Five Things Pixar’s UP Has In Common With The Saturday’s UP

One thing (or five) Up!, and Pixar in general, doesn’t have in common with The Saturdays: strong female presence. Yes Ellie is a strong character, shame she doesn’t make it beyond the first ten minutes.

http://vastpublicindifference.blogspot.com/2008/06/pixars-gender-problem.html

I think I have mentioned this point in every Pixar movie prior to this and even I have got a little jaded by it. But it is remarkable, and there is a really interesting question about the choice of lead for this film. Would UP have worked if Carl had been replaced by Ellie?

And oddly, I cannot think of a way in which it wouldn’t. You might need to tweak a few of the family issues for Russell, change absent Dad to absent Mum (but that’s easy), and make sure you had an non-sexual adversarial relationship for Muntz, but it really would still work.

Of course Pixar’s films are great precisely because they tend to avoid this kind of focus grouped demographic munching, but perhaps at the “choice of story to develop” moment they should fast-track the stronger female characters.

(My view on Jessie is whilst she has a DEVASTATING plot effect in Toy Story 2, she is just a female knock off of Woody).

I have not seen as many Ghibli films, though I am sure you are right. The difficulty of course lies with marrying the storytelling desires of the writer/director and the stabs at making them as independent as possible, whilst accepting the cultural impact of the work. Bearing in mind that its quite possible that the first five feature films EVER SEEN by a child will be by Pixar (true of many children I know) the normalising of male leads is interesting.

I am being glib with my flipping of Carl and Ellie, though the interesting thing is that Ellie is a more adventurous character until she marries Carl. She brings him out, stops him being shy (and monosyllabic). Her reward, a suburban house and subsumed into a marriage )albeit a loving one). She seems to get the bum rap even BEFORE she dies.

The Ghibli issue does bring up an interesting angle to the gender question, as fantasy heroines do seem more prevalent in Japanese anime culture. I’d be loathe to suggest what this means or what its effect is, but a quick fix to the Pixar problem could well be a well stocked cupboard of Ghibli too.

@5&6. Interesting comments, thanks.
but a quick fix to the Pixar problem could well be a well stocked cupboard of Ghibli too.
That’s how it’s working with my nieces I assure you!
different sub-streams within the genre “kid’s adventure”
I suspect this is right, and, yes, those different streams of kid’s adventure lit. are pretty heavily gendered. Ghibli films, say, especially, Kiki and Totoro are definitely playing on the same team as Little Women and Mary Poppins as well as Alice/Oz…. In turn, all of that stuff seems strongly continuous with the adult, female-centric lit that has Austen as its brilliant standard-bearer. One upshot for me is that Ghibli films feel, at bottom, much more literary/novel-ish than Pixar films. Not that I mean to criticize Pixar by saying that…. I’m very much looking forward to Up (but I know my nieces will get more out of Ponyo).

Lytton has so far seen two feature films (not counting “feature-length” straight-to-DVD eps of Thomas etc.)

1. My Neighbour Totoro, a big favourite because of the CATBUS.
2. that one about the secret agent guinea pigs which came out a few months ago. He saw this one in the cinema and it made a very big impression on him indeed.

Families do not equal gangs in my book, they don’t choose to be together (indeed some of the best tension in gang fiction is the “little brother”). But OK, lets not get back to the res of what we are calling “literary”, and why we want it in film. Are we using literary as in the genre “literary fiction”, ie highly introspective, internal crisis as important as external crisis type stuff. Which I think Ghibli does to and extent, but often with gods, moving/flying castles etc.

I hate the term literary when applied to the actually literary fiction genre, so really don’t want to see it imported here.

I think this is basically right:
Girl: is the elaboration of “internal” via encounter with an extant, complex, subtle social order, whch may or may not be challenged (it is in alice and oz and ghibli; not in little women or little house on the prairie)

Boy: is the realisation of elaborated self via picaresque flight from dull flat social order into, well, a sequence of adventures, LEVELS if you will

Or put slightly differently, core girl-fiction is ultimately social psychology, whereas core boy-fiction adapts/build on earlier myth-making, non-psychological forms of story-telling.

There are many many hybrid cases of course: Moby Dick is nifty (at least to an adult) precisely because you go to literally the ends of the earth, but really, much of the time Ishmael’s like a French philosophe (slumming it in a Newport, RI bar!) working though the Encyclopaedia entries on whaling etc. with us. And superhero stories (which have taken over movies to a shocking degree) are also an interesting hybrid

Anyhow, Pixar and Ghibli do seem to build out from these two different core settings. I’m happy to call both ‘literary’… but ultimately the social-psychology form is where the novel goes, whereas the myth-making lit. goes… to getting on with life and putting away childish things like story-telling (or something). For many boys The Lord of the Rings ends child-hood (getting through that is like completing your own great quest), and is the last novel they ever read.