Do you feel a bit boring when you see Disney's logo on the opening of the movie? I thought, the fairy tale of Family Fun is here again? Indeed, Disney’s impression has always been so.
Not to mention anything else, it can be seen from the classification alone. Most of Disney’s past movies are rated PG or G, and can be watched by basically all ages. It was only in 2003 that there was the first PG-13 film "Pirates of the Caribbean", and the sequel to the series also continued. Classification; after the acquisition of Marvel in 2009, the Marvel movies under Disney's rule are all PG-13; as for those classic IP remakes, such as "Cinderella", "Beauty and the Beast", "The Lion King" and "Aladdin" ...... is basically PG level. The "Black and White Witch Kuila" released recently (June 6) is also a classic IP adaptation, and its PG-13 rating has been considered the largest.
So has Disney brought a change this time? Has "Black and White Witch" made a breakthrough? Or is it just another variant of Disney's "young teeth" positioning?
01
Before I watched it, I was looking forward to " Black and White Witch Kuila ". Especially when I learned that the film was adapted from "101 Faithful Dogs", which tells the history of the growth of the devil Kuila, I am even more looking forward to it. I wonder how Disney will adapt such a villain story.
But after reading it, I understand that Disney's scale is here. Describe the perception in one sentence: "Black and White Witch Kuila" is like a good student in fancy clothes, looks rebellious, but actually very well-behaved. In other words, it just puts on the look of being an enemy of the world, but in the end it still wants to be at peace with the world.
Why do you say that? Let's look at the story of the film first.
From the perspective of the play, the structure of "Black and White Witch" is very neat. To describe it in a cross talk term is " three turns and four shakes ", that is to say, the film has gone through three times of foreshadowing before the final big reversal.
If you look closely, these three have their own focus.
Skip the prologue paragraphs of childhood, the first episode is actually a " workplace film ", about the orphan Estella rushing to London, being photographed by the baroness, and becoming a fashion designer. Just look at this episode, which is very similar to the first half of "The Queen Wearing Prada", about how grassroots girls counterattack the workplace.
After the second episode, suspense appeared, Estella accidentally discovered that the Baroness was wearing the necklace left by her mother, so she planned to steal the necklace with her friend. This time, I entered the " bandit movie " mode, and talked about how this small gang concealed others and broke through the barriers to win treasures.
Later, as Estara discovered the shocking secret-the baroness was probably the murderer who killed his mother that year, the film entered the third episode, and the " revenge mode " was turned on .
After experiencing this "false victory", the film finally ushered in the final big reversal, Estella fell into the "night of soul" and began to fight back in Jedi.
Such twists and turns, layer by layer, and through this progressive structure, the film connects several types of elements, thus ensuring the viewability of the whole film.
02
Apart from the above-mentioned superficial stories, what I think is more interesting are the two "hidden stories" in the dark form of the film. One is the " mother-daughter war " and the other is the " personality war ."
Let me talk about the former first.
The director of "Black and White Witch" is Craig Gillespe, and his predecessor "I, Queen of Flowers" also tells a "mother-daughter war".
The mother in the film has completely subverted the traditional image of motherly love. She can only use her daughter and has no love. If this mother-daughter relationship is substituted into "Black and White Witch", you will know that the director actually brought the same feeling of despair into this movie. The mother in "Black and White Witch" also has no love for her daughter at all, and more than that, she also regards her daughter as an enemy. This kind of hatred seems to have no reason, but in fact it comes from the extreme narcissism of her mother, so when she faces the mirror, she recognizes herself and her life’s greatest enemy—the woman who looks most like herself— -daughter.
As a result, Estella, who was tragically abandoned, grew up under the care of her adoptive mother, and gradually approached the truth, and started a fashion showdown with her biological mother.
If we combine the time background of the film, it is London in the 1970s, where the punk frenzy is sweeping across the city, and the mother-daughter war in the film also has a taste of the times. What it actually shows us is: how the emerging punk trend that despises traditions defeats the old generation in the street carnival.
