Movie review: Up
May. 31st, 2009 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrj(because if I don't do it now while the thoughts are fresh, it ain't gonna get done)
A bit of gender and a very small smidgen of ethnic stuff.
Ok, to get it out of the way: blah blah Pixar, blah blah amazing animation technique, blah blah exquisite texturing and characterization, blah blah unpredictable plot elements, blah blah. Ok, can I move on?
Not sure if I loved the movie or hated it. I got whapped upside the head in the first ten minutes by having the most engaging, most exciting, most intriguing character in the movie killed off. Ok, death by old age isn't quite "killed off", but I'm feeling rather fragile around issues of aging and mortality these years. Knowing that this was going to be a movie about a curmudgeonly old man with no woman in sight, I watched the fast-forward story from childhood sweethearts to widowerhood the same way I'd watch a car driving off a cliff that hasn't hit bottom yet. It's not nice to have a movie promoted as a children's flick make me bawl my eyes out before the story even gets going.
But it's not just that I feel emotionally ambushed and manipulated, it's that in my heart of hearts, I wanted to see Ellie's story, not Carl's story. Ellie is daring, imaginative, assertive, creative; she knows what she wants and reaches out to take it. Carl is swept up almost helplessly in her wake to his delight and confusion. And up until the start of his great adventure, he struck me as chronically reactive, rather than active.
But therein lies the dramatic problem. Carl has been set up with the potential for a major transformative life experience. We could watch him become what Ellie had always been. And because of that, quintessentially active Ellie was relegated to the passive dramatic role of muse and inspiration. Carl's transformation requires Ellie to be disappeared out of the story so that the vacuum of her absence can pull Carl out of his own essential passivity to become the actor on our stage.
This might be simply a classic dramatic structuring device if it weren't part of a larger overriding message: Adventuring is for Boys. Up is, all in all, a classic boys' adventure story, with the very few female characters providing nothing more than the scrollwork on the picture frame. Peculiarly, the revelation of Kevin's female gender only points this up further. Russell named the bird looking at the world through male-defaulting glasses; when he learns the bird is female, it isn't simply a "*shrug* oops" moment, he seems taken seriously aback. And, of course, in contrast to the (male) dogs, who are active, verbal participants in the adventure, Kevin is non-verbal and exists to be rescued.
And while I can excuse the intense focus on Russell's frustrated desire for attention from his father (since this is required in order for Carl to substitute ... in addition to being a perfectly reasonable same-gender role model issue), it's harder to excuse the presentation of Russell's mother as essentially invisible in his life and interests (other than her cameo in the audience at his awards ceremony, because ... like ... she was going to sit there watching him be humiliated and embarrassed on stage until Carl saves the day, rather than stepping in herself and acting as his award-presenter, right).
In short: massively fails the Bechdel Test.
On the plus side -- and this is going to be tricky to say in a non-risky way, but I'll say it anyway -- I like that Russell is Asian-American and it doesn't matter. (Given the limitations of the cartoon medium, I'm not sure whether he's meant to be specifically of Japanese heritage like the voice-actor or not -- the character isn't given a surname.) As far as I can tell (and I certainly don't discount the limitations of my perception), the character isn't presented as Asian-American in order to evoke some particular social stereotype or cultural myth, but simply because in a story coming out of Bay Area culture it's a perfectly ordinary, normal, everyday, unmarked thing for a random schoolboy to be. I feel weird commenting on it in the same way that I feel weird commenting when a movie stars an actress who isn't a cookie-cutter-Hollywood anorexic. It shouldn't be so refreshingly unusual. And yet ....
I have not, in general, been impressed by Pixar's handling of gender issues. For all that Ratatouille included some meta-commentary on gender, it went ahead and reinforced all the tired old cliches. The Incredibles similarly failed to break anything resembling new ground on gender. I won't speak to the various Toy Stories, or Wall-E or any of the other films I haven't seen, but my general impression is that they wouldn't change my conclusions on this. Has Pixar abandoned the field to the "princess is a career goal" crowd? Or do they simply not care about producing movies that inspire girls as girls and not as girls-imagining-through-male-POVs?
