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Saya · 06-03-2012, 08:17 PM

Well, its been the hobby of film for a long time to make fairy tales more palatable to feminist sensibilities, more recent examples are Ever After and Ella Enchanted and arguably Shrek, but I think Disney was even kinda going for it with Sleeping Beauty, yeah the princess is useless but she's not the hero of the film, neither is the prince, its the Golden Girls in fairy form.

But the critique against the "feminist" remakings its the same, is that the powerful, sexual woman is evil (Maleficent, Ursula, the evil stepmother, pick your fairy tale in which she appears). Its an essential part of the story though, unless we do a remake with an evil step father instead, but then people will scream its too PC and the folklorists get their panties in a twist.

I'd also argue I don't really care about the critique of female dictatorships, a dictatorship is a dictatorship. I don't think mimicking male power is feminist since male power is dominating and oppressive. I had to recently rant about the reboot of the Amazons in Wonder Woman because of how they reinvision a whole society of women, from a paradise where the women lived in peace to a barbaric society of rapists and baby killers. Its the society as a whole that's now fucked up, not Hippolyta who's apparently one of the nicer ones because she boned consensually. For Snow White, its about a young woman who's selling point is that she's the whitest white girl in all of whitedom and her stepmother envies her for that. There's little room for feminist retelling, its arguably shadeist in its very name and heteronormative, and while it puts a woman in as a protagonist in a fantasy/action film, which is sorely lacking to the point where Jackson is making up a female character to put into The Hobbit for the sake of it not being an entire sausage fest, its still same old same old and doesn't push to far. But that's to be expected of Hollywood, really, they're not going to make something that points out how fucked up all the other films they make are. V For Vendetta, for example, wasn't ever going to be about anti-capitalism or anarchism despite that being the whole point of the comic.

This reminds me that I haven't read The Bloody Chamber yet, but the only successful retelling of a fairy tale when it comes to making it feminist sensible, that I've come across, was probably the video game The Path, and a lot of people got upset about that because of the implied rrape.

06-03-2012, 08:17 PM	#6
Saya Join Date: Oct 2005 Posts: 9,548	Well, its been the hobby of film for a long time to make fairy tales more palatable to feminist sensibilities, more recent examples are Ever After and Ella Enchanted and arguably Shrek, but I think Disney was even kinda going for it with Sleeping Beauty, yeah the princess is useless but she's not the hero of the film, neither is the prince, its the Golden Girls in fairy form. But the critique against the "feminist" remakings its the same, is that the powerful, sexual woman is evil (Maleficent, Ursula, the evil stepmother, pick your fairy tale in which she appears). Its an essential part of the story though, unless we do a remake with an evil step father instead, but then people will scream its too PC and the folklorists get their panties in a twist. I'd also argue I don't really care about the critique of female dictatorships, a dictatorship is a dictatorship. I don't think mimicking male power is feminist since male power is dominating and oppressive. I had to recently rant about the reboot of the Amazons in Wonder Woman because of how they reinvision a whole society of women, from a paradise where the women lived in peace to a barbaric society of rapists and baby killers. Its the society as a whole that's now fucked up, not Hippolyta who's apparently one of the nicer ones because she boned consensually. For Snow White, its about a young woman who's selling point is that she's the whitest white girl in all of whitedom and her stepmother envies her for that. There's little room for feminist retelling, its arguably shadeist in its very name and heteronormative, and while it puts a woman in as a protagonist in a fantasy/action film, which is sorely lacking to the point where Jackson is making up a female character to put into The Hobbit for the sake of it not being an entire sausage fest, its still same old same old and doesn't push to far. But that's to be expected of Hollywood, really, they're not going to make something that points out how fucked up all the other films they make are. V For Vendetta, for example, wasn't ever going to be about anti-capitalism or anarchism despite that being the whole point of the comic. This reminds me that I haven't read The Bloody Chamber yet, but the only successful retelling of a fairy tale when it comes to making it feminist sensible, that I've come across, was probably the video game The Path, and a lot of people got upset about that because of the implied rrape.