Oral Presentations Day 2

Today's class gave the remaining students a chance to present, and that included me. I was very surprised to see that most people chose to present a comparison of Little Red Riding Hood. I thought that I would be one of the only ones, if not the only one to present on this topic but never the less it was another interesting set of presentations.

Although most of our presentations focused on a similar topic, I found Josephs presentation particularly well presented and researched, and to me it stood out as one of the best so far. His analogies on the importance of the color red with respect to the tale was interesting, and it was great to see how he interpreted the color through his research, and how it represented so many contrasting things, like love or the devil. He made me see that the tale really is two sided, making notions on the importance of advice and listening to ones elders, as well as certain rebellious acts like Little Red Riding hood disobeying her mother in straying of the path. I feel like he had a good point in mentioning that this respect for the elderly and the wisdom associated with age is something that has remained relatively unchanged throughout history, something that is quite rare when one looks at the drastic differences in today's world and that of the sixteenth century.

Overall I felt that our group presentations went very well, and although I was not happy with my own presentation, as a class I think we did very well, certainly better than any other class I can compare too.

Oral Presentations Day 1

Our class today consisted of seven oral presentations, we started with a presentation by Gwyn, who compared Cinderella and Donkeyskin in terms of appropriatness for children. Her topic was well presented and I agree with her that donkeyskin seems generally inappropriate for children, the notions on incest, along with the general absense of magic and great amounts of trickery would leave children unentertained and with a wrong moral.
The soundtrack analysis on Beauty and the Beast was my favorite presentations, it was very well researched and displayed a great knowledge of how the music attributed so beautyfully to the story and ultimately led to receiving an acadamy award. The individual clips of music were very intersting, and i was intrigued by the explanations of each motif. Like the enchantment motif and the use of a fluid woodwind sound, or the low brass notes of the beast motif. My favorite part was the west wing, as it used no dialogue and was all instrumental. I've always been a fan of transmitting emotion simply through sound, in the past this was only possible using orchestras or complex instrumental arrangments, but electronics have led us to great lengths in being able to generate this type of content from our own personal computers. electronic music really has revolutionized this idea and user generated instrumental music has allowed us to convey emotions through many new styles of music, like house or electro.
We also had two presentations on Snow White, which were also well researched and led me to agree that the grimm version of the tale seems most suited for kids, as it portrays a more clear moral and is generally less violent.
I have to say that most of the presentations were very well thought out and executed, and I'm hoping that mine will go as smoothly as the first seven we saw.

Otogibanashi - Folktales of Japan

I've recently been doing a bit of research on Japanese Folktales for another class of mine, and after a presentation on the concept by a few of my classmates in my Japanese Society class, it became strikingly clear to me that the Japanese have a very familiar folktale structure to the one we as westerners are used to. Many of the tales ive explored are remarkably similar in their moral and virtue, some so similar they directly relate to tales we have analyzed in class.

In Japan, folktales are referred to as Otogibanashi. These tales have received strong influence from Japanese Shinto and Buddhist beliefs and often deal with supernatural beings like kami's, the many gods the japanese have interpreted from nature throughout past centuries. The Japanese also distinguish between 3 basic types of folktales, with the Namidabanashi tales dealing with sadness, Obakebanashi tales focusing on ghosts and Ongaeshibanashi tales dealing with repaying kindness. The tales always tell a story based on distinct factors of visual and emotional beauty, and there are many more categories to be found in Japanese folktales, but these three do represent some of the most common tales found today.

A tale that i certainly found similar to our version of Bluebeard was the tale of Uguisu no Sato which translates to something like "a bush warbler and the house". It tells the tale of a woodcutter that stumbles upon a beautiful house in a hidden grove. Inside he found a beautiful woman that is busy and wants the woodcutter to take care of her home while she goes out. She instructs him to never look in any of the reception rooms during her absence but as in our tale, curiosity overcomes the woodcutter and he dares to look in the other rooms, where he finds many riches and beautiful furniture following a theme of the four seasons, along with three eggs which he accidentally breaks . At this point the woman returns, complains about the mans insincerity and transforms her self into a bush warbler. She then flies off singing "i miss my children," at which point the woodcutter suddenly finds himself in a field with the house and everything valuable gone.

I was stunned at how similar this tale was and although its hard to determine when exactly this tale found its origins, it still seemed as though Japanese folktales are remarkably similar to the ones we have in our society. Although these similarities are very clear, it seems that the Japanese have a much larger emphasis on portraying natural beauty and their concepts of "wabi sabi" or basically the concept of finding beauty in the imperfections of nature. This seems to make the tales I've read more peaceful in their nature, although they can often be just as graphic as our tales from Perrault and the Grimm Brothers.

