Reading/Watching Log #118

This month can best be described as a one-thing-leading-to-another month. I wanted to finish the second season of Atlantis, and that reminded me of 2012’s Sinbad. Having watched that, I naturally had to watch the animated movie of the same name from DreamWorks, which lead me to their other early animated projects. That meant rewatching The Prince of Egypt, which in turn put me in mind of other Biblical retellings, like Samson and Delilah. And so on and so forth.

It reminded me of just how connected our multitude of stories are; how one can inform another; how it all trickles down, like streaks of rain on a windowpane. Superman’s origins are just a variation of Moses in the Bulrushes, while his superstrength is matched in that of Samson’s. Then there’s the progression of Moses’s story, in which he learns a devastating truth, runs away, and returns a changed person who has been charged with righting a great wrong. It forms the backbone of so many modern stories.

Meanwhile, so many of our Femme Fatales are the progeny of Delilah, while the star-crossed element of her love affair with Samson (she’s Philistine, he’s of the tribe of Dan) reminded me a little of what they’re going for in the upcoming Robin Hood, in which Robin and Marian are Saxon and Norman respectively. Atlantis is filled with ancient tropes that are all muddled up in order to create a new story, while Sinbad’s best episode involves a run-in with the personification of death, who has been promised a young woman as a bride, but is ultimately outwitted out of his prize. How many times have we seen that one before?

Anyways, I just find it fascinating to join the dots between narratives, and this was a good month for doing so. 

Links and Updates

I haven’t done one of these posts since June, so a lot of things under the cut have already been updated (or even released) while I was busy accumulating them over the intervening months.

The good news is that SPRING is here in the southern hemisphere, which means an end to the dark evenings and cold mornings (for the most part, anyway). I’m still super-busy and I’ll be working all the way through Christmas until I get some more annual leave in February, but hopefully I’ll be able to bump up the amount of posts for 2025, as so far it’s been at its lowest since I started this blog back in 2014.

Angela Barrett: The Orchard Book of Stories From the Ballet

That Angela Barrett would illustrate a book of ballet stories seems inevitable, as her style perfectly matches the nature of ballet: delicate, elegant, and with a fairy tale-like ambiance. The Orchard Book of Stories From the Ballet has no less than four original covers, so the publishers certainly got their money’s worth.

This compilation includes ten stories in all, from the most famous (Swan Lake, The Nutcracker) to the more obscure (La Sylphide, Petrouchka) and all those in-between (Giselle, Coppelia, The Firebird). Interestingly, Barrett makes the call to depict the events of these stories as non-diegetic – that is, real events – no matter how magical – as opposed to a ballet enacted on the stage. For a comparison, Francesca Crespi illustrated her firebird in A Little Box of Ballet Stories as a person dressed as the firebird, whereas Barrett depicts it as an actual bird. The title is Stories From the Ballet, not Ballet Stories.

Aside from the cover art, the frontispiece and a few tiny images of ballet shoes and masks and other paraphernalia strewn throughout the pages, these stories are illustrated in a rendering of the real world, not as a theatrical illusion. I’m making a point of this, because there’s one exception, and that’s naturally going to be the subject of this post...

Meta: Rebecca and Rowena; Part I: Introduction

Note: I have been working on this post for several months now, and it just keeps getting longer and longer. As such, I’ve decided to break it down into four parts: the introduction, the novel/parody novella, the films, and the television adaptations.

Every now and then I come back to this article in The Toast about The Unified Theory of Ophelia, in which the author half-jokingly claims that they once believed everything there was to know about womanhood could be discovered in the character of Ophelia.

I had a similar revelation last year on reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and watching its assorted film and television adaptations (plus, William Makepeace Thackery’s parody novella). Everything about how female characters are portrayed across media, how fandom responds to them, and even how Love Triangles and Fan-Preferred Couples form in the imaginations of readers/viewers, can arguably be found in media’s collective portrayal of Rowena and Rebecca across the centuries.

Source

I would go so far as to say that the genesis of all fandom’s discourse and harassment and cross-examination and hypersensitivity and preoccupation with female characters and the role they play in any given narrative can be traced back to these two fictional women. Is that too broad a claim? Yes, of course – but as the linked article points out, every now and then certain theories and concepts that interest you can occasionally seem to magically coalesce into a single, shining, straightforward example. It’s like discovering the unifying theory of the universe.

Woman of the Month: Eris

Eris from Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas

For this month, I am allowing myself one semi-obscure female villain.

Of course, the goddess Eris is hardly unknown: she’s a major player in Greek mythology and the deity who kicked off the Trojan War when she threw the Golden Apple of Discord into the crowd at Peleus and Thetis’s wedding (and by doing so, making herself the progenitor of the evil fairy that curses Sleeping Beauty at her Christening, for whether she’s called Maleficent, Carabosse or the Fairy of Red, that character also sows discord after not being invited to a party).

But this particular take on Eris might count as obscure, as she’s from an animated movie released in 2003 that bombed badly at the box office. Yet for all that, she is easily its highlight, and reason enough to watch Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas at least once.

Michelle Pfeiffer lent her silky voice to the manipulative, chaos-loving goddess who has an elaborate plan to strew havoc throughout the known world, but what really gets your attention is the stunning animation that brings her to life. She slinks and glides across the screen, shifting in and out of ink-black smoke, with serpentine hair that undulates around her with an underwater fluidity. Sometimes she’s the size of a mortal woman; other times she expands to frighteningly large proportions, with glowing eyes and elongating fingers. You can’t take your eyes off her whenever she’s onscreen

Truly, she’s a marvel of animation; demonstrating that even a not-great movie can be elevated by a truly great villain.