viz. - fantasy

Lilo & Stitch: The Danger of Beautiful Stories

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

If Frozen (as my previous blog argues) gleefully revises Disney’s traditional iconography, Lilo and Stitch does something far more interesting. Both are, in their ways, re-telling of fairy tales, but Lilo and Stitch proves far weirder, as well as far more intelligent, than its visually-immaculate descendent. We have already discussed Lilo and Stitch once at the Viz blog, praising it for its ability to subvert the “prince charming” narrative. Yet Lilo and Stitch is certainly worth at least one more look. The film is, in fact, both far more critical, and far more thoughtful, than Frozen is. Indeed, the film (despite its rough spots) is sophisticated and thoughtful in a lot of ways that Frozen never dreams of being, and may have something quite important to say about the way we engage with popular children’s stories.

The scene at the heart of the film—and I am aware this may be a contentious statement—involves neither of the female leads, but rather Stitch, Lilo’s hyperactive, destructive, pet alien “dog.” Near the climax of the film, when Stitch is finally coming to be accepted by his nontraditional adoptive family, he uncharacteristically runs away. Taking Lilo’s beautiful picture-book of The Ugly Duckling, he vanishes into the woods; there, in the rain (of course), he expresses a sorrow previously alien to his nature. “I’m lost,” he cries, before the scene fades to black.

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

The scene would be puzzling, and seems to break with the film’s otherwise-reasonable plotting. Stitch has a lot of deficiencies, to put it mildly, but a lack of directional sense is not one of them. Nor is he particularly prone to deploy creative metaphors, or to express heartfelt narratives of any sort. Helpfully, however, the film gives us a key image to let us understand Stitch’s plight. Moments before, the camera showed us the page Stitch was reading; an image of the Ugly Duckling, alone, wishing for his family to be reunited with him. Stitch, in fact, emulates the Ugly Duckling’s pose as he mimics the story’s dialog, while the virtual camera floats to the proper height to cement the visual similarity.

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

The moment has a cruel brilliance to it. Stitch misses the point of the narrative even as he re-enacts its climactic scene. Already, he had found his kind—Lilo loved him unconditionally from the first, and even her older sister Nani was forced to accept that he counts as ohana, part of a family where “nobody gets left behind and forgotten.” In any other Disney movie, Stitch would have come to a saccharine realization that the story of “The Ugly Duckling” is about his relationship with Lilo and Nani, and would have come to a happy ending then and there. Instead, he is unable to see the two orphaned sisters, who yell at each other and inhabit a house full of unmade dishes and filth-covered stoves, as part of the same world as an elegant swan and her children. So he waits, in the woods, repeating the phrase “I’m lost” while hoping that such mimicry will automatically generate the happy ending that the fairy-tale promised. A fairy tale that many people see as beautiful and true becomes, for Stitch, an elegant lie that keeps him from embracing his true family.

Indeed, in the film’s portrait of Kaua’i, a magnificient island whose tourist industry never seems to generate enough money to provide security, beautiful and polished stories can only be the enemy of practical wisdom. Lilo’s friends, for instance, each are equipped with Barbies, all modeled after their own complexion yet impossibly thin, tall, and elegant.

Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

Lilo, however, is bored with simple stories. Her doll is an adorable, muppet-like monster named Scrump whose life is soon to come to a gory end. “Her head’s too big,” Lilo says, “so I pretend a bug laid eggs in her ears, and she’s upset because she only has a few days to—.” Delivered in her cheerful, indomitable voice, the line doesn’t feel particularly morbid but rather testifies to Lilo’s vibrant inner life, filled with life-and-death struggles whose fantastic SF elements insulate them from the concerns of her fragile daily existence. Her friends, on the other hand, are bored, if not grossed out, by Lilo's ability to love a doll that isn't manufactured to demonstrate an artificial perfection. They leave the scene before she can even finish the sentence.

Poor Scrump. Everyone's afraid of him! Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

If that early scene wasn't enough to emphasize Lilo's distaste for conventional narratives, another comic scene (recorded, but sadly never animated) drives home the point. Hearing one too many rich, grotesque, continental-American tourist repeat the same boring question ("where is the beach?") Lilo launches her own poetic revenge. Using her local connections, she makes sure that a siren is going to be tested, then convinces the tourists that the test actually heralds a tsunami that moves "faster than the speed of sound." Lacking any sense of curiosity or independent thought, the Lemming-like tourists flee in a panicked herd. The local CPS officer doesn't share their morbid glee, but Lilo lets him in on a secret. "If you lived here," she says, "you'd understand." Lilo's love for the morbid and bizarre has, it turns out, some specific roots: a bitter frustration of dealing with insensitive outsiders who refuse to recognize the humanity of the natives.