Whoops, bedtime. Gotta post and run.
A bit of gender and a very small smidgen of ethnic stuff.
Ok, to get it out of the way: blah blah Pixar, blah blah amazing animation technique, blah blah exquisite texturing and characterization, blah blah unpredictable plot elements, blah blah. Ok, can I move on?
Not sure if I loved the movie or hated it. I got whapped upside the head in the first ten minutes by having the most engaging, most exciting, most intriguing character in the movie killed off. Ok, death by old age isn't quite "killed off", but I'm feeling rather fragile around issues of aging and mortality these years. Knowing that this was going to be a movie about a curmudgeonly old man with no woman in sight, I watched the fast-forward story from childhood sweethearts to widowerhood the same way I'd watch a car driving off a cliff that hasn't hit bottom yet. It's not nice to have a movie promoted as a children's flick make me bawl my eyes out before the story even gets going.
But it's not just that I feel emotionally ambushed and manipulated, it's that in my heart of hearts, I wanted to see Ellie's story, not Carl's story. Ellie is daring, imaginative, assertive, creative; she knows what she wants and reaches out to take it. Carl is swept up almost helplessly in her wake to his delight and confusion. And up until the start of his great adventure, he struck me as chronically reactive, rather than active.
But therein lies the dramatic problem. Carl has been set up with the potential for a major transformative life experience. We could watch him become what Ellie had always been. And because of that, quintessentially active Ellie was relegated to the passive dramatic role of muse and inspiration. Carl's transformation requires Ellie to be disappeared out of the story so that the vacuum of her absence can pull Carl out of his own essential passivity to become the actor on our stage.
This might be simply a classic dramatic structuring device if it weren't part of a larger overriding message: Adventuring is for Boys. Up is, all in all, a classic boys' adventure story, with the very few female characters providing nothing more than the scrollwork on the picture frame. Peculiarly, the revelation of Kevin's female gender only points this up further. Russell named the bird looking at the world through male-defaulting glasses; when he learns the bird is female, it isn't simply a "*shrug* oops" moment, he seems taken seriously aback. And, of course, in contrast to the (male) dogs, who are active, verbal participants in the adventure, Kevin is non-verbal and exists to be rescued.
And while I can excuse the intense focus on Russell's frustrated desire for attention from his father (since this is required in order for Carl to substitute ... in addition to being a perfectly reasonable same-gender role model issue), it's harder to excuse the presentation of Russell's mother as essentially invisible in his life and interests (other than her cameo in the audience at his awards ceremony, because ... like ... she was going to sit there watching him be humiliated and embarrassed on stage until Carl saves the day, rather than stepping in herself and acting as his award-presenter, right).
In short: massively fails the Bechdel Test.
On the plus side -- and this is going to be tricky to say in a non-risky way, but I'll say it anyway -- I like that Russell is Asian-American and it doesn't matter. (Given the limitations of the cartoon medium, I'm not sure whether he's meant to be specifically of Japanese heritage like the voice-actor or not -- the character isn't given a surname.) As far as I can tell (and I certainly don't discount the limitations of my perception), the character isn't presented as Asian-American in order to evoke some particular social stereotype or cultural myth, but simply because in a story coming out of Bay Area culture it's a perfectly ordinary, normal, everyday, unmarked thing for a random schoolboy to be. I feel weird commenting on it in the same way that I feel weird commenting when a movie stars an actress who isn't a cookie-cutter-Hollywood anorexic. It shouldn't be so refreshingly unusual. And yet ....
I have not, in general, been impressed by Pixar's handling of gender issues. For all that Ratatouille included some meta-commentary on gender, it went ahead and reinforced all the tired old cliches. The Incredibles similarly failed to break anything resembling new ground on gender. I won't speak to the various Toy Stories, or Wall-E or any of the other films I haven't seen, but my general impression is that they wouldn't change my conclusions on this. Has Pixar abandoned the field to the "princess is a career goal" crowd? Or do they simply not care about producing movies that inspire girls as girls and not as girls-imagining-through-male-POVs?
Whoops, bedtime. Gotta post and run.
