Meet Cassandra, Rapunzel’s new pal on Tangled: The Series.
TOWER combines archival footage with rotoscopic animation to tell a painful story. TOWER is on VOD now and we highly recommend you check this documentary out.
Studio Ghibli’s Ocean Waves, a 1993 feature that was previously unreleased in the United States, is in limited release right now! Check your indie art house theaters for it and read up on our review of Ocean Waves here: https://goo.gl/PFkJcB
Take back that jab at Jubilee, though. Don’t you ever talk smack about her.
It’s a little narrow-minded to root the majority of important parental relationships in one place. Mothers are too often relegated to the role of nurturer, or are killed off as part of a tragic origin story. They may serve as a moral center or a mentor to some extent like Aunt May, but they virtually never serve as the figure of heroic inspiration.
Remember how Peter Quill’s mother died in Guardians of the Galaxy? Yeah, that was a sad moment…and it was also the entirety of her character’s purpose, while Peter’s yet to be seen dad is implied to be some ancient being of great importance. Probably Adam Warlock, Marvel’s glowing-space-Jesus.
Through most of her history, Wonder Woman has been the exception. Her two greatest mentors were her mother Hippolyta and the Oracle of Delphi, and her formative years were completely free of male influence, with her first encounters with men taking place after she left Themyscira for the outside world.
However, recent versions of the characters, in an attempt to simplify Diana for mainstream audiences, rewrote her origin to make her the demigod daughter of Zeus….as if fiction wasn’t already crawling with his spawn.
Enter Steven Universe.
Superheroes, Steven Universe, and the Maternal Narrative (x)
On its face, the Disney adaptation of The Little Mermaid does not seem to make any political statement. If you interpret the story in its most literal presentation, it actually seems somewhat boring. Although The Little Mermaid is my personal all-time favorite Disney movie, simply because of its beautiful animation and excellent music, I never would have argued in my youth that it’s a good example of a “progressive” movie. The movie’s heroine, Ariel, seems to trade one form of patriarchy for another. Her only “progression” in the movie, it seems, is to transition from the watchful eye of her overbearing father directly into a marriage with a Prince—so, yet another institutional patriarchal power. Plus, she barely even knows Prince Eric! She only seems to love what he represents, which is freedom from her father.
But the entire lesson of the movie changes completely if you look at it through the lens of the probable subtext of Andersen’s story. If we look at Ariel’s journey as a queer coming-of-age story, the movie makes significantly more sense, and it also becomes an impressive feat of metaphorical storytelling. Specifically, I think Ariel’s story works best when interpreted as a pansexual coming-of-age story.
Cue shippers blowing up our mentions to yell about the couples we “forgot.”
But a professor and writer for The People’s Liberation Army Daily denounced the film as American propaganda.
