May 28, 2012
The Princess Industrial Complex
Who provides the raw materials for little girls' dreams?
Where do they find inspiration for the costumes they dress up in and the characters they play? In what petri dish do they grow their culture?
Here's an interesting insight on the origins of Disney Princess phenomenon, from the New York Times review of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture:
"The 'princess phase.' So inevitable is this period in the maturation of girls today that it should qualify as an official developmental stage, worthy of an entry in Leach or Brazelton: first crawling, then walking, then the urgent desire to wear something pink and sparkly....Yet the princess phase, at least in its current hyper-feminine and highly commercial form, is anything but natural, or so Peggy Orenstein argues in Cinderella Ate My Daughter. As she tells the story, in 2000 a Disney executive named Andy Mooney went to check out a 'Disney on Ice' show and found himself 'surrounded by little girls in princess costumes. Princess costumes that were — horrors! — homemade. How had such a massive branding opportunity been overlooked? The very next day he called together his team and they began working on what would become known in-house as "Princess." ' Mooney’s revelation yielded a bonanza for the company. There are now more than 26,000 Disney Princess items on the market; in 2009, Princess products generated sales of $4 billion.
Disney didn’t have the tiara market to itself for long. Orenstein takes us on a tour of the princess industrial complex, its practices as coolly calculating as its products are soft and fluffy. She describes a toy fair, held at the Javits Center in New York, at which the merchandise for girls seems to come in only one color: pink jewelry boxes, pink vanity mirrors, pink telephones, pink hair dryers, pink fur stoles. 'Is all this pink really necessary?' Orenstein finally asks a sales rep.
'Only if you want to make money,' he replies...."
Read the rest of the review of Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Is Pink Necessary?
Peggy Orenstein continues the investigation in her chock-full blog. A couple of her more recent reflections on the subject: "Disney Princesses: The Gateway Drug" and "Cinderella’s Ball Gown Ate Mulan".
Great Geek Debates: Disney Princesses vs. Hayao Miyazaki
"Young children are still developing their capacity to distinguish fact from fiction. It seems reasonable to assume they are more influenced by the stories we give them than an adult, who is better able to separate himself from the impact and message of a story....Being a parent of girls, I have an almost primal reaction to the Walt Disney princess industrial complex. The sight of a Jasmine costume marketed to my 5-year-old can cause me to break out in hives. It isn’t so much the bare midriff, although I think that does have an influence on how my 5-year-old perceives and relates to her body. My frustration comes from the quality of the stories themselves. The stories of the Disney princess industrial complex follow a formula which sells massive amounts of princess swag but can be highly problematic in what it teaches young girls about their worth and value.
My 5-year-old is just now finishing her education about the difference between real and pretend. Kindergarten seems to help. I cringe when she plays dress-up and pretends to be one of the princesses from the Disney canon. It just creeps me out, like I am watching my child pretend to play Britney or Lindsey or their apprentice Miley, all three of which got their start as child stars with Disney.
Which is why I am grateful my geek instincts led me to be a somewhat early adopter of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli anime. I have been hooked since I first saw Spirited Away, and I have found his work to provide a needed vaccine for my girls against the creeping illness of princess-itis....
One of the major reasons Disney princesses are so effective as marketing vehicles for children is they distill what it means to be a girl or boy down to a highly simplified formula easy for young children to grasp. Put on a princess dress and I am a girl. Wear a sword, I am a boy. Such stereotyping works really well for a 3- to 6-year-old mind which is just beginning to grapple with gender differences and their consequences. As effective as these stereotypes can be at selling princess products to young girls, these oversimplified notions of gender become problematic when you examine what a princess does."
Read on for Erik Wecks's "three most important reasons why I would rather have my daughter pretending to be any Miyazaki heroine over a Disney princess"...
May 27, 2012
Fairy/Arrietty
I must go seek some dewdrops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear
From an article on Wired.com, Nanoscience Is at Work in The Secret World of Arrietty:
"According to the book Elemental Magic, Volume I: The Art of Special Effects Animation, from 1935 to 1941, around the time Disney was making Fantasia, there were over 100 artists in the special effects department devoted to drawing every type of “natural” phenomena from rain falling to pixie dust glittering.
And special effects of nature played a big part in The Secret World of Arrietty, the new Studio Ghibli animated version of the children’s classic series The Borrowers by Mary Norton. Arrietty and her dollhouse-sized family live in a very different world than you and I, as the hand-drawn special effects animation made very clear....
One aspect of this micro-world is the way liquids behave. When Arrietty’s mother Homily goes to pour a pot of tea, it doesn’t just pour out of the spout. Instead, it squeezes out, giant drop by drop.... Even though Arrietty and her family are smaller than we are, water molecules are still the same size. So water tends to form into drops of about the same size as in our world, and behave the same way."
Another article, this one from The Telegraph, titled Sandman meets Queen Mab:
"How big is a fairy? [A British stamp designed by Dave McKean]... represent[s] what CS Lewis, in his literary-historical persona, calls 'the minute and almost insectal fairies of the debased modern convention with their antennae and gauzy wings'. In the medieval tradition, fairies were noted mainly for their preternataral status rather than their size.
Lewis blames 16th-century artificial writers such as Michael Drayton (whom most people do not read today, though I recommend Poly-Olbion) and Shakespeare (whom most people do not read either, but suppose that they do). Queen Mab's chariot is described in Romeo and Juliet:
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film;
Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid:
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or an old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
Very nice, if you like that kind of thing. But it has little enough to do with any ancient folklore or myth that Britain boasts. I'm afraid that McKean's... images come from the genre of modern 'fantasy' playing on the wreckage of tradition moulded by vulgar secondary imagination."
Christopher Howse probably would've harrumphed about The Borrowers, too.
May 24, 2012
IWD at the RSC
"Actors, Directors and Designers from the RSC's Nations at War season discuss whether there is a need for International Women's Day, and talk about women in theatre."
http://www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/updates/international-womens-day.aspx
May 23, 2012
Hippolyta had a daughter...
It's only a short invisible-plane ride from ancient Greece to modern Gotham. Thank you, Lauren Faust!
May 09, 2012
Heart of Stars
Vanessa Shaver, Creative Producer extraordinaire, spent a year at the Canadian Film Centre's Media Lab creating a stellar motion-capture adventure for all of us still wondering where our jetpacks are:
May 08, 2012
About the Author
Alison Humphrey
Director, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Despite starting her career with a summer job at Marvel Comics, within two weeks of graduation Alison had defected from superheroes to Shakespeare as an usher at the RSC in London.
Her theatre experience includes assistant directing at the Royal Court Theatre, English Touring Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where she won the 2009 Elliott Hayes Award. Directing includes the UK premieres of James Reaney's The Donnellys at the Old Red Lion Theatre, and Normand Chaurette's The Queens at the Royal Shakespeare Company Fringe Festival in Stratford-on-Avon.
Alison has written and story-edited for television and film, shot a no-budget sci-fi feature on location in Bali and Virginia, and produced one of the earliest web-based alternate reality games for Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic.
She holds a BA in American studies and studio art from Wellesley College, and an MA in interactive multimedia from the Royal College of Art. Alison is currently in her final year of an MFA in theatre directing at York University, where her thesis production of A Midsummer Night's Dream will use motion-capture technology to weave 3D computer animation and special effects into live performance.
She still aims to write a comic book when she grows up.
About this Blog
Visual and mental grazing by director Alison Humphrey for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream using motion-capture technology to weave computer animation into live theatre.
The show runs March 23-28, 2013, Theatre@York, York University, Toronto, Canada.