Beauty and the Beast - Critics Discussion

Our critics discussion really turned out interesting today as our e-reserve articles turned out to be quite political as well. The discussion questions led us from analyzing the plot of the story to examining these aspects more broadly with regards to past as well as present media and politics.

Our first discussion question dealt with Belle and how her being an outsider left her more predisposed to accept Beast. The class seemed to generally agree with this idea and I my self thought so too. The tale was set around a small french village were being different was bad and although belle was most beloved by her neighbors and village for her beauty and unjudgmental innocence, she herself was isolated and without a true companion besides father. This in my mind definetly left her predisposed to eventually accept the beast for who he truly is inside.

Gaston was the topic of my last blog and he was also a main focus in the discussion questions. We talked about his role in the story and how he potentially aids in delivering Disney's message on external versus internal beauty. I found that Gaston was well utlized as a character and the idea of having him portray a contrast to the Beast seemed to work too. As i found out from researching his character, he was specifically redesigned to reflect less of a classical macho and instead was supposed to look charming and handsome to make his evil personality particularly shocking. This concept should be perceivable to children although they might not be fully aware of this, if at all.

The last discussion question we dealt with had to do with expectations of men and how these might have changed over the past two decades. As a class we seemed to feel that much more emphasis is places on a deep sense of character, and being not just a great strong man but also having a sensitive and compassionate  side that others can identify with and potentially exemplify such behavior. This trend seems to appear in many aspects of society, even with respect to the newly elected predisent of the United States, a man that is arguable more of a family oriented and sensitive individual, very educated in all aspects of his leadership and also notably the first president of african descent. But its not just in the political world that we can observe this, popular movies are no longer focused around a great big, perfectly chizled white male protagonist. Instead we have seen great characters like Denzel Washinton emerge to be characters that as we mentioned in class truly make a movie and not the other way around. I feel as though society has grown bored of the stereotypical white male characters and we are all craving for new creative ideas to emerge out of the huge pool of media that has evolved over the last few decades.

In conclusion,  although our class has shrunk to only fifteen remaining students, our discussions are still strong and the Beaty and the Beast critics class was no exceptions. We analyzed the questions well and ended up drawing quite valuable information on how society seems to have changed and indeed is changing ever so fast into a world were race, gender and origin no longer effect judgement, and we are free to experiance the full palette of talent that our world as a whole has to offer. This phenomenon in my mind is long overdue and has sadly been greatly restricted in the past. People of all origins have been oppressed through overpowerful religions and corrupt political policy and it has crippled our society with rediculous stereotypes and great amounts of indefensible bias. I will finish my blog with a particularly hideous picture of Germany's potential next Foreign Minister, a man who is openly gay, married to his partner and wears lots of pink ties. None of these things however have kept him from having a successful political career based on his actual skill and experience, without being rendered completely irrelevant and uncompetitive because of his sexual preferences. I think this shows a step in the right direction and exemplifies a future that is hopefully free from such bias, and relies on actual skill, knowledge and experience instead.

Beauty and the Beast - Gaston in Detail

The articles chosen for our critics class on Beauty and the Beast included an article entitled Yep Gaston's Gay and although this is an interesting topic on its own, it got me interested in why Disney choose to add this character to the story in the first place.

After doing a bit of research on the character, it seems that Disney added Gaston to the film in order to give the tale a sense of danger and to present an even greater contrast to the tales theme on inner versus outer beauty. The supervising animator responsible for initial drawings of Gaston portrayed him as an arrogant man, heavily built and having a mustache. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was in charge of Disney's motion picture division at the time insisted that Gaston had to appear more serious to add an element of "don't judge a book by its cover."

The idea of adding to the tales already sharp sense of inner beauty vs outer beauty through a character like Gaston was a smart move in my opinion. It gives the tale a character that is truly opposite to the Beast, very handsome to look at, but evil inside. The revisions made to Gaston to properly suit the tale shows that the creators really wanted to make a statement with this character, and thus made him more appealing to a modern audience, effectively giving him a soap opera charm rather than portraying him as an old fashioned Paramour.

This once again shows that Disney is not afraid to add many layers of new characters to the original tale they are revamping. They really seem to have mastered this art and are able to more effectively make a point on theme and moral by generating these specific provocative characters.

Beauty and the Beast Day 1

Today's class started with the realization that none of the three groups that were supposed to present were able to as all the presenters seem to have dropped the class. It really has started to scare me a little to see how many people dropped the class. Nevertheless after reviewing Ms Newsam's newest additions to our blackboard page we went on to start a short class discussion on The Beauty and the Beast. 