Older sister Nani seems too busy for stories; she’s constantly scrambling to get a job and prove to the local Child Protective Services officer that she can function as a decent mother. Even so, she shares with Lilo an ability to inhabit a world of dark fantasy and a distaste for conventional narratives. When she’s fired from her waitress job, her first reaction is to call it a “stupid fakey Luau.” Her second is to tell Lilo that “The master’s a vampire, and he wants me to join his leigon of the undead.”

The obsession that Lilo and Nani have for rough-hewn narratives also applies to rough-hewn people. Lilo and Stitch probably features more diversity than any Disney movie not starring animals, and Lilo, at least, loves it. She collects photos of people—all obese, all living rich and fulfilling lives. Looking up at these people whose body types prohibit their participation in any other Disney movie, she draws only one conclusion. “They’re beautiful,” she says. Such courageous vision is probably the reason she can tell her own horrific story without flinching; looking at a photo taken before her parents died, she speaks simply and plainly. “That’s us, before. It was rainy, and they went for a drive.” Then she turns her attention back to Stitch. “What happened to yours? I hear you cry at night. Do you dream about them? I know that’s why you wreck things, and push me.”

"They're Beautiful!" Image credit: captured from Netflix.com

I have a harder time loving the movie as a whole than I do its characters, themes, and often shockingly-precise dialog. Stitch brings with him a lot of space-opera insanity that would be joyous in another movie, but here seems an unwelcome violation of the film’s otherwise gentle and thoughtful tone. I’m not sure how the audience is supposed to feel, for instance, when Snitch takes a chainsaw to Lilo and Nani’s house. It’s wacky fun at the time, but then we have to face a distraught Nani, who races home in anguish just as she’d finally found a decent job, and has to watch in despair as her sister is carted off by the sorrowful CPS officer.

Despite its rough edges, Lilo and Stitch pulled in nearly $150 million at the domestic box office, not quite the blockbuster numbers of Frozen, but a decent profit for a film with a budget of only $80 million. Sadly, while the success of Lilo and Stitch may speak well of the average American moviegoer, only Pixar has come close to producing the same sort of thoughtful, emotionally-complex storytelling, and they have had much more success with boys than girls as protagonists. Lilo and Stitch remains, then, as a unique, flawed masterpiece—and above all a warning about the stories we tell, the images we show, and the damage done when people are sold a pristine image of life whose glamor they will never be able to equal.

Frozen: The Anatomy of a Gaze

Scott Garbacz — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Image credit: The Guardian

The first song composed for (but ultimately cut from) the recent Disney blockbuster Frozen explicitly engages with Disney's presentation of female characters. In the song, entitled "We Know Better," young princesses Elsa and Anna lay out a laundry list of objections to the traditional idea of a "Disney Princess." The film's two heroes refuse to be the sort of princess who "always knows her place," insist that a real princess “laughs and snorts milk out her nose," and maintain their right to mention “underwear.” Though whimsical, the film sets out its heroines' priorities: the only things they take seriously are their sisterly friendship and the political demands of ruling the realm. In climactic two-part harmony, the girls promise to "take care of our people and they will love / Me and you." If films like Tangled and Brave taught Disney that their princesses can (quite profitably) take center stage without dressing up as boys, Frozen insists that its female leads will be more concerned with national policy than with the clothes they wear.

The film's feminist aims were reflected in early reviews. NPR discussed the film's hit single, and the message of empowerment that many tweens heard in its lyrics. Social media exploded with a list of "7 Moments that Made Frozen the Most Progressive Disney Movie Ever." On the other hand, Frozen came under fire for perpetuating some of the worst tropes of the very "Disney Princess" genre it mocks. From critiques of Elsa's embodiment of Disney's Madonna-whore dichotomy to concern over the ridiculous gender dimorphism of its CGI character-models, the movie collected criticism as well as praise from feminists. Frozen was often compared unfavorably to Lilo & Stitch, a movie with its own fascinating treatment of social narratives.

In this post, however, I'm not particularly interested in praising or condemning Frozen so much as in understanding how it works. In particular, I want to draw attention to a visual contradiction that I see energizing much of Frozen. On the one hand, the the film claims to be a reversal of what we expect from a Disney film. On the other hand, in its meticulous computer animation actually displays a deep reliance on the sorts of traditional, emotional-powerful images created by Disney and other culture-makers over the years.

