osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2020-04-07 09:49 am
osprey_archer) wrote2020-04-07 09:49 am
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The Jungle Book
In the days of my youth, Baloo was my favorite character in The Jungle Book ("The Bear Necessities," clearly the best part of the movie! Possibly I learned all the wrong life lessons from this film), and I still like him now, but rewatching the movie this week I had a new appreciation for Bagheera, who I always saw as kind of a killjoy. All he wanted to do was protect Mowgli! Even though that means forcing Mowgli to leave the forest and go live with boring old human beings!
I was 100% on board with Mowgli's "I want to stay in the forest!" thing, and I totally didn't get the ending, where he throws it all over because... he sees a girl drawing water from the pond?? It occurs to me now that this is the same basic story arc as Fern in Charlotte's Web: human child abandons talking animal friends for the lure of heterosexual love! I found it baffling there, too. Why would anyone abandon their talking animal friends for anything???
In general as a child I found early Disney romance plots incomprehensible. I've been thinking recently about the extent to which our understanding of something as "romantic" is culturally determined - originally I was thinking about this in the context of queer romances, about the way that people who aren't in queer spaces often just don't see queerness even when it's right under their noses (exhibit A: my mother didn't realize that the leads in Briarley, a Beauty and the Beast retelling, were going to get together until they actually kissed), but it occurs to me that actually humans have to be taught to recognize heterosexual romances, too, it's just that this tends to occur when we're so young that we forget it's something we learned.
I was 100% on board with Mowgli's "I want to stay in the forest!" thing, and I totally didn't get the ending, where he throws it all over because... he sees a girl drawing water from the pond?? It occurs to me now that this is the same basic story arc as Fern in Charlotte's Web: human child abandons talking animal friends for the lure of heterosexual love! I found it baffling there, too. Why would anyone abandon their talking animal friends for anything???
In general as a child I found early Disney romance plots incomprehensible. I've been thinking recently about the extent to which our understanding of something as "romantic" is culturally determined - originally I was thinking about this in the context of queer romances, about the way that people who aren't in queer spaces often just don't see queerness even when it's right under their noses (exhibit A: my mother didn't realize that the leads in Briarley, a Beauty and the Beast retelling, were going to get together until they actually kissed), but it occurs to me that actually humans have to be taught to recognize heterosexual romances, too, it's just that this tends to occur when we're so young that we forget it's something we learned.
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My dad used to read the Jungle Book to me when I was very small (my fave chapter was the one about the seals) until I demanded to try to read it for myself. My dim memory is there were a bunch of Disney re-releases when I was a kid (must have been in San Francisco) and this was one of them. My burning indignation at 'THIS IS NOT LIKE THE BOOK' kind of blots out all the other details. That was the first time I was highly pissed at a movie adaptation of a favourite story but definitely not the last!
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What kind of LOSER! Stay in the forest, Mowgli!
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