Feb 10, 2017
you know i’m not sure it’s a coincidence that maleficent had a female writer and dealt VERY explicitly with themes of gendered violence and the overthrow of oppressive power structures, and completely blew apart the structure of its original disney story in talking about those themes... whereas cinderella and now beauty and the beast were written by male screenwriters and both (seem to, in the case of batb) adhere very strongly to the structure of the original animated movies; and in the case of cinderella (batb remains to be seen) the movie utterly fails to deal in complex and thoughtful ways with what issues it DOES raise outside the basic fairy tale structure...?
#██ ( OUT OF CHARACTER. )#i mean like#maleficent's not a perfect movie#but it very deliberately guts the original story in order to use its framework to talk about extremely relevant and real acts of violence#and oppression#and like#don't get me wrong i think that cinderella has an extremely valid approach re: abuse in that#i'm not asking for a strong female character™ treatment#but...? like...?#what i mean by 'fails to deal in complex in thoughtful ways' is that#the movie raises the issue of learned helplessness#and women's financial/social dependence on men#via the treatment/dialogue of lady tremaine#and then ?#never actually critiques or deals with or has a main character address it ?#but these are circumstances that inevitably trickle down into her violence against ella?#and engaging with them more fully would make the abuse more textured and complex and make the story#way way more interesting imo?#like because the way it's presented#with the necessity of marriage assumed#it's like ella's story is in some way just about her beating the system#'hey there's an oppressive power structure in place that keeps women helpless and dependent on men!#but because this one abuse victim was nice she beat the system and got the only good man in the world and now she's queen :)'#like that's not nearly so interesting to me as... any other form of the story lmfao...#i mean even the redone rodgers & hammerstein version had ella get political#and there's an element of politics in the novelization which i appreciate but also find just as ham-handed as every other storytelling#choice associated with this movie