Take, for instance, the following freeze-frame, an image featured in various promotional materials, including (as seen below) Disney.com's website for the film:

Image credit: Disney.com

This image is particularly powerful because, in its essence, we have already seen it a million times in previous fantasy films and cartoons (though never, perhaps, executed with such icy beauty or complexity.) A young protagonist gazes upon an exotic, striking location, while the viewer's gaze is drawn along the explorer's eyeline through careful image composition. At the top of the image is a distant, female beauty, more of an icon than a person; Elsa's face is an indistinguishable blur, looking over her elegantly-clad shoulder as her dress swirls about her.

Such an image announces its continuity with previous riffs on the same motif, such as the scene where Prince Phillip hacks his way towards his future wife's magical castle in Sleeping Beauty, or the scene where Alladin's titular hero looks out at the city of Agrabah while dreaming of the life lead by its princess, Jasmine. Indeed, the parallels from the former seem particularly striking. Frozen is the first "ultra-widescreen" Disney fairytale since Sleeping Beauty, and Eyvind Earle's detailed, decorative background work on Sleeping Beauty stands as a predecessor for the elaborately ornate (yet often-threatening) nature of Frozen's arctic scenes.

The two protagonists' red, flowing capes are also suspiciously similar. Image credit: Evensi.com

If Frozen shares much in common with Sleeping Beauty, it also follows T.S. Eliot's dictum that "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." The most obvious shift is one in the characters' gender and motivation. Where Prince Phillip seeks merely to rescue his love and obtain the obligatory "happy ever after" of marriage, Anna's goals are doubled--even doubled against each other. She seeks to be reunited with her sister and thereby restore their family bond, but she also wants to save the realm from her sister's magic, a political task that places the two of them in a (potentially) adversarial relationship. Within this freeze-frame, then, it is fitting that Anna herself is duplicated. While Elsa's body faces away from the reader and seems ready to confront Anna, her reflected gaze points vaguely to the right of the image, her mouth slightly open in uncertainty. This doubling might also be seen to echo Anna's larger character-arc, in which she longs to be the heroic masculine figure capable of saving the realm from Elsa's sorcery, but also wants to be the beautiful ingenue, "Fetchingly draped against the wall / The picture of sophisticated grace." Anna is no prince charming--but she sure can dress for the role.

One thing is certain. In aligning the viewer with Anna, Frozen both re-creates and revises one of Disney's most oft-repeated images. Whether this hybridity represents a feminist deconstruction of a powerful gender stereotype or a hypocritical "feminist" gesture in a story mired by inherited images and old forms is a philosophical question beyond the scope of this blog. That such a question might emerge from a single freeze-frame in a popular Disney film, however, is a testament to the power and complexity of images, even those images that flash momentarily on the screen in one of the year's many blockbuster entertainments.

Cosplay and the Visual Rhetoric of Loneliness

Megan Eatman — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 19:19:05 +0000

The Anime Within, Elena Dorfman

The image above is from a photo essay on the Mother Jones website. The essay, entitled "The Anime Within," was disappointing to me, and while I don't want to malign Dorfman's project, especially since I am glad to see cosplay getting attention in a publication that might not normally address it, I do want to critique some of the messages that these images send.

In the picture above, the subject looks uncomfortably stranded between reality and fantasy. While in costume, she wears minimal if any makeup (thereby disrupting the illusion) and is noticeably withdrawn in posture and expression. The dark background suggests that she is nowhere; not in reality, not in fantasy, and certainly not in a community. She looks both alone and lonely.

Not all of Dorfman's subjects look as depressed. The man above's expression looks faintly playful; he has an attitude that seems appropriate to his costume. He is, however, still alone.

I know that photographing the subject alone is a convention of portraiture, but this essay made me more conscious of its effects in particular contexts. Few of the subjects have truly impressive costumes, which would not in itself be problematic if it weren't also for the fact that none really appear to be having fun. The combination of these two elements, combined with the isolation imposed by the dark background, makes the subjects seem less like artists engaged in a vibrant fan culture and more like sad loners half-heartedly trying to escape reality.

In this particular context, it seemed as if the composition choices helped enforce rather than dispel existing beliefs about people in certain fan cultures. While I would not suggest that a photo essay on cosplay ignore bad costumes or sad people, a practice that already has such circumscribed representation in many contexts deserves a photo essay that complicates stereotypes and emphasizes the complex issues of play, belonging, and performance that permeate this culture.