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damkiannaI appreciate it. Really, I do. Even if it was coming down hard enough to wake me up early this morning. I will forgive you almost anything, outdoors, if it can always be fifty degrees or cooler when I wake up in the morning.
Sadly, I suspect it is not to be, since the forecast says it'll be eighty-five (eighty-five! Kill me now!) tomorrow. *ded* And I have gym, too. DNW!
But I appreciate the effort, outdoors. It's the thought that counts.
Let's see. Can I think of anything else to blather about before I start doing actual work? Oh - well, yesterday, I saw Disney's Robin Hood for the first time - the animated one, with the anthropomorphized animals.
I always find it interesting to watch older Disney movies, and observe the changes in style - the character design in this one was very, very like that of The Jungle Book, with Little John's look and even voice very reminiscent of Baloo, and Sir Hiss almost Kaa's doppelganger (not exactly, of course, he was far less badass). There was even something of Shere Khan to the style of Prince John's face (although, again: less badass). I could also have sworn that the female churchmouse - Friar Tuck calls her "little Sister" a few times, I missed any other names she might have - was voiced by the same person who did Merryweather's voice in Sleeping Beauty, which immediately made her awesome. I love Merryweather.
Anyway. I vaguely remember a time when I probably could have watched this movie without getting all weird and meta about its presentations of gender and language, but, thanks to a combination of fandom and school, that time is long gone - which is probably a good thing, since I would much rather be disillusioned than go ... well, any more pantsless than I have to.
So I couldn't help but notice that Maid Marian, model of beauty and sweetness and femininity, does ... practically nothing; by contrast, her hen handmaid - Clucky? - beats up rhinoceri, plays at swordfighting with one of the kids, and is the butt of a brief visual joke wherein a badminton birdie disappears down her ample cleavage - not to mention her dress is often flipped up, her underclothes exposed and, once, nearly pulled off. All of these being made acceptable by her implied age, her weight, and so on and so forth.
As fandom has sensitized me to meta issues with gender, my Communication Science classes have sensitized me to issues of language, dialect, and accent. I can't say with any real confidence whether Clucky's accent - Scottish or Irish, I couldn't quite tell - was part of the defeminizing image, but I suspect it may have been. The choice to give Robin and Marian relatively high-prestige accents, while sticking the Sheriff with a twang and Prince John with a very Scarlet-Pimpernel-masquerading-as-a-fop kind of whine, stuck out a lot more to me than it would have before I got to college and started taking linguistics classes.
The crossdressing moments near the beginning amused me, although the stereotyped gypsy/fortune-teller/thief part grated a little; it may be possible to read that part as Robin using Prince John's stereotyped views to trick him, though, which I would appreciate much more.
And I did like the love story between Marian and Robin, at least to some extent; it was kind of a nice change from the usual love-at-first-sight, to have the backstory be that they had been sweethearts at least a few years ago and then separated, and were only now getting back together. And the part where Robin almost got himself captured and killed because he went back to save the youngest rabbit made me go all squishy inside.
... This is turning into some kind of bizarro meta review thing for a really old Disney movie that very few people probably care about, which wasn't really my intention. I was just trying to get out of doing work for a little bit! Suffice it to say that it wasn't bad; having seen it, I feel a lot of the kind of nostalgic affection for it that I do for 101 Dalmatians, or The Jungle Book, simply due to the style and the sort of innocent, old-fashioned morality it expresses. But if I had the choice between it (or either of those other movies) and, say, Beauty and the Beast? ... Yeah. I know which one I'm gonna watch.
Sadly, I suspect it is not to be, since the forecast says it'll be eighty-five (eighty-five! Kill me now!) tomorrow. *ded* And I have gym, too. DNW!
But I appreciate the effort, outdoors. It's the thought that counts.
Let's see. Can I think of anything else to blather about before I start doing actual work? Oh - well, yesterday, I saw Disney's Robin Hood for the first time - the animated one, with the anthropomorphized animals.
I always find it interesting to watch older Disney movies, and observe the changes in style - the character design in this one was very, very like that of The Jungle Book, with Little John's look and even voice very reminiscent of Baloo, and Sir Hiss almost Kaa's doppelganger (not exactly, of course, he was far less badass). There was even something of Shere Khan to the style of Prince John's face (although, again: less badass). I could also have sworn that the female churchmouse - Friar Tuck calls her "little Sister" a few times, I missed any other names she might have - was voiced by the same person who did Merryweather's voice in Sleeping Beauty, which immediately made her awesome. I love Merryweather.
Anyway. I vaguely remember a time when I probably could have watched this movie without getting all weird and meta about its presentations of gender and language, but, thanks to a combination of fandom and school, that time is long gone - which is probably a good thing, since I would much rather be disillusioned than go ... well, any more pantsless than I have to.
So I couldn't help but notice that Maid Marian, model of beauty and sweetness and femininity, does ... practically nothing; by contrast, her hen handmaid - Clucky? - beats up rhinoceri, plays at swordfighting with one of the kids, and is the butt of a brief visual joke wherein a badminton birdie disappears down her ample cleavage - not to mention her dress is often flipped up, her underclothes exposed and, once, nearly pulled off. All of these being made acceptable by her implied age, her weight, and so on and so forth.
As fandom has sensitized me to meta issues with gender, my Communication Science classes have sensitized me to issues of language, dialect, and accent. I can't say with any real confidence whether Clucky's accent - Scottish or Irish, I couldn't quite tell - was part of the defeminizing image, but I suspect it may have been. The choice to give Robin and Marian relatively high-prestige accents, while sticking the Sheriff with a twang and Prince John with a very Scarlet-Pimpernel-masquerading-as-a-fop kind of whine, stuck out a lot more to me than it would have before I got to college and started taking linguistics classes.
The crossdressing moments near the beginning amused me, although the stereotyped gypsy/fortune-teller/thief part grated a little; it may be possible to read that part as Robin using Prince John's stereotyped views to trick him, though, which I would appreciate much more.
And I did like the love story between Marian and Robin, at least to some extent; it was kind of a nice change from the usual love-at-first-sight, to have the backstory be that they had been sweethearts at least a few years ago and then separated, and were only now getting back together. And the part where Robin almost got himself captured and killed because he went back to save the youngest rabbit made me go all squishy inside.
... This is turning into some kind of bizarro meta review thing for a really old Disney movie that very few people probably care about, which wasn't really my intention. I was just trying to get out of doing work for a little bit! Suffice it to say that it wasn't bad; having seen it, I feel a lot of the kind of nostalgic affection for it that I do for 101 Dalmatians, or The Jungle Book, simply due to the style and the sort of innocent, old-fashioned morality it expresses. But if I had the choice between it (or either of those other movies) and, say, Beauty and the Beast? ... Yeah. I know which one I'm gonna watch.
