[ SECRET POST #2242 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2242 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 022 secrets from Secret Submission Post #320.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[sugar_spun]

I didn't really sense that.

"the true villain is prejudice" movie without (to me) making it feel like one

I definitely see it. I mean, I even remember Hiccup going about the whole "but don't you see, all this time, it's just misunderstanding!" speech a la movies like Pocahontas. The Vikings and dragons make up their differences very easily and quaintly.

the exploration of disability

I didn't feel so. Toothless was an animal, he didn't have feelings or thoughts like humans. It felt like any 'befriending the injured animal' plot line.

It was beautifully animated, but I felt most of the characters were dull--Astrid was a fairly terrible character, and none of the other Vikings felt like they had any depth besides Hiccup and his father--and the story moved as I expected it to with little surprises.

One thing I did like, though, was that there was no 'Hiccup becomes a real Viking through his amazing inventions!'. While that in a sense happened, it was more than he supplanted the Viking traditionally entirely by doing a new thing out of kindness.

I liked the movie, don't get me wrong, but people raved over it a lot more than I ended up liking it.

[yeahscience]

the exploration of disability

I didn't feel so. Toothless was an animal, he didn't have feelings or thoughts like humans. It felt like any 'befriending the injured animal' plot line.

I don't understand how you reconcile that with the ending, where the loss of Hiccup's leg and the loss of Toothless's tail fin are pretty much explicitly visually linked together?

[sugar_spun]

Because Toothless was an animal. We never see Hiccup deal with disability, just deal with having an animal he just met be injured and trying to befriend it. I wouldn't even parallel that to living with a person with a disability.

We see Toothless deal with his disability in an animal way. This can't really parallel with a disabled person dealing with their disability with human emotions.

I just don't feel like it explored anything human or real about disability. It was a story about friendship between a boy and his x, x=dragon framed under the idea that he needs to help this dragon learn to fly again.

[yeahscience]

We never see Hiccup deal with disability

Except when he becomes disabled.

[sugar_spun]

That happens at the very end of the movie. He does not 'deal' with disability. He wakes up and finds a prosthetic leg and oh look everyone is working together end movie.

That is not even remotely close to a 'dealing' with something. That's just learning it happened.

[yeahscience]

Well, first of all, the fact that a children's movie did that at all is pretty bold, but second, I disagree with your glossing over it.

First off, Toothless isn't just injured in that he can't be nursed back to health and has to permanently rely on Hiccup to fly. However, at first, Toothless is angry and actively rebellious against Hiccup's help. Even after that he blames Hiccup when their flying doesn't go smoothly, because he has to rely on Hiccup's guidance and support. Those are things I think kids with disabilities can definitely relate to -- I know that I related as someone who has disability as an issue in their life. Again, it's not like... a Black Stallion situation, because in that case, they learned to trust each other and became a team voluntarily. In this case, it's not at all voluntary on Toothless's part, but he learns to cope and then thrive with it.

Then you have the ending, which is brief but does have important textual and subtextual content in it. Hiccup wakes up, sees what happened, and has an obvious emotional reaction that I personally found instantly relatable. He then learns that his new leg is specifically tailored to Toothless's saddle, such that they're now almost literally built to fly with each other. Neither is broken, but each is better with the other there... not only that, but better and more powerful than anyone else on the island. That is, honestly, a really strong message to send to kids who might be struggling with their own bodies or mental health.

So, yes. I would say there's a strong subtext about disability in that movie that I think elevates it above the chaff.

[sugar_spun]

I didn't think it was chaff--it's either Dreamworks' best film, or their second best, but I don't think it's a masterpiece.

It's not that I think Hiccup and Toothless' relationship is plain or boring or one-dimensional, I just don't think it's terribly nuanced. It strikes all the same chords to me as most rescuing wild animal and boy + animal stories go. I didn't think it stood out in that regard. I feel like Toothless' reactions are animal ones, which is fine, but I don't think that makes it an acceptable parallel for human disability.

[yeahscience]

I said classic, not masterpiece. There are few things I would call a masterpiece, and I can't even think of a Pixar movie I'd include in that. The first 30 minutes of Wall-E, maybe.

But whatever, I made my case about the disability thing. As someone who does have a relationship with disability and as someone who works with disabled kids, it spoke to me in a way that other "horse and his boy" stories do not. I'm happy to have it on my regular rotation.

[sugar_spun]

Ah. Does that mean you're using 'classic' as a stand-out example of a certain genre, style, etc, and 'masterpiece' as being a very outstanding work of art? I usually conflate the two. I was being tautological above.

In that case, I don't think I disagree. It's a very good animated family film that will probably hold up very well in later years.

Hm...actually that gets me thinking about Pixar. As a group, Pixar produces so many excellent films that it didn't really occur to me I might not think of one of them as being a 'masterpiece'. I'm tempted to say Toy Story 2 is, though, especially if you see it as a story about death and accepting death.

[yeahscience]

Eh, personally I found Toy Story 2 relatively bland and lacking in the freshness and punch of the original. It was too nakedly emotionally manipulative to have an impact on me, I think.

[cloudsinvenice]

+1

I'm disabled and this is exactly how it pinged for me, too. It wasn't a perfect movie, but I'm very fond of it and I wish I saw more movies that managed to get across that disability is not some unique ~dependent state that sucks for able-bodied people and makes disabled people separate, but that as people we are all interdependent - I thought that the way the dragons and Vikings wound up living and working together underlined that beautifully.