animated academic

22 | grad student the place where all the research gets stored. literally all of it.

[cyranope]

Nine Fun Ways To Fuck With Shakespeare

I’ve been sitting on this list for a bit (mostly because I… forgot I wrote it) but now, here it is! Note: These are all things I have seen in actual productions or done myself.

Assume the characters love each other. The more they hate each other, the more fun this is!

Move punctuation around to make new sentences. (There’s textual precedent for this! The Prologue to ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’- in Midsummer, yo- bases its humor on the actor speaking it having messed up his pauses. Also a lot of punctuation was added by editors later, so this one isn’t even a stretch.)

Eliminate metatheatrical deception. Asides? Everyone on stage can hear them. Disguise? Everyone can see through it.

Cut out famous soliloquies. I saw a production of Hamlet that cut 'To be or not to be.’ It was EXCELLENT. Corollary 4a: Leave in the bits that always get cut.

Kill somebody who the script leaves alive. In that same Hamlet, Horatio drank the rest of the poison and died after delivering his final speech.

Introduce a physical plot point without changing the text. The Shakespeare Theatre in DC did a King Lear where Cordelia was played by a deaf actor, and the Fool was her interpreter. (I also saw a Much Ado in which the actor who played Beatrice was pregnant in real life. The production didn’t really acknowledge that, but it would have been so interesting if they had!)

Make it a musical! Keep the text, put songs in it. Or just set the text to music. Or, if there are songs in it already, replace them with modern ones- not a Shakespeare example, but I’ve seen a couple versions of Knight of the Burning Pestle that did this.

Fuck genres. Play tragedies for laughs. Make comedies disturbing.

What if the characters know they’re characters in a play? What if just one of them does? Shakespeare uses enough theatrical language that you can really have fun with this.

I will probably add more to this list, or make a second one of things I haven’t seen (or done!) but would really like to. If you’ve seen or done anything else fun and unusual, reblog and add it! I’d love to know about it!

[animatedacademic-blog]

God Help the Outcasts: Gender and Religious Symbolism in Disney’s the Hunchback of Notre Dame

In 1996, the Walt Disney Company released their animated reimagining of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame. During its brief theatrical run the film generated equal parts critical acclaim and popular controversy. Despite the Disney Company’s push to make the film “religiously neutral”[1] many felt that the “religious content”[2] had been ill handled. Thus it could be deemed unsurprising that after the film’s release to home video it quickly faded into obscurity. Oft cited as the reason for the fade are the themes and plotlines that most, including Disney, considered overly dark for their younger audiences.

None of this would be considered odd if one were to consider the source material. Victor Hugo’s novel served as a love letter to the architecture of the Notre Dame Cathedral and a harsh critique of the Catholic Church. It also offered a complex and frequently contradictory view on the human worth of the physically and mentally disabled, women, ethnic minorities, and others considered ‘socially undesirable.’

Both Hugo’s novel and the later Disney adaption present an examination of religion and a treatise about the worth of those who fall outside the norm. Both also rely heavily on gender and race to provide plot impetus. The axis of this impetus is Esmeralda.

Esmeralda thus provides a crystallizing focus for the differences between the novel and its animated film adaption. Hugo’s novel sets her as a kind of progressive-switch bait. Initially shown as a virtuous heroine despite her status as a hated ethnic minority and a street dancer of lower class, she’s later revealed to be ethnically white and originally of a high class before she was kidnapped. When her virtue is called into question in the last half of the book, the issue is only resolved by her eventual martyrdom. The Disney adaption rebels against both this interpretation of the character and the usual protests made by critics about the passive, ethnically white, disempowered women of the Disney oeuvre.

[1] Mark Pinsky, The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust (Lousville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 172-173.

[2] Pinsky, The Gospel According to Disney, 168.

[toxzen]

Cutting off hair in Ancient Asia symbolizes being banished or rejected from their home. In the more modern age that is now, cutting long hair into a short cut means to forget the past, leaving the old, and starting anew.

[x]

edited: dec13 2015 

[animatedacademic-blog]

Someday I would very much like to write an academic meta analysis of Korra’s S4 haircut.

While she does it after leaving her home, the exile is one she chooses. In fact, her exile is twice chosen--e.g. when she leaves Republic City, and when she leaves the South Pole. But cutting her hair doesn’t just represent exile from a physical place.

It also represents exile from her sense of self. Re: she’s no longer the Avatar...or at least not the Avatar she thought herself. Faced with a world that seemingly no longer needs her, Korra has been exiled in a much more existential way, which leads to her eventual rejection of place and self.

[animatedacademic-blog]

The Scars We Choose - Bibliography

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Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard & Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012. Print.

Basson, Lauren L. “Annexed Americans: Robert Wilcox, Home Rule, and Self-Government in Hawaii.” White Enough to Be American?: Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 95-140. eBook.

Bennett, Gillian. Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Print.

Bernheimer, Kate, ed. Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Print.

Bottigheimer, Ruth, ed. Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. Print.

Coffman, Tom. Island Edge of America: A Political History of Hawaii. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. eBook.

Crost, Lyn. Honor by Fire: Japanese Americans at War in Europe and the Pacific. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1994. Print.

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Duus, Masayo. Unlikely Liberators: The Men of the 100th and the 442nd. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. eBook.

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[aconissa]

I just found one of my favourite books about queer history available as a pdf online for free, so I thought I’d share it will you all! It’s called Homosexuality & Civilisation by Louis Crompton, and you can download it here. So you get an idea of what it covers, the table of contents is:

Early Greece 776 – 480 BCE

Judea 900 BCE – 600 CE

Classical Greece 480 – 323 BCE

Rome and Greece 323 BCE – 138 CE

Christians and Pagans 1 – 565 CE

Darkness Descends 476 – 1049 CE

The Medieval World 1050 – 1321 CE

Imperial China 500 BCE - 1849 CE

Italy in the Renaissance 1321 – 1609 CE

Spain and the Inquisition 1497 – 1700 CE

France from Calvin to Louis XIV 1517 – 1715 CE

England from the Reformation to William III 1533 – 1702 CE

Pre-Meiji Japan 800 – 1868 CE

Patterns of Persecution 1700 – 1730 CE

Sapphic Lovers 1700 – 1793 CE

The Enlightenment 1730 – 1810 CE

Pretty broad, as you can see. It’s a great book and well worth a read!

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

Feminism didn’t teach me to hate men, but it did teach me to stop prioritising them over women.

And it turns out a lot of men think that’s the same thing as hatred.

[kirby-does-his-taxes]

I said it once and I’ll say it again. Instead of claiming to not hate men, think about why so many people think you do.

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

This is literally an explanation of why.

Men grow up in a world where men are always more important than everyone else. Refusing to go along with this and actively prioritising women feels like hatred to men who conflate their unearned position of power with their identity.

Maybe instead of obediently supporting the status quo, you should put some critical thought into why so many men get irrationally angry when women want to be treated fairly.

[animatedacademic-blog]

Also applies to most underrepresented groups.

Re: how it plays out in media. It’s fine to want more [insert underrepresented group here] in [insert medium here], but actually put someone from that group in and up the hackles go.

Connect to the study done by Australians--find this later!--about speaking in the classroom. Basics: men speak two to three times more often in classroom settings than women, dominating most conversations, though both men and women felt that the discussion time had been roughly equal. When women were actively encouraged to speak up, thus bringing the room to rough parity of speaking time, both men and women felt that women had dominated the conversation. Weird shit, huh?