***As is usual, dear readers, the BadRep pirate flag reading SPOILER WARNING – only mild to moderate this time, but still – is hereby hoisted here! ***

So, Britain’s most beloved animation house, Aardman Animations, the cheerful cohort behind treasured characters Wallace & Gromit and my personal comfort-watchers Chicken Run and Rex The Runt, really can’t go wrong with a film entitled The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists.  It’s adapted from Gideon Defoe’s series of childrens’ books of the same name and derivations thereof, one of which is called The Pirates! In An Adventure With Communists, and if that doesn’t make you deliriously excited, then I’m afraid we can’t be friends.  I haven’t read them yet, but I’ve made arrangements to get them into my eager paws as soon as possible because how can I not?  Pirates!  Everyone likes pirates.

It was the poster that drew my eye first.  Witness:

PIRATES! it says.  And there they are.  There’s a nice representation of different genders, ages, ethnicities and beards on the poster, and I was all excited for a nice diverse film – the sort I tend to dream about.

SHAME IT’S A LIE.

Well, no, I’m exaggerating – it’s not quite a bare-faced man-churned fictivated sin-speech, but it’s pretty fallacious.  The main character is that chap in the middle there, the Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant).  The pirate to the left of him, Cutlass Liz – voiced by the brilliant Salma Hayek – is an award-winning Pirate Of The Year, full of swash, buckle and plunder-power, and gets literally no screen-time in which she isn’t a sex object.  Seriously.  She turns up, wiggles, alludes to her piratical prowess and then… isn’t seen again!  She has, like, three scenes!  And one of them is in the dreams of the Pirate Captain where she’s all, “Ooh Pirate Captain, I am UNDONE”.

The pirate to the right of said Pirate Captain in the poster goes by the moniker Suspiciously Curvaceous Pirate (they’re all “[Adjective] Pirate”). Voiced by Ashley Jensen, she’s a dragged-up pirate with an amazing false beard and a sweet Scottish chirp – who also gets very little screen-time or lines, and whose characterisation appears to revolve around the fact that she likes sparkly jewels, pastel colours and fancies the captain a bit.  The humour of her character is almost exclusively that she’s a cross-dressing woman.  Now, I’m never okay with boys in drag being sent up purely for being boys in drag, so why would I be okay with it if the character’s female?

Not great, is it?

That said, it’s not all bad news for lady characters in this, but from a rather unexpected source: the villain, voiced by the legendary Imelda Staunton, Queen Victoria (“Look at my crest! What does it say?  I HATE PIRATES.”) is absolutely magnificent.  She’s perfect.  Stop making that face.  This is the badassest Queen Vic you have ever seen, and I don’t think it’s possible to not fancy her even a little bit after the credits roll.  She has a battle skirt that clanks aside to reveal a) jodphurs and b) TWO KATANAS.  Come on.  How many other films have had Queen Victoria fighting pirates with katanas before getting vanquished by GCSE-classroom science?  FUCKING ZERO.  THIS IS A UNIQUE CINEMATOGRAPHICAL EXPERIENCE.

OVERALL, the above issues aside, it’s a very funny film – the school of humour whereby if one joke doesn’t wash with you, never fear! there’ll be another one along in a tick – and it’s rich with classic Aardman background detail (the pirate ship has a fusebox, for example, and watch the faces of the taxidermy animals in Charles Darwin’s (David Tennant) house during the bathtub chase scene!).  Martin Freeman’s second-in-command pirate actually looks a bit like him, which is neatly appealing, and Brian Blessed’s megaphonic turn as the Pirate King is predictably godlike.  The dodo is gorgeously animated.  I wish there’d been more scientists doing science-y things, but then I was imagining something dreadful involving shiny gloves, tailored labcoats and experimentation, and there are reasons I haven’t been allowed to make films for children and that’s one of them.

But I did make a new poster, to give the neglected characters just a bit more attention. I made Cutlass Liz look a bit more badass, too, on account of her being badass and therefore deserving of a badass coat:

THERE.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

•  The best Queen Victoria you have literally ever seen
• It’s really painfully funny
• Who doesn’t want to see Brian Blessed being a pirate king, seriously
• There’s Flight Of The Concords on the soundtrack!
• Thank god for stop-motion claymation – surely the finest animation technique ever? THIS HOUSE BELIEVES: YES

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It promises a lot in the trailer and poster in terms of ethnic/gender representation and then doesn’t deliver
• I frankly wanted more science
• And more Brian Blessed
• More of everything that wasn’t the cis/white/male lead characters, actually, I mean they were great and all but I’m bored of cis/white/men being the… we’ve already had this discussion, internet, leave me be

Although the Doctor has, so far, always been male and his companions are most often female, the gender of these characters are somewhat irrelevant when it comes to Getting Things Done. The Doctor is no James Bond or Indiana Jones. He uses intellect, banter and good old-fashioned running away rather than weapons, strength or bravado. In addition, there is nothing to say that regeneration could not leave our Time Lord resembling a human female in the future. This did happen when Joanna Lumley briefly played the part for a Comic Relief spoof in 1999, and there is often speculation about which female actor would be best to play the part.

