It’s always reassuring to find strong female characters in any fictional medium. All too often, we’re merely portrayed as the passive window-dressing for a male character’s storyline. Just this week, the wonderful Hermione Norris commented on this in an interview for the Graun:
“…There is a lack of true representations of women. I was once on the judging panel for a TV award; all the dramas we assessed that starred men were great big stories, while those that starred women were small-scale domestic dramas. But any of the big stories could have been told from a female perspective…”
In 2007, Warner Bros decreed that they were no longer going to produce movies with a woman as the lead character. Two recent pictures (respectively starring Jodie Foster and Nicole Kidman) had brought poor box-office revenues and President of Production, Jeff Robinov, decided that this must be the fault of the female protagonists. Women everywhere were understandably pissed off. Gloria Allred, noted women’s rights attorney said: “…when movies with men as the lead fail, no one says we’ll stop making movies with men in the lead.”
However, in 2009, Steve Shibuya, along with Zack and Deborah Snyder, began work on Suckerpunch, due to be released by Warner Bros in UK cinemas on April 1st. Two years earlier, Zack Snyder had directed “300”, arguably the most masculine film ever made. Directly contradicting the studio’s stance, he decided that Suckerpunch would be very different: “I already did the all-male cast with 300,” said Snyder, “so I’m doing the opposite end of the spectrum.”
All the main characters in Suckerpunch are women. I haven’t yet seen it myself, but the trailer is certainly intriguing.
What intrigued me even more, however, was the “Disney Punch Mash-Up Trailer” on YouTube. As a child, I was never keen on Disney Princesses. Their innate helplessness and lack of individual personality grated on me and none seemed able to survive without submitting to a handsome stranger on a horse and being led away to be his wife. Each Princess’ story would end when she married. We never got to see what happened after that. It wasn’t thought to matter. All that young girls of my generation ever got to aspire to was the promise that being rescued and housed by a man would inevitably lead to some vague, cloudy, and suspiciously indistinct notion of happy-ever-after.
This idea never seduced me. Even when I was a little Princess myself, I was always far more Wicked Queen than Snow White. In the “Disney Punch Mash-Up Trailer”, the audio from the Suckerpunch preview clip has been expertly matched with scenes from Disney Princess movies. Suddenly, they’re not as pathetic after all.
Watch the “Disney Punch Mash-Up Trailer” here.
