Urgh. Fantasy animations created before I was born.

I watched another one of those frustratingly sexist fantasy animations. Urgh. I like D&D, and there are some fantasy novels I’ve enjoyed in my time - but what is up with this genre and timeframe? I can console myself with the fact that these were created awhile ago and things actually do seem to be getting better.

This one is sort of fantasy sci-fi. It’s called “Starchaser - The legend of Orin” and it was made in 1985 by someone who _isn’t_ Ralph Bakshi (creator of Fire and Ice and Wizards, both of which I’ve written about here before.) There’s a dude with a magical sword, and there are fairy like creatures. (Well. Sort of) He’s on a quest. This is all fantasy. There are also robots, lasers and space ships.

The animation starts off in these mines where people are being oppressed by robots to mine for these crystals which are apparently worth a lot. The humans don’t know that there are worlds above the mines and worship the robot leader like some kind of god. One of their religious tennants was never to dig up because hell is in that direction.
One of them gets a magic sword. His name is Orin. He has a lady friend who he is very fond of. The magic sword projects some sort of holograph of a guy who tells them about the upper world. Sword guy and his girlfriend-type decide to go find this world. They leave this little blind kid behind who seems very fond of them and looks like Orin. They were possibly a family or something.

They get out of the mines, have an encounter with the bad-dude, Orins-girlfriend-type gets killed, he meets some smuggler guy, kidnaps some robot woman, goes to visit a pimp in a slum (The smuggler has used the prostituted women in the past.) meets up with some princess. Falls in love with said princess really quickly even though they had a bad set of first impressions. She falls in love with him back. They save the day. Sort of generic stuff I guess - but seriously the standard movie reivew thing isn’t what I want to do here.

Obviously given the theme of this blog I want to talk about _gender._

Now. The main character is this dudely-dude who the story is focused on. His original love interest exists as something for the main character to be upset about rather then being a character in her own right. Not an unusual thing - but worth mentioning. The first bit that seems really worth mentioning is the introduction of the robot lady. We see her all pouty and upset, she’s dropped a bunch of papers and such. As soon as she arrived my housemate says something like “Why would they put breasts on a robot?” which is reminicent of those articles about robot-women that Richie used to have up. (I think he took them down, right?)
I’d ask the counter-question “Why even make a bipedal robot, they don’t balance well and I’m sure a centipede with lasers on it would do the job. Anything humanoid isn’t practical” I’d also think that _given_ we’re making humanois robots just for the sake of their being human then why _not_ put breasts on some of them? (Something about men being default people hrmm?) However my answer doesn’t seem very good because I’m ignoring the spicy, spicy sexism there.
My boyfriend had something which seemed like a more accurate answer: “Well - if she doesn’t have breasts how would we know why she’s pouty?” said in a sarcastic tone.

They kidnap her, and then treat her like shit. I’ll show of video of it later. She kept doing things, like fixing the ship (which had a personified male robot name Arthur attatched controlling it.) and trying to fly the ship and I thought “maybe she’s going to do something useful / not be berated with this task she’s doing.” when these things happened. But it wasnt to be. When she did things, she did them wrong - or if she did them right people complained she wasn’t doing them fast enough. She’s fixing the ship Arthur. Here’s what he has to say about the matter: “What in the world is taking you so long? We’ve got to find Dag. Next thing you know, you’ll be putting up curtains.”
So - she could fix things and fly the ship a bit, but she made a lot of mistakes and was berated. The thing that gets me is that the things she can do (albiet not that greatly it might seem) are all related to her being a robot. Seriously - “sexy robot woman” is her _entire_ character profile. Thats it. Just think of a bunch of stereotypes about robots and some stereotypes about women. Then BAM. You have a character.

I don’t really want to write much more - so here’s that video. If a picture tells a thousand words, how much does 2 minutes of video tell? Uhh. It’s not cut well because I wasn’t able to get sound going in the video editor (some free thing I got from the web.) So there are some non-gender/robot things going on here.
This is not long after they first meant the fembot, when they kidnap her.

I’ll provide a transcript too. I can’t remember anyone but Orin and Arthurs name and I just watched this move. Not a good sign. I’ll call the robot “fembot” (they call her a fembot) and the smuggler dude smuggler.