Having relatively little knowledge of the many original series of Doctor Who, due to my poor memory and loss of interest around the Colin Baker era, I thought I’d ask a dedicated fan for a second opinion on this theory. Nick from book blog A Pile of Leaves agreed that I was right about the irrelevant gender of the characters. “Often the Doctor is a paternal or pedagogic figure, but he’s also depicted as fallible, flaky, eccentric, irascible. The first Doctor was told off quite a bit by his stern schoolteacher companion Barbara, the second Doctor was never as clever as astrophysicist Zoe, and the Fourth went around with a Time Lady for a while who was constantly correcting him.”

The Doctor is simply a person, albeit an alien one, and so many of the usual tropes just won’t work here. He’s not ‘all knowing’, although he does a very good impression of that most of the time, and quite frequently he doesn’t have a plan. Most adventure stories have a hero who will always stay and fight, but the Doctor knows all too well when it’s time to simply give up and run away. Unlike most shows with a male and a female lead, none of the Doctors and companions have really had a romantic relationship until Rose Tyler, somewhat controversially, declared her love for David Tennant’s Doctor. The companions are usually just someone to hang around with, adding an extra layer of excitement and preventing the boredom of travelling alone. Occasionally they know a fair bit more than he does too.

Clearly, no discussion on why Doctor Who is a feminist television programme would be allowed without a mention of the wonderful investigative reporter Sarah-Jane Smith. When the character joined the show in 1973 she was added to give a topical splash of ‘Women’s Lib’, but it took a while for the writers to get the hang of exactly how best to do this. With the help of the actress who played her, the late Elisabeth Sladen, in Tom Baker’s second series as the Doctor Sarah-Jane became a strong, independent character who often worked things out for herself. The writers started to give her some of the lines that had been written for the Doctor and she became more of an equal partner to him, staying on the show for longer than most companions and also returning in 2006 for another adventure. Only the best companions get their own spin-off show, right?

Another excellent character who failed to conform to the annoyingly useless stereotype was Ace. Appearing right at the end of the original stretch of Doctor Who series in the 1980s, Ace, played by Sophie Aldred, had already learned to fend for herself on an alien planet before the Doctor even arrived and was far more tough than he ever was. She battled the Daleks and the Cybermen, gaining confidence during her time in the TARDIS much like the brash Rose Tyler. These days, however, confidence is definitely not something that is lacking when it comes to female characters on the show. Since her arrival in 2010, Amy Pond has always been stubborn, determined and rarely doubts her own abilities. Karen Gillan, who plays her, may have dismissed the idea that Amy is a feminist character, but she most certainly has the ability to kick the patriarchy squarely in the balls. In contrast, her love-interest Rory is a caring and loyal nurse.

For anyone who likes their action-adventure stories to have a proper ballsy action hero, Doctor Who does now have one of those too. Of course, with this being Who, the character is no Jason Bourne. She was introduced in 2008 as a fearless professor and, due to also being a time traveller, River Song (Alex Kingston) not only knew the Doctor but had travelled with a future version of him, which meant that she now knew more than he did! River has seen and done enough to have a pretty good idea how to get out of most situations, and unlike the Doctor, she has no objection to using weapons to get her own way. Most definitely someone I would like to be around to help me out of trouble, but then again, so is the Doctor.

I’m not saying that the programme fulfills every feminist want and need, as it’s still chock full of cliches and stereotypes in places, but this is a story where the parts could theoretically be played by anyone. River Song could be Nathan Fillion and the Doctor could be Helena Bonham Carter. How great would that be? In a Saturday night television schedule where little girls are shown that singing well and looking pretty can make you a star, isn’t it nice that they also have a show to watch where a gang of intergalactic misfits can win via the strategic application of a bit of thinking? There’s more to life than X Factor. Choose Who.

Lori Smith is a rant-lite feminist who enjoys turning her thoughts into word form and then throwing them at the internet to see what sticks. She does this on a weekly basis for BitchBuzz, managed a bit at The F-Word under her Sunday name and dumps the remaining stuff on her blog, Rarely Wears Lipstick.