Strawberry Shortcakes

The really insane part of me--the part which mostly governs my life it would seem--thought it would be an excellent idea to write an 80,000 word children's story in less than 2 1/2 months for a competition. If anyone was wondering why my blog is massively out of date and why, apart from to lose at endless games of Scrabulous, I have been otherwise unavailable and aloof--that's why!

Fortunately for me the madness has passed, and now I can go back to some degree of normality. But as I'm apparently still incapable of coherent thought beyond solving the problems of what to do about characters I suddenly need in chapter 20 having killed them off in chapter 9, and how it is I failed to notice that one of my characters had a sex change in chapter 2, I'm going to have to post some 'fillers' here just to make it look like I'm at least partially on the ball again... however slippery the ball is...!!

So here's some waffle and pretty pics from 'Strawberry Shortcakes':




...a Japanese film we saw at the Hyde Park Picture House as part of the Leeds International Film Festival.



The film follows the lives of four young Japanese women in Tokyo and is meant to be based upon an anime/manga series called 'Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries':



The blurb in the festival booklet suggested that it's supposed to be a part of the re-addressing of the repetitive function women play in this genre--which is often extremely voyeuristic, exploitative and infantilising. Apart from being about 40 minutes too long it was a really visually rewarding film to watch. But I don't feel it was particularly successful at rewriting manga roles for women. In its favour, the women's lives were really complex and multi-dimensional, but the film over all was just as voyeuristic as any anime.

The problem any film faces with drawing attention to the way certain film and graphic fiction genres exploit, commodify and detach women's bodies from the woman is that it's almost impossible without them actually doing it all over again themselves! So there was a lot of stylized nudity and intrusive shots of private moments to demonstrate how this genre stylizes nudity and intrudes on privacy!!! Oh, and there was some definite infantilising going on too! Yes, quite, well, what can you do??





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hyde park picture house, leeds international film festival, strawberry shortcakes, sweet cream and red strawberries, manga, anime