Yay!

Pixar’s first full length movie with a female protagonist is less than four months away from release. And, as io9 reported last week, the first scene is now previewable:

I’m really excited. ENGAGE INITIAL BURBLE-O-METER:

HURRAH!

• I remain so, so pleased to see a Pixar movie from the point of view of a girl character. Without exception, the entire Pixar canon – which I’m a huge, boxset-toting, scene-quoting fan of, for the record – features male protagonists, and while Jessie, Dory, and Ellie (who determines much of Up‘s story even though it’s via her absence) are all fun and compelling sidekick or partner characters, I’ve been waiting for Pixar to place a female character centre-stage. And now, after over 20 years, we’ve got one in the shape of Princess Merida, headstrong Scottish medieval archery whizz.
• Placing a female character centre-stage, of course, is not the be-all and end-all. Disney’s been doing it for years with their fairytale movies and resultant “princess” brand. They’ve finally brought the curtain down on their run of “princess” films with 2010’s Tangled, which I thought was charmingly smart, sassy and very happy, to a point, to send up its own canon. But it still operated very much within the constraints of that canon – it was, in places, a bit like Legally Blonde in Fairytale Land – and I’m hoping this will bust the box open juuuust a bit more.

BROW-FURROW!

• I think it’s interesting that Pixar have chosen, as far as I can tell, to make their first girl-POV movie begin from a starting problem of an arranged marriage tradition, and the synopsis as it stands (it’s on the io9 page) hints that they’re going with Little Mermaid-style tropes of “headstrong young woman consults wise woman for advice to avoid patriarchal problem; things go wrong”, and so on. Being critical for just a moment, I do think it would be good in the end to get to a Disney/Pixar film where female characters are not lone figures in a world of predominantly male characters, or on quests where the aim is to fight the male status quo. Or as one commenter on io9 put it, “I’m still waiting for the movie about the girl who doesn’t have to prove she’s awesome or that she’s as good as boys”. It makes me want to cheer and bounce off my chair when Merida fires that final arrow in front of all those shocked dudes, but I’d also quite like to just see her … go on a quest that isn’t about Defying Sexism. Lone Female Crusaders are all over our screens with relative frequency, from True Grit‘s Mattie Ross – who has a lump-throat-making scene where she packs her bags for adventure and stuffs rolls of newspaper in a man’s cowboy hat to make it fit her head – to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo‘s Lisbeth Salander (arguably the ultimate Lone Woman On A Vengeful Spree for our time), and I’d like to see more scope for women in Hollywood stories to get to interact a bit more with other women – beyond, for example, “but mother, WHY can’t I do X” and “yes, sorceress, I will make this dodgy deal with you!” at the very least.

BACK TO HURRAH-ING!

• Buuuut the fact remains that this scene still makes me go misty eyed and wibbly at the slightest provocation. I love how it looks and feels, and it’s got Billy Connolly (playing Princess Merida’s warlord dad, with whom she seems to have a pleasingly co-conspirator relationship rather than what I call the King Triton Model, though this does mean relations with mum aren’t looking cosy), Emma Thompson, Julie Walters (the wise woman conflict catalyst!) and more on board. It’s been co-authored by two women (for anyone casually interested in the gender balance of the creative team) and I’m honestly so excited (IT HAS A BEAR IN IT I LOVE BEARS I HOPE SHE DOES NOT SHOOT THE BEAR) that I’m really glad it won’t be long now.
• ENTIRELY SPECULATION, BUT ANYWAY: On the fairy tale riffing front, I’m pleased to see such an obvious Robin Hood folklore moment referenced in the scene above – he, of course, splits an arrow just like this in his own quest to win Maid Marion, and in this version the princess is out to win…her own hand. Neat. Since it was originally titled The Bear and the Bow, so presumably has a bear of some importance in the story, it’s also got me wondering whether it’ll draw on beast stories like East of the Sun, West of the Moon or Brown Bear of Norway. The idea is that the woman goes on a journey and finds a man/foils a curse along the way. That might not happen in Brave at all, but since the opening problem is marriage-related I’d be surprised if no options around the topic came up, and if it doesn’t happen like that, that’ll be an attempt at subversion in itself. Either way, I think with the final title being Brave I’m optimistic about how it’ll turn out for Merida.
• THERE IS A HORSE IN IT AND HIS NAME IS ANGUS. I love Disney’s horses. They’ve carved out a noble niche as providers of bathos and irony over the years from Samson through to Maximus. ANGUS, I HAVE HIGH HOPES FOR YOU. (Although I kind of wish you were an Elspeth, maybe? I mean, Maximus would’ve been fine as… Agrippina, you know?) Oh God, now everyone’s going to think I’m really weird. Uh. Moving on.
• Conclusion: Any road, I think my DVD shelf can take one more Lone Female Crusader in this instance. See you in the cinema.