As this "mother-daughter war" intensified, another dark line of "personality engagement" also unfolded.
It turns out that when her adoptive mother taught Estella to be good since she was a child, she was actually suppressing the "devil personality" she inherited from her biological mother in her heart. From this perspective, the entire film can also be seen as a battle between Estella's inner dual personalities (an angel personality "Esdella" and a devil personality "Kuira").
The final outcome is actually very dark. Estella designed to avenge her birth mother, but it was also in the process of revenge that the devil in her heart was gradually awakened, leading her to degenerate into a "mother" step by step. This is the story of "the dragon slaying girl finally becomes the evil dragon", and the day the revenge succeeds, it is the adult ceremony of the evil dragon.
Speaking of this, I think of another movie "Joker".
"Joker" is also a "villain biopic ", and like "Black and White Witch", it also presents the whole process of "negative personality defeating positive personality" of the protagonist, except that the former is the clown who defeated Arthur, and the latter is the protagonist. Kuila replaced Estella.
And by comparing the two, you can see the limitations of "Black and White Witch".
This limitation is not limited to the difference in classification. "Joker" is an R-rated film, while "Black and White Witch" is only a PG-13-rated family movie; more importantly, it is more mixed than the gloomy style of "Joker" With the sorrowful hostility at the bottom and the ostentatious loneliness, in contrast, "Black and White Witch" is still too fairy tale and too young . According to its story, it could have led to complete "blackness". But when he walked halfway, he stopped, and the end result, like Kuila's hair, was half black and half white, stuck in an embarrassing position where he could not move forward or retreat.
And the most concentrated manifestation of all this is that, in order to make this villain’s narrative also return to a positive happy ending, the film once again played Disney’s best "family card", so that the already blackened Kuila was crying half-heartedly. The friend said that sentence: "You are my family, you are all to me."
This sudden change in emotions was unprepared; more deadly, it completely obscured Kuila's personality traits of "crazy, evil, and contempt for everything," and also made the character's arc of light fall into obscurity.
You can hardly even imagine that if this IP continues to be filmed, when Kuila appears as a real villain, can she pose a real threat to the protagonist? A devil who is still returning to the family-is the devil who has the most universal emotion still a true devil?
Of course, these problems are almost insoluble under Disney's existing production framework. It is already Disney's limit to be able to achieve "Black and White Witch". But for me, it's very discouraging.
It felt like after a series of wonderful cooperation, finally facing the empty goal, but then gave up the opportunity, turned and passed the ball back to his teammate.
03
Finally, let's put aside the above narrative and talk about it from a female perspective.
It is not difficult to find that this movie is a movie with women as the absolute protagonist. Not only is the first protagonist a female, the villain is a female, and even the only one among the three dalmatians whose name we remember is a bitch... and the male characters, without exception, are all auxiliary characters.
Ordinarily, it should be able to dig out some kind of female expression. But as the saying goes, movies starring a woman are not equivalent to women's movies. The same is true for this movie.
Throughout the film, it has nothing to do with gender issues. Even Shangzhuan said on the line that the female characters in the film are still standard women under a certain patriarchal discourse system. Not to mention that the big villain "The Baroness" itself is an appellation of others. It depends on her image, behavior, and personality. Her fascination with power is actually more like a domineering "man"; while the protagonist Estella looks like Very maverick, but as mentioned above, this character's ultimate goal is to return to the "family", and the "home" she returned to is nothing else, but the baron's castle inherited from the patriarchal legacy.
In this sense, another aspect of Disney's conservativeness is fully exposed.
Black, dare not really black; natural female, can't really be female.
All possible offenses are neatly closed under the huge creative inertia. In this way, Disney's fairy tales are staged again, but unfortunately, the audience has already grown up.
Welcome to pay attention to my public account: Zi Ge said the movie
Only write different in-depth film reviews.
View more about Cruella reviews
