psocoptera

What my three-year-old thought: She enjoyed it! We were worried it might be too scary for her, but she didn't seem scared or upset; she said afterwards that she didn't like it when the girl cried, and I agreed that was a sad part. We had watched the trailer together and talked about how there was a scary bear that chased people like in that one book, and the first time we saw it I was all "ohp there's that bear!", like, oh, good, we needed that, got it!, so I think maybe it helped that it was an *expected* bear. Although in fact Junie doesn't seem to be particularly scared of monsters in movies - she loved Monsters Inc, and her favorite part of Cars was when they get chased by a monster truck. She does get upset about separations (where's the dad? where did his friend go? kind of thing) and so I think maybe she wasn't upset by the mom turning into a bear, because we still knew where she was? (ETA: also it was mom matinee and we sat right under some of the lights which stay on, and she was stuffing her face with grandma's popcorn, both of which probably made it less intense than if she was just sitting there in the dark watching.)

What I thought: Mixed feelings! I did not entirely love it that, when Pixar *finally* made a movie with a female protagonist, they made her femininity a problem. I mean, okay, I guess realistically in a patriarchy being a girl *is* inherently problematic, but I would have loved a plot where her happening to be a girl was as entirely incidental as, say, Nemo's being a boy was. Although it occurred to me later that I had read the "princesses don't" montage as being primarily about gender-role policing, and you could also read it as being more about class, about the demands on her because of an inherited-leadership system. There's a hint later that the sons may also feel oppressed in their expected roles. I wish they would have emphasized that a little more, maybe even rewritten some of the "princess" lines to "royalty doesn't" or "a leader doesn't" or something, so it was less about performing girlyness and more about whether she would have choices as an adult, or just this pre-defined role.

That said, some things I did love:
- sometimes you can tell which animation department made recent giant leaps forward, in a Pixar movie (the hair and fur in Monsters Inc, the skin textures in Incredibles, the water in the Ratatouille sewer sequence) - here it was definitely the tree&plant people. Wow. Gorgeous.
- it was a movie about a mother-daughter relationship (and there wasn't a romance at all)
- literal mama-bear fighting to protect her daughter
- when the mom is supposed to be sneaking upstairs, but she stops to watch Merida use the public-speaking skills she's tried to teach her, and she's so proud of her
- Merida using her doing-things-while-riding skills to mend the tapestry on horseback (perfect synthesis moment of the archery-on-horseback and boring-princess-stuff opposites from the first act)
- at the end, them out riding together. Oh my god ::heart heart heart::.

I think I'm putting it on my "might offer for Yuletide" list (hey, it's never too early to think about ~~the massacre~~ Yuletide!).