Weird tales, well told

For one thing, her stories are more original, imaginative and accomplished than much of what is served up to young fantasy readers. The reason I reached for Red Spikes a few nights ago is because I wanted to be transported. I wanted a way out of my worries, and in her short stories Lanagan places you in an (often unnervingly) immediate, vivid and visceral other place.

She’s economical with the detail she gives you, winding her descriptions around dialogue or a protagonist’s thoughts rather than self-consciously setting the scene. The situations and societies she presents feel solid, brutally so at times, without you needing to be told what colour the sky is. The story is about the situation, not the setting, if you see what I mean.

And those situations are genuinely unusual, strange and surprising. You can set your story on the third moon of Azkablam and still make it clichéd, formulaic and dull as ditchwater (famed for its dullness). In Red Spikes and another collection, Black Juice, a girl watches her sister killed in a tar-pit as punishment for murdering her husband, while elsewhere in a circus-y dystopia two anti-clown vigilantes carry out a hit. A girl in a paper dress graduates from Bride School, and a boy finds some tiny figures of a bear and a heavily pregnant armoured queen who grow and come to life in the night. Naturally, he is enlisted as midwife.

Lanagan’s stories are bizarre, and even when you’re in more familiar terrain they’re often told from an unusual point of view. In Black Juice a village is periodically attacked by terrifying underground ‘yowlinin’ monsters. So far, so Tremors. But the tale is told by an ‘untouchable’ outcast, treated as a monster herself, who saves the life of the boy she loves only to be rejected. However, UNLIKE the Little Mermaid, she doesn’t wimpily dissolve into seafoam, but sees him for the coward he is and strides away into her future.

These synopses have probably given you a clue that as well as being strange, Lanagan’s stories are often pretty dark. And if you think Harry Potter is ‘dark’ you may be in for a shock: the first few chapters of her novel Tender Morsels include child abuse, incest, forced abortion and gang rape.

Tender Morsels

Here’s a review that describes why I think it’s a remarkable work. But it is distressing. Briefly: 14-year-old Liga lives in the usual cottage-on-the-edge-of-the-dark-forest with her father, who repeatedly rapes her. When she becomes pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion. He dies, but she discovers she has become pregnant again. She has her baby and lives alone in relative peace in the cottage until some boys from the nearby town come to find her and sexually assault her. Liga despairs, takes her baby daughter to a ravine in the forest and tries to kill them both, but they are magically saved and wake in what seems to be a parallel world in which she is at last safe. The townspeople have been replaced with kind, two-dimensional versions of themselves, and in this world there are no men. It seems to be a heaven that Liga has created to protect herself and her daughters (she has another baby). But as her daughter grows up the membrane between their protected world and the world Liga left behind starts to grow thin, and the story becomes a reimagining of the traditional fairytale of Snow White and Rose Red.

Of course, when it was published Tender Morsels met with a fair amount of controversy, but I agree with Lanagan when she says “I guess I’m not a big fan of corralling sex, death and war into the adult world and then giving children a terrible shock when they realise their existence.” Besides, there is nothing graphic, titillating or exploitative about the descriptions of the abuse suffered by Liga in the novel. One of the things the book is about is how people take refuge and heal from trauma.

Women in fairytales

It’s also about fairytales, and women’s lot in them. Asked in this interview why she was drawn to the Snow White and Rose Red story, Lanagan said:

Mainly I was annoyed by what the Grimm Brothers had done with Caroline Stahl’s story, that is, rewritten it to deliver a very oppressive message to girls and women: At all costs, however beastly your menfolk’s behaviour, remain nice, kind and always willing to come to their aid. This kind of message is not uncommon in the collections of transcribed and revised folktales of the 18th and 19th century, and it’s distressing that those versions are often mistaken for the root stories – although they still sometimes contain the germs of the originals, they are very much products of their times and societies.

So, the irritation was the main thing, but then I couldn’t resist a story that had such a great character as the ungrateful dwarf, the kindly bear and the three bemused women, trying to make good lives for themselves in an ever stranger world.

Like Angela Carter, Lanagan seems to be interested in the rawer, messier, less moral incarnations of our familiar fairytales, but where they differ is that Lanagan’s story fully inhabits the folkloric style where Carter’s versions are self-conscious and ironic.

The final thing I love about Lanagan’s stories is that they’re full of GIRLS and WOMEN! All kinds of different ones! With different personalities! And they do things! In Tender Morsels there are two witches, both distinct and full-developed characters, with powers and flaws and everything. The novel deals with violence against women, but also with women’s sexuality and desires.

I can’t say I’d recommend them to help you get to sleep, but Margo Lanagan’s stories offer strange worlds to be explored.