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kaberettSo! The film I went to see yesterday was The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!. It was brightly coloured and it was pretty but unfortunately there was enough wrong with it that it mostly left me irritated.
The historical infelicities
A banner at the beginning of the film proclaims that the setting is "London, 1837". It is plausibly the summer of 1837. The monarch, we are told, is Queen Victoria. I care about the fact that they give the date, because everything that follows I'd've been willing to overlook if they hadn't.
Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in the June of 1837.
The character as presented is not consistent (in behaviour or in appearance) with records of Victoria less than three months after she became Queen.
One of the other main characters is Charles Darwin. We first meet him on the Beagle.
The second voyage of the Beagle ended in October 1836. Darwin did not spend any significant portion of 1837 at sea collecting specimens. (As an aside, I am unreasonably irritated by the fact that the major geological contributions Darwin made as a result of the Beagle voyage are entirely glossed over, as ever. He nearly bloody worked out sodding plate tectonics based on coral atolls, okay.)
The racism
Peg Leg Hastings is the first non-white character to appear with a speaking role, and his first line is something approximating "yarr harr harr, lock up yer daughters". Given he is one of two speaking non-white characters, and the white villainous character doesn't make any such joke...
Cutlass Liz is the second non-white character to appear, and she is also massively and overtly sexualised.
The sexism
There are three women of whom two are named sensibly. They do not ever have a conversation.
Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate says about ten words and exists for the sake of "women in disguise" jokes.
Cutlass Liz is a token sexualised non-white female villain and is essentially a cardboard cut-out... who shows up with a diamond as plunder, because diamonds are a girl's best friend, amirite. (All the other pirates have gold as loot.)
Queen Victoria is very nearly textbook God Save Us From The Queen! [tv tropes], with a side dish sexualisation & luring poor innocent men to their DOOM!! by entrapping them.
In summary: had potential, pity about the fail. I was imagining something rather cooler than what I ended up with.
The historical infelicities
A banner at the beginning of the film proclaims that the setting is "London, 1837". It is plausibly the summer of 1837. The monarch, we are told, is Queen Victoria. I care about the fact that they give the date, because everything that follows I'd've been willing to overlook if they hadn't.
Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in the June of 1837.
The character as presented is not consistent (in behaviour or in appearance) with records of Victoria less than three months after she became Queen.
One of the other main characters is Charles Darwin. We first meet him on the Beagle.
The second voyage of the Beagle ended in October 1836. Darwin did not spend any significant portion of 1837 at sea collecting specimens. (As an aside, I am unreasonably irritated by the fact that the major geological contributions Darwin made as a result of the Beagle voyage are entirely glossed over, as ever. He nearly bloody worked out sodding plate tectonics based on coral atolls, okay.)
The racism
Peg Leg Hastings is the first non-white character to appear with a speaking role, and his first line is something approximating "yarr harr harr, lock up yer daughters". Given he is one of two speaking non-white characters, and the white villainous character doesn't make any such joke...
Cutlass Liz is the second non-white character to appear, and she is also massively and overtly sexualised.
The sexism
There are three women of whom two are named sensibly. They do not ever have a conversation.
Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate says about ten words and exists for the sake of "women in disguise" jokes.
Cutlass Liz is a token sexualised non-white female villain and is essentially a cardboard cut-out... who shows up with a diamond as plunder, because diamonds are a girl's best friend, amirite. (All the other pirates have gold as loot.)
Queen Victoria is very nearly textbook God Save Us From The Queen! [tv tropes], with a side dish sexualisation & luring poor innocent men to their DOOM!! by entrapping them.
In summary: had potential, pity about the fail. I was imagining something rather cooler than what I ended up with.
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-06 05:52 pm (UTC)Surely the biggest inaccuracy involving Darwin is not that he's on the Beagle in 1837, but that he's on a boat and not vomiting everywhere. He was probably the worst sailor ever and spent the entirety of the Beagle's 18 months at sea incapacitated with seasickness (apparently, he took a book of seasickness cures with him to field-test them; they didn't work). The three years the Beagle crew spent exploring land wasn't much better in terms of crippling illness.
Most characters in Aardman films tend to bear at least a passing resemblance both in appearance and personality to whomever is doing the voice-over. Bearing in mind that Peg Leg Hastings is played by Lenny Henry, the "lock up your daughters" stuff sounds pretty much like something his own standup characters would have said, and it wouldn't surprise me if he hadn't put the line in himself. Either that, or it's an in-joke about Henry's personal life since his divorce. Certainly if it's truly offensive to black people, Henry is rich and famous enough either to turn the part down or get the line removed. Aardman were only too willing to alter other scenes in response to objections.
Similarly, the pictures I've seen of Cutlass Liz are strikingly like Salma Hayek. If anything, she's toned down considerably in comparison with Hayek's usual appearance at celebrity events, let alone her other movie roles or TV commercials. Since she's built her entire career on being a sexualised cardboard cut-out, it's probably a mite late for her to change now.
Objections to perceived racism by those of other ethnicity always remind me of the Reginald D Hunter joke: "N****r (he says the word) is a term found highly offensive (long pause) By middle-class white people"
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-10 03:20 am (UTC)