Fembot: Who the hell ordered this drill?
Smuggler: *Doesn’t answer her. Just picks her up and starts running*
Fembot: Hey!
Smuggler: Come on kid lets get out of here
Fembot: Let me go! Let me go! Get your human hands off me!
Smuggler: Get us out of here Arthur. Fast!
*ship takes off. Cut to the bad guy talking about Orin. Cut back to the inside of the escaped ship*
Fembot: You’ll never get away with this. Crystal smuggling is an inter-planetary offense. And so is kidnapping!
*smuggler has her opened up and he seems to be fixing her or something*
Fembot: Stop that! You have no right to go plumbing around inside me. Oww! *unhappy noises that I can’t make out*
*Fade to flashbacks about the blind kid he left behind, and his dead girlfriend. He’s not met and fallen in love with the princess yet, so she’s in his mind I guess. Come back to the scene inside the ship*
Smuggler: Arthur. Where the hell are the personality files of these G2 Fembots
Arthur: According to the internal schematics manual of the G2 class government model fembots all personality characteristics are located in her… *embrassed stuttering*You’re definately looking in the wrong place.
Smuggler: Well where are they?
Arthur: They’re in her… posterior
*Smuggler grins this creepy grin*
Fembot: You wouldn’t dare
*Smuggler puts some tape over her mouth as she starts calling for help. Opens up her butt plate as she struggles some.*
*Orin starts talking to the smuggler about crystal smuggling as if this whole situation is an ordinary thing. Smuggler plays around in her arse-are, with lights and gizmos flashing up. He finishes and takes the duct-tape off her mouth.*
Fembot: *gets up sexily and then says “hiiiii” in a sultry manner*
Smuggler: Thats more like it
Fembot: Has anyone ever told you that you’re awfully cute for a meat body?

Fin.

Yes. That did happen. Urgh. Later in the movie she’s back to her original pouty angry seeming self, but then even later in the movie towards the end she swoons over the smuggler and they seem to be a couple. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

Also: Orin cures that blind kid of blindness. The blind kid was upset thinking Orin only didn’t want to take him on the dangerous journey because he was blind, and Orin insisted it was because he was _young_ instead, but the cure for blindess seems to be played up as awesome sauce. I dunno. Urgh.

Thats the longest thing I’ve written in awhile.

Damn you fantasy animations created before I was born.

Today I watched the movie Wizards. It reminded me in a lot of ways of Fire and Ice so it wasn’t too surprising when I read just now that they were created by the same dude.

The animation of wizards was pretty bad. Much worse then the animation in Fire and Ice. The start of the movie made me think ‘moving comic book’ more then it made me think ‘animation’ because it consisted of camera’s panning up and down still pages as a voice narrated the thing. So where Fire and Ice had pretty animation as a redeeming factor, Wizards does not.
Wizards actually has some moments in it that I genuinely enjoyed, unlike Fire and Ice, so I don’t know where to balance it out.

A basic rundown of the plot:

Man destroyed the world with nuclear bombs and things like that, and then there were mutants and people died and shit. Then the “true ancestors of man” fairies, dwarves, elves and that shit come back. There are good areas that the fairy people inhabit, and bad (mostly radiated) areas inhabited by mutants, humans and other monstrous shit. (I kind of liked that humans are also considered monstrous, and the conversations showing how the humans pretended to be good, but acted evilly were part of he bits I enjoyed.)
A woman gave birth to two children. Both grew up to be wizards. One (named Avatar) was kind, good and loving, the other was evil and for some reason had skeleton arms. Very cliche. (One of the ways it was demonstrated that the good one was good and the evil one was evil was interesting I must say: The good one spent lots of time with his mother, and the evil one didn’t. Also the evil one tortured animals.) The evil one fought the good one, the evil one lost and swore he’d be back.
He started attacking the ‘good areas’ filled with pixies and whatnot after he summoned some creatures from hell. Mutants, humans, robots and creatures from hell made up his army. He used old technology like guns n’tanks and things. Conversely technology was banned in the fey-folk areas. It was played up as “The fight between magic and technology”
The evil dude lost all the time because his troops were unmotivated and ran away easily. He found some old footage of Hitler and inspired his troops into battle with nazi propaganda. Then the evil guy started winning ’cause as one fey-folk person put it “They have technology and guns, and we just have hope” or something like that.
So the good wizard, a fairy lady named Elinore, an elf dude and a robot that used to be evil but turned good go in search to destroy the projector which shows the nazi-stuff.

Like Fire and Ice the lone female adventurer in this fantasy flick was pretty much nothing more then eyecandy. You can see her nipples through her dress at every point as well as a whole lot of cleavage. There are some serious ‘pinup’ moments of her.
Elinore is called a slut at one point, which had been the harshest insult in the movie so far (others basically being close to “you old fool”) but at the end of the movie the good wizard calls the bad one a son of a bitch. Still a gendered insult, but not as jarring as in fire and ice, where female characters were called bitches and sluts, and men were called nothing harsher then fools.
Her father died and she said she was out to avenge him though early, early, early in the trip the good wizard tells her to sing, and she says something similar to ‘I don’t want to” then he goes “Well that’s why we brought you along” and she says
“fine” and starts singing.
Apparently the only reason she was in the party was to be the groups minstrel. Awesome.
At the end of the movie she gets married to the good wizard.

