Alice In Wonderland opens this Friday, and it’s about time we got another adventure for a young woman. Alice is all grown up in this one – or so it seems – but let’s hope Tim Burton still has a great adventure planned for her. The great thing about children’s stories is that they tend to use solid, old-school storytelling to show the passage from child to adult, which is all about finding values, stepping out into a bigger world, and finding the strength within — cue Joseph Campbell.
The great thing about children’s movies is that they’re unafraid to tell a straight-ahead story. Some people even use it as a pejorative: “Star Wars is just a kids movie!” Still only a kids story can hit that hallowed sweet-spot of Hollywood, the four-quadrant movie. Over 25, under 25, men, and women. In fact, Pixar shocked Hollywood through the crazy approach of going for story, humor, adventure, and broad morality. Their movies are always – always about family, even if the family story looks like a buddy movie.
They do have a weak spot, though. Female protagonists. Where are the stories for little girls? We don’t live in a culture that provides genuine rites of passage that clearly delineate the passage into adulthood, and so what it means to be a man and what it means to be woman isn’t ever really made clear. On this score, it’s certainly worse for girls than it is for boys, but boys get it bad too. Nobody can say what it means to be a man nowadays. Or say anything good, anyways. This wasn’t always the case. Time was, a movie could unapologetically be all about what it meant to be a man, and that could be a good thing.
Case in point: 1937’s Captains Courageous.
Harvey Cheyne’s a spoiled, manipulative little brat, who learned to be that way because his father, a single dad, was too scared of raising the kid alone to do anything other than throw money at him. When Harvey goes one step too far, dad thinks he can solve everything by taking Harvey on a cruise. Instead, Harvey goes overboard, whereupon ensues Harvey’s great adventure.
All I’ll tell you about that adventure is this: Harvey falls in with Manuel, a salty fisherman with his own wounds, played in an Oscar-winning turn by Spencer Tracy. Manuel, of course, has no interest in being friends with Harvey any more than Harvey wants to be friends with Manuel. They see in each other everything they hate, which means, of course, that only by becoming friends can they find everything they need.
Sound familiar? That dynamic sits at the emotional engine every Pixar movie.
As fearless as it is in teaching straight-up morals about what it means to be a man, Captains Courageous leaves me hankering for more wide-release kids movies for young women. For now, though, we’ll have to send our daughters and sisters to Alice in Wonderland so that they can learn that it’s alright to change several times between breakfast and lunch, and that curiosity can be the greatest virtue of them all.
Next week we move from big adventure and broad morality into the subtlety and depth of human relationships. In other words: a French movie.
Check out last week’s Movies that Changed My Life
