The Secret of Kells, The Club Dumas
Apr. 6th, 2010 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaebilityPete and I saw The Secret of Kells last week. It's an absolutely breath-taking movie - It surpasses anything by Pixar and Disney.
I read a review - unfortunately can't remember by whom - which bemoaned the lack of female protagonists, particularly in children's media. I agree completely; girls have to identify with the male characters, sometimes against the female ones. However, the reviewer used Kells as an example, how it's about Brendan, the young monk-in-training, or whatever Catholics call that role, and not about the female spirit Aisling. Pete and I were talking about this on the subway ride home: the movie's not really about Brendan. It's about the book.
Finished The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte last week, too, and I felt the same way. The books take precedence; the characters exist almost in a passive sense in regards to the books. In Club the main character, a "book hunter" named Lucas Corso, is hired to locate two copies of a rare and old book The Book of the Nine Doors. As he fulfils his mission, he realizes his life is following the plot of The Three Musketeers; he later ruminates how fictional his quest and the people in his life seem to be. They exist to progress the plot; they are pages in the book.
And that's what I think about Kells, too. The characters don't really matter. We don't learn much about them, they don't really grow or change over the plot's progression, and there's not even much of a plot. They exist to protect the book. It's not a story about their maturation, it's about how the book expands.
It's all very meta. Wish I were more articulate.
I read a review - unfortunately can't remember by whom - which bemoaned the lack of female protagonists, particularly in children's media. I agree completely; girls have to identify with the male characters, sometimes against the female ones. However, the reviewer used Kells as an example, how it's about Brendan, the young monk-in-training, or whatever Catholics call that role, and not about the female spirit Aisling. Pete and I were talking about this on the subway ride home: the movie's not really about Brendan. It's about the book.
Finished The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte last week, too, and I felt the same way. The books take precedence; the characters exist almost in a passive sense in regards to the books. In Club the main character, a "book hunter" named Lucas Corso, is hired to locate two copies of a rare and old book The Book of the Nine Doors. As he fulfils his mission, he realizes his life is following the plot of The Three Musketeers; he later ruminates how fictional his quest and the people in his life seem to be. They exist to progress the plot; they are pages in the book.
And that's what I think about Kells, too. The characters don't really matter. We don't learn much about them, they don't really grow or change over the plot's progression, and there's not even much of a plot. They exist to protect the book. It's not a story about their maturation, it's about how the book expands.
It's all very meta. Wish I were more articulate.