It’s just a bad movie is all. It had some redeeming bits, but on the whole: bad and sexist.

There were no nonwhite people, so there were no racist depictions of them, and the only sexuality we heard about was heterosexuality, which isn’t as blatantly bad as Fire and Ice I guess, but if the only reason there wasn’t overt racism and homophobia is ’cause they chose not to depict those people in their fantasy world…
Well that’s not good either.

>.<

You say "cult classic" I say "sexist, racist, homophobic piece of crap"

I’ve been told, many a time that the movie ‘Fire & Ice’ was something worth seeing. A cult classic I was told. When I was in my old animation college people told me that the animation (based off rotoscoping) was not great, but regardless it’s something I should see.

So when my housemate bought a copy of it recently, I decided why not check it out, I’d been told such good things about it after all. So, to anyone looking for a decent animation to watch, I’ll tell you with this hindsight.
Don’t seek out Fire and Ice.

We’re told in the beginning through some text that the world was being taken over by an evil woman named Juliana, who had a son named Neckron who she taught the black arts. Her son is now taking over the world as a major evil. He’s in charge, and doing all the evil things throughout the movie but really, it’s his mothers fault. She taught him to be that way. The good guy is called King Jerrold. He’s a swell guy!

We open with a scene of Neckron destroying a villiage full of strapping white men with a glacier. Somehow, from the glacier evil black men attack!

We come to a scene where the black men are harrassing a white woman, who has been chained down. They speak only in grunts, a white man we saw earlier in the villiage wakes up, then brutally kills several of the black men in a chase scene. Killing these black men is perfectly alright, they are after all bad guys. (Referred to as ‘The subhumans’ and ‘The dogs of Neckron’ later. Lets take a closer look at these guys They look human to me)
Our white male hero escapes them by jumping off a cliff, and not dying. ‘Cause he’s buff.

Cut to a scene of Juliana and Neckron talking, here we affirm that Juliana is egging our evil man on. She’s an evil mother she is! She orders that King Jerrold’s daugher be kidnapped, cut scene.

We get some conversation between the king and his daughter, where she wants to do something of use, and he says that she must stay in the castle. We then see her learning about the elements from her female teacher in her bedroom, neither of which are wearing very much in the way of clothing.
She complains that the men are getting the glory while she has to stay at home, and this is unfair. All the while, the camera pans up and down her lovely body, we get shots of her breasts and thighs, as she lolls around on her bed. I wonder if the people who made this film intended her to be a strong female, what with her talks of wanting independance. (Reminds me of something I saw in a ‘the making of Cinderella’ documentary. Cindy was a ’strong female’ because she went out and got her man unlike all previous Disney Princesses.)

Evil black men storm in, knock the teacher unconscious, and steal the Princess (who is named Teegra)

They take her to a river so they can relax, and they push her in. She takes her chance and decides to make herself look as alluring as possible, she dips in and out of the water as the black men stare at her longingly, on her last dip in, she swims for freedom! What an escape plan!

She gets to the other side of the lake, and runs for her life, jiggling about the forest looking scared.

This is how she will continue to look throughout the movie, or at least, the parts where she’s not being Lead around on a chain by either the black men, or Juliana

She meets the strong brave white man we encountered her earlier, and continues a pattern of being chased, captured, retrieved, escaping etc.

Oh, I can’t do this scene by scene thing anymore, the movie is bad, geddit!

Some more things of interest: Teegra, who walks around, sits, runs and does everything else in submissive postures also brutally kills some black ’subhumans’ It’s okay to kill them, they’re subhuman.

Also, we have an evil lesbian like the evil Juliana, this evil lesbian practices witchcraft. She has a lightly coloured servile man with her, who she tells Teegra not to be scared of “He’s as harmless as a child.” She kisses Teegra in her sleep, which is how we learn of her sexual preferences. (Are you getting the message oh whiteheterosexualmale audience? Lesbians are evil, and want to steal your women!)

There’s a token ‘good’ coloured guy His name is Darkwolf. In case you couldn’t tell he’s dark by the colour of his skin, they put it in his name as well!

Juliana is called a bitch once.

Teegra is called a bitch, a slut and a skank, once each.

The strongest insult a male seems to get is something along the lines of ‘foolish boy’

This movie was made with all the values of white male supremacy. I’m sure there’s more instances of bad things, but I can’t recall them off the top of my head, and I don’t want to keep writing.