Damsels Not in Distress

Hello and welcome to Nick Bakers. Nick Bakers is a podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creative, bought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and in this episode I wanted to give a review of the new Netflix stream film, Danzel, starring Milly Bobby Brown and then widening that out into discussion of these fairy tale type heroines that are becoming, I guess, the new cliché of films. Anyway, so just first of all starting with the film. Okay, so it's obviously a streamed film so it's supposed to be a family film. I watched it feeling a bit under the weather and as you can hear from my voice and I found it thoroughly entertaining but I was also thinking how some of the things they're saying in the promotion for this film, like on the posters it says this is not a fairy tale. Actually we have seen quite a lot of what's happening in this film already so it's as though there's a new shorthand for this is the right kind of fairy tale heroine so no longer do we have a sort of buttercup style heroine from the princess bride we have you know LOD the the the girl who picks up her father's sword literally and becomes the hero very much a hero rather than the old traditional heroine waiting for the hero to come and rescue her. It's written by a man called Dan Mazzo and directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and that did make me think about a film which is all about women's empowerment. I wondered where the female voices were at the very top other than Millie Bobby Brown herself so that was just a little question I had them filmmakers maybe there were layers below that with more women present but I did wonder if it's always almost a shorthand now for a more feminist flavoured film that okay yeah we must do this and don't actually look at who's behind the camera that was one question I heard but also when I was talking about the new clichés they do a bound so basically all the male characters are terrible everyone everybody I'm trying to think of a redeeming male character no even the dragon turns out to be a female dragon so yeah so there's that and I do think that for old men do need positive role models as well the other clichés that's in it is how her dress kind of breaks apart so gradually she gets dressed up to be married and this isn't a plot spoiler because it's in the trailer is cast into a ravine to be you know killed by the dragon and gradually as she fights for survival her dress gets more and more broken down till it becomes a sort of bodicea style armour and short skirt thing or Roman gladiator maybe so I've seen that before in other films there is plenty of them like one one area where I think of it is I've seen in parts of Caribbean where that sort of heavy costume gets kind of taken away but I'm sure you can think of your own cliche in that area and another place where I've seen the cutting of the hair which is another move she makes to make her weaponry yeah so the cutting of the hair I've seen that in Tangled which was a reimagining of Rapunzel the animated film from quite a few years ago now so yeah it's packed full of the nuclear shades of the feminist take on a fairy tale but oddly written by what from the names suggest men and starring obviously one of the the best young actors of her generation but it is enjoyable so there's me griping away I don't want you to go away thinking let's not bother I actually think it's predictable but enjoyable and looking at how it's been received on Rotten Tomatoes it's got just over 57% positive reviews but the audience approval is as is often the case is up at 72% so yeah popcorn movie stuff it certainly works and also just thinking about it in terms of what does it do differently I think there are several things here which I wanted to say you know well done that that was great to the filmmakers one is I think it's got some beautiful cinematography and striking images so we obviously take a while to meet the dragon you don't want to spoil your your best it's at most vicious monster right at the beginning and there's a moment where the dragon dragon's arrival is heralded by burning bats and it was hauntingly morbidly beautiful with these bats that have been caught fire flying through the cave and I thought that was very good the other thing I really appreciated about it was that the injury is hurt so early on there's quite a lot of milli bobby brown very convincingly looks as though she's both bruised and battered but also burned and that is often missing from fantasy films that it's all that sword fighting and maybe a sort of artistic cut on the cheek or something she looked really hurt and that was great and it didn't just get forgotten by the next scene it stayed with her and you got it felt in that sense more realistic and less fairy tale so I thought that was a really good innovation and there were some very nice things about the way the script was constructed which I don't want to spoil here but there were some small details and for example the glowworms which then have several points where they come into having more meaning I love this because I've just been to New Zealand and seen some glowware caves so it was lovely to find that the filmmakers were using the idea of glowworms in a cave in such interesting ways amazing creatures so yeah the dams are a really good family film a little bit scary so not for the very very young for example were quite shockingly one of the white horse gets fried so if you've got sensitive children at home probably best just to skip that bit or you know prepare them for it no animals were really hurt in the making of this film but I thought that yeah it's not bad however I think there are a few things that wideness out here in this fairy tale world of the new kind of heroines it kind of sets itself up as saying this there are you know no damsels in this movie but of course there is her sister is becomes a damsel in distress so there is a little bit of damseling if that's the word in this story but also it's not new is it and I got me to think about when did we start to have princesses I suppose because she's a princess who are not victims and so I think this has been around since at least the first Star Wars with princess layer turning out to be the most competent of the three in the sort of dream team plus Chewbacca and her running a rebellion so already she started that pattern and I think that if you go forward we've got plenty now of heroines of basically it's women who make decisions and actually drive the action that's what we're looking at and so we've got heroines like Wonder Woman we've got a catness in the Hunger Games we've got re-workings or fairy tales like Snow White and Huntsman so it isn't particularly new what they're doing in this film it's almost more shocking now to choose to make a film where the princess is the damsel that's probably going to be the rebound isn't it where that happens and what is going on here I think it's actually people have forgotten the origins of a lot of these fairy tales because when you read the original fairy tales that underlie our understanding of fairy tales very often both can fairy tales the the heroine is active they are taking decisions they are standing up against oppression in the case of Cinderella they are going to grandmother's house on their own red riding hood so they're not sitting in a castle waiting to be rescued I remember when I watched Shrek they had a lot of fun with that idea that in some way Princess Fiona needs the rescue but it turns out that actually her solution isn't being a princess it's turning back into an ogre you know so we've been actually riffing on this idea for some time and I think maybe that this idea that heroines are passive is more of a Victorian and 20th century idea particularly the sort of Disney films of the the kind of the sleeping beauty sort which is the most passive heroine you can imagine and so white in the seven dwarves that the Cinderella in that one so the sort of dainty lady stuff was probably more an accretion later on rather than something from the original source material so when people go about rewriting the damsel it might be they're actually not creating something new but going back to something that was already there at the root of a fairy tale so looking at the poster for damsel I will take issue this is not a fairy tale yes it is a fairy tale but it is a fairy tale of the thought that we had forgotten existed because we had followed a disneyfication of the role of the female heroes in these stories so that's my little review of damsel yeah rainy day or when you're feeling a bit under the weather not a bad film yeah so it is worth watching some of the locations look terribly CGI'd but the caves in particular where most of the film take place actually are convincing there's some fantastic places in the cave and it's well set out where they're going so there's a crystal sort of passage where she has to climb up which I loved it felt hard it felt sharp it felt dangerous so yeah I I really enjoyed that side a bit less impressed by the castles outside they all look like something from a computer game but I guess that's kind of the way things go these days I found where she came from this sort of northern kingdom was much more convincing of its harshness could have preferred to stay there really rather than this impossibly beautiful iconic castle thing which yeah I didn't feel real but anyway I would think not a bad thing to what but don't go in expecting to find your world shake it so that was myth makers review thank you very much for listening thanks for listening to myth makers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy visit Oxford Center for Fantasy.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide