, across the age groups. I imagine she will stay for some time (it’s been screening in cinemas for four months!). She is the star of a Disney movie after all—those have a lot of cultural influence, and they stick with you. Which is why it’s so great that she is the way she is.

Disney Princesses and Adjectives

Who are you people? Are you the heroes of this movie? Why do you have the same face??

Kids’ movies are a formative influence. Anyone can tell you that. Everyone has that one movie they watched to death when they were young, practically memorising the entire script and score, absorbing the main characters into their personality and wearing down the video tapes until they caught fire. Among other things, this is why it’s so important to create good role models (for girls and boys alike) and powerful stories within these movies, especially if you’re a big influential studio like Disney, who lately has a weird habit of simultaneously capitalising on and denying the existence of their star female characters.

Mulan was my movie and Disney heroine of choice. Conventional princesses were all very well, but I never really connected with them, or superficially admired their tales that much. I looked up to Mulan, not only for being clever and strong and being able to handle a cool sword but because I watched it with my dad a lot, and I think on some level I sort of saw us in the story. Given his Chinese linguistics and history background and involvement in martial arts, I think he enjoyed it too, more than other Disney movies he was, as a gracious parent, inevitably forced to watch ad nauseum. And Mulan deeply admires and loves her father, then goes and protects him like a total boss, and young me really dug that. But, on a less personal level, I think I just enjoyed Mulan because dad-plot or not it was a gosh-darn girl power story, about her and how much ass she kicked.

I could go on forever about the infinite kickassery of this movie and Mulan herself and in doing so revert to my eight-year-old self, but I want to come back to the business of titles: immediately it’s evident, from looking at it, that this story is about Mulan. As well as driving it, it belongs to her, with her name emblazoned on everything and brought up in glowing full-screen glory in the opening credits. There was no question anywhere, this was a film about a kickass lady and Disney was not afraid to tell anyone that.

Mother of a Representation Problem

Ever notice that 99% of the mothers in kid’s movies are dead?

There are reasons for this, I guess—it eases the viewership into a lesson about loss and life, opens the gates for evil stepmothers to stroll in and start wreaking havoc and kind of makes sense given the medieval setting of a lot of the fairy tale-based ones, where surviving past childbirth was rare and only the beginning of your troubles. And, of course, stories about the relationship between female characters are no good and totally don’t sell, so you may as well shuffle off as many as you can to begin with.

Killing off or removing the traditionally steadfast and secure emotional rock of the mother figure is the starting block of plots all over the spectrum, from sitcoms to high dramas. It leads the protagonist, in whatever form, down the “leaving the nest” part of their coming of age story as they have independence thrust upon them, or are caught up in the mess ensuing from their loss (because the mother is often expressed as the sympathetic and wise one who knows how to handle all that mushy stuff, and without her naturally the family falls into disarray. Because of you know, like, motherly reasons. It’s in the female’s hardwiring).

Though it’s not just a case of orphan heroes being the best because fathers are still around, more often than not, creating fun emotional subplots all throughout children’s movies no matter what they’re about. The absence of the mother gets the father-son bonding plotline going—like, off the top of my head, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (widowed father doesn’t understand his son’s dreams to be an inventor, if only Mom were here), Super 8 (widowed father doesn’t understand his son’s artistic passions and his claims the town has an escaped military alien in it, if only Mom were here), How To Train Your Dragon (widowed father doesn’t understand his son’s meek nerdy inability to kill fire-breathing monsters, if only… you get the gosh darn picture).

“Patriarchy, Merida. Patriarchy”

Which is all well and good, but after a while you get used to the formula and wonder, if only for curiosity’s sake, where on earth the genderflipped version is.

Bambi’s Mother Died for Your Education

It’s an experience we’ve all had: sitting down to enjoy a few hours of G-rated fun with friends or family, and then bam — you find yourself staring at the screen with your mouth agape, and this cry seeps from your slackened jaw:

“How is this in a kid’s movie?!”

Take DreamWorks’ Shark Tale: the plot kicks off when a car wash employee is left to die by mafia hitmen when he loses the money he owes them on a horse race. He then witnesses the accidental death of the mafia boss’ son and claims fame for it, leading us into a story of greed, fame, violence, revenge, kidnapping, a tense and emotional love triangle, and the internal struggle of a shark who wants to be a vegetarian. (minus the last bits, that sounds like the freaking intro to Chicago!)

The mafia, and gambling. In a children’s film. Granted, the mafia are sharks and the hitmen are jellyfish (and the racehorse was a seahorse, badum tss) but the point remains.