We mainly focused on the "Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont" version and the Disney version today, and tried to underline some of the key differences in both of these tales. We first talked about why characters like Lumiere and Cogsworth were added to the tale in the Disney version. This brought us to discuss several concepts on how these characters were used as communication aids between Belle and the Beast, as they really were not able to spend much time together otherwise. We also argued that it might be useful to have such characters in order for children to better grasp the moral of the story, they allow the tale to be narrated by several different characters, helping young ones follow along with the tale without being overly confused by it. In my mind not only do these characters serve as means of clarifying the tale, but they also help make the story more exciting and fluid ensuring that children are kept entertained and watching. 

This really led us into a good discussion on how children today are so over stimulated with visual inputs and media information, it seems that especially over the last decade these industries have evolved way beyond what they were in the early nineties when this movie was released. One would think that if this movie was made in 2009 it would greatly contrast the original, a film that was only released in 1991. It really does drive generations apart, and one gets the feeling that children, and people in general are constantly presented with more vivid forms of entertainment, causing our desire and threshold for more excitement in everything we do for fun to grow more and more. The age of Videogames and constant streaming information really has taken over, and hopefully this wont effect us negatively in the future.

When talking about the original tale, published in the late seventeen hundreds we all thought that although it wasn’t as filled with characters and imagery stimulus, the tale its self seemed more elegant and developed, in terms of its characters, like Belle and her sisters, who seemed better introduced and appeared to have greater depth in the written tale. Most of us felt that although today's children might find the Disney version of the story more entertaining and easier to follow, as a parent the original tale should be considered as it offers many other interesting aspects that could very well leave a child just as mesmerized.

Bluebeard Discussion Day 2

Today's class was focused around the criticism on Bluebeard. It was my turn to present the criticism, along with my discussion partner Stephanie who took care of today's discussion questions. Our criticism was based around the article "Anti-housewives and ogres housekeepers the roles of Bluebeards female helper," in the e-reserves section, and talked about the importance of the so-called female helper in the story, and what the importance of this often vague character really was.

We mainly focused on Charles Perrault's version of the tale, In which the female helper is actually the wife's sister. referred to as "Sister Anne" in the tale, Perrault left this character out of the tale till the resolution of the story was required, at which point she helped the wife spot her brothers and signaled them to hurry. As a quote in our critical text points out, "the heroine’s brothers are “summoned” by Sister Anne to save her sister’s life, but this is not strictly true. The brothers, by a mighty coincidence, are already on their way. Sister Anne merely signals them to hurry up-- she’s helpful but not that helpful”(Tatar, 210). We came to the conclusion that sister Anne was an element to the tale that helped execute the resolution of the story, but was left so undeveloped by Perrault so that she would not interfere with the plot otherwise. This seems to be the reason Perrault made her appearance so brief, and why he chose to leave her so uninformed and vague as a character.

Our discussion then carried on to try and put the tale into perspective with relation to the time it was written, and what possible symbolism might be involved to leave a distinct moral to the reader, in particular with reference to sister Anne. We figured that while sister Anne is by no means a character Perrault spent a lot of time with, she still seems to portray a message of family importance, and being able to rely on family members in otherwise hopeless situations.

We spent a good deal of class discussing possible relations to medieval times and as Ms. Newsmen mentioned that an estimated six million women were murdered due to witch trials and other beliefs of the time, I commented that I get the feeling we really weren't humans at the time with how evil and judgmental our acts used to be. Matt then pointed out how we as humans are still so inclined to such evil today and he felt that we really can't be considered human for the things we do in the present. I have to agree with him on that, although I feel that there have been some great changes since those times, changes that thoroughly altered us as human beings and how we perceive ourselves on this planet. In medieval times, people for the most part had no idea why they were on this planet, and were forced into religious belief to offer an explanation.

Since then however, we have made great discoveries that have led us to understand that we are no different than the rest of the animals on this planet. Although many people still believe in creationism, I feel that our advancements in science have to be the single greatest achievements in human history. Without science I don’t think times would be any different than they were back then, and we would still be burning witches and punishing women for preposterous reasons. If it wasn’t for such bright minds like Galileo and da Vinci that were pushed by their curiosity to disobey the church and in turn made some of the most fundamental discoveries in the history of science and research. Although science has been abused just as much as anything else in history, it's never the scientists that created the processes or theories that are abusing these powers, but the political figures that are in my mind just as evil today as they were in medieval times, leading me to agree with what matt said in that we still have much of the same cruelty and unjustifiable evil going on today as we did back then. Time for a social revolution if you ask me…