Christmas double feature

Yeah, it’s that time of year again. I got to see two recent openings at the local cinema these past couple of days: Disney’s Princess and the Frog and James Cameron’s Avatar (in IMAX 3D), and I’d like to share my thoughts on both. A warning to the reader: this post does contain some spoilers.



The Princess and the Frog was the first Disney animated feature film I’d gone to see in theatres in a very long time, given my troubled relationship with the corporation. Eventually, my ars gratia artis side won out over my inner aesthetic Stalinist, and I allowed myself to appreciate again the artistic value of Disney animation, particularly that of the 1990’s renaissance beginning with The Little Mermaid. Artistically, I was impressed with The Princess and the Frog. It’s not daring or groundbreaking or revolutionary the way Beauty and the Beast had been, but it was a fun story with a genuinely strong, sensible and sympathetic heroine. I was glad to see the classism and redemptive-violence problems of previous animated Disney features completely gone. And Tiana is a remarkably dignified working-class heroine, facing down all the problems working-class black people had to live with daily in the postbellum South: minimum-wage poverty and entrenched racism chief among them. In an interesting twist, she isn’t saved by marrying a rich man; the Prince she ends up with starts out as a highly-problematic, frivolous spendthrift who’s been disowned by his parents (and Tiana, thankfully, sees straight through him), who is redeemed by his growing affection for Tiana and his eventual willingness to labour alongside her and share in her dream. It’s a Disney script informed more by Bruce Springsteen and Soren Kierkegaard than by the Brothers Grimm.

The animation quality is polished (but that’s to be expected) and the characterisation is good even for the minor characters (Louis, Ray and Mama Odie) who would otherwise have been bit gags. The musical numbers were delightful, drawing heavily from the cajun, jazz and gospel traditions (though I wasn’t that great a fan of the pop number during the end credits). I enjoyed the delightfully slick villain, Dr Facilier, with his tarot cards and magic cane, though the highly-stereotypical treatment of voodoo (almost, but not quite reminiscent of 1970’s blaxploitation films) was perhaps the most insensitive aspect of the whole movie. All in all, there’s not that much more to tell – it’s fairly optimistic and benign, with a ‘hard work, love and hope pay off’ -type moral, but one which somehow manages to avoid a Pollyanna treatment; even if it isn’t the flashiest or most daring of entries in the Disney animated canon, it is still solid work.



James Cameron's James Cameron's Avatar (by James Cameron) was far more awe-inspiring than Disney’s new film; though flawed, it affords rich food for thought as well as plenty of CGI eye-candy and popcorn action. Story-wise, there was nothing original about Avatar; it is essentially H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds told from the point-of-view of the Martians, and it basically plodded steadily along the trail blazed by movies like FernGully, Stargate, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Star Trek: Insurrection and most importantly Dances With Wolves. We are introduced to a mining project in the Klach D’Kel Brakt on an alien world, Pandora, which is about to displace the indigenous people, the Ba’ku Na’vi. Human agents are sent into the wilderness around the human base by remote-controlling replicant bodies called ‘Avatars’, which resemble Na’vi and can breathe the otherwise deadly (to humans) atmosphere, in order to learn their language and facilitate their displacement diplomatically. One of the researchers was killed in a mugging, so his identical twin Jake (played by Sam Worthington) is sent in his place, since his genome makes him uniquely suited to controlling his Avatar. Jake suffers a crisis of conscience as he begins to interact with the Na’vi (particularly Neytiri, his guide and eventual love interest, played by Zoe Saldaña) and understand their religion and way of life, and ultimately has to make a choice between his mission and the Na’vi.

Okay, so it’s been done before. That’s perfectly fine by me, because Cameron tells the story with relish and aplomb, and turns it into an amazing technical spectacle that puts even the new Star Trek movie to shame in terms of mastery of special effects and computer animation. The world Cameron created was something straight out of a Miyazaki movie – floating mountains, awesome landscapes, exotic insectoid and reptilian life – and he even included a breathtaking flying scene which ought to make Miyazaki-sensei proud. The Na’vi themselves are given their own physiology, language, culture and religion – though this religion is basically a revamped Lovelock hypothesis. Not a minute of the two-and-a-half hours is wasted; the film is gripping and adventurous within its own world.

This film deserves the most positive reaction I can give it. While I applaud the political message (which is stridently anti-militarist, anti-imperialist, anti-corporatist, pro-conservation and often driven home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer), I felt it could have been far more nuanced. It’s very well and good to turn the lens upon ourselves and ask us the tough questions about our own imperial projects and environmental impact, but even beyond the problematic stereotypes of the noble savage and the sympathetic occupier becoming the leader of the resistance, the way in which Cameron explores these issues seems over-simplistic at points.

SPOILERS in next paragraph

For example, Jake’s eventual rejection of his own humanity in favour of his Avatar seemed like something of a cop-out. Jake suffers a crisis of conscience about the displacement of the Na’vi – as any red-blooded human being ought to in his place – and it’s even understandable that he might have in addition a crisis of identity as a result of spending so much time in his Avatar. But this crisis of identity is given pretty short shrift: what allows Jake to step back and tell himself that the imperial project in which he’s caught up is wrong is precisely the humanity that he casts off by the end of the movie. The decision he ends up making is the direct product of an ethic that arises out of his own culture, not that of the Na’vi; there’s no way it can, given Jake’s superficial understanding of their culture. Yet this question is either completely ignored or glossed over in a series of one-liners between him and the evil Colonel Quatrich.

End spoilers

So: Avatar and Princess? Both recommended, but for different reasons. Princess is good, clean fun with an admirably well-adjusted heroine. Avatar is a big, hulking CGI spectacle with a brilliant, if naïve, soul.