Oh Disney. I give you a good review for The Princess and The Frog and then you go and make some silly, silly gender mistakes in Oceans. I guess the film was made by Disneynature, and another Disney-owned studio, Pixar, has not won my seal of approval for gender portrayal. Maybe I should have expected this.
And yes. Yes I did find things to criticize about gender in a documentary about the ocean.
Okay. The summary. Lots of beautiful, beautiful shots of the ocean and sea life. Shallow (ha) information about said ocean and sea life. Sometimes they didn't even tell you the name of the creature onscreen. As a major aqua-geek (I once dreamed of being a marine biologist), I was more interested in this film than an adult should probably be and really wanted to be able to Google some of the animals they featured. Disappointing in that respect, but definitely cool overall.
The problem I had with gender portrayal has three parts.
1) The narrator was male.
2) The film opens with a group of children running on a beach toward the water. A young male stops and looks out pensively. The voiceover says, "When a boy asks, 'What is the ocean?'..." That's the only mention of human gender we have in the whole film. Why not, "When a child asks...?"
3) Every time the narrator refers to an sea animal, he calls it a "he." Unless - you guessed it - the animal happens to be a mother with young offspring.
Okay. The first two choices, by themselves, would have be fine. Even 1) and 2) together wouldn't have been horribly offensive (although I probably still would have complained about it). But all three, together, are totally unnecessary and unfair. Gender-wise, the movie felt really old-school to me. In a bad way. It reminded me of a world I've never had to live in where only men are scientists and only women are parents.
All this, by the way, was preceded by a trailer for a new Disneynature film called African Cats. The tagline for the movie is something like, "Every mother has one goal. To protect her family." I mean, okay. Probably a lot of fathers feel the same way. And maybe some mothers actually have more than one goal? Maybe?
Garrrrggghhhhh. Come on, Disney! Get your underlings on-board with your sometimes admirable gender portrayals!
Click here to go to the website for Oceans.
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I feel your frustration. The footage was fantastic, and I enjoyed the film, but still feel that it sacrificed some of the science for accessibility. Using "he/she" arguably invests the animals with human gender distinctions; "the male" and "the female" might have been more accurate, if cumbersome. I'm curious whether research scientists use third person pronouns in their work.
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