By Natasja van Loon

Borderline 1 & 2 by Monique Renault

No list of feminist animation would be complete without at least one movie by independent French animator Monique Renault. Her work is based upon social themes like feminism, anti-militarism and anti-religion. Her technique is mainly colored pencil applied directly to paper.

Renault’s most recent film, Holy Smoke, was made in 2000, when smoking was still socially accepted. It focuses on a woman writing a letter: when she lights up a cigarette she remembers all the important cigarettes of her life. It’s a beautiful rendition of a time when the cigarette was still a symbol of empowerment, and a woman could appropriate male iconic power by smoking. I chose however one of her older animations for this top 5. Borderline 1 & 2 were made in 1981, but especially Borderline 1 is still strikingly relevant in our age and will stay that way as long as there is a wage gap, and household and caretaking chores aren’t evenly distributed between the genders. Borderline 2 is a shorter and more philosophical animation about the feats of men, as seen through the eyes of women.

Among The Black Waves by Anna Budanova

The Russian Federation is not a regime one usually associates with women’s rights, so it’s a small miracle that Among The Black Waves by Anna Budanova got funded by the Russian state. Perhaps because the story is based upon an ancient northern folktale that conveys its feminist layers in a very subtile and implicit way. But make no mistake: the legend of the seal girl whose skin gets stolen by a man giving him power over her, has a distinct feminist message. The seal girls are free spirits, they represent women who do not bow to the will of men – which is why the male adversary is dead set on taming one of them.

Budanova’s stylish black and white animation is imbued with the threat of male power, symbolized by the dog of the man that ferociously guards the woman he has made his wife. But neither man nor dog wholly succeed in taming her spirit and she keeps longing for the freedom of the sea. It is no coincidence that the one who ultimately frees her is another woman: the seal girl’s daughter.

Teat Beat of Sex by Signe Baumane

It’s hardly surprising that a lot of feminist animation films deal with the subject of sex. After all, the male fear of female sexuality is responsible for the creation of a societal system that is completely dedicated to the suppression of the female sexuality. Chosing one animation out of the countless  productions that are worthwhile was hard, but the work of the New York-based Latvian animator Signe Baumane mustn’t lack in this overview.

Sexuality is not Baumane’s only feminist topic: she also tackles difficult themes like pregnancy and depression and makes them palatable through humor and irony. She usually narrates her personal stories over a flat 2D hand-drawn style of animation. Her short film Teat Beat of Sex is a perfect example: it’s funny and frank, but also highly educational and based on first-hand experiences. In Teat Beat of Sex Baumane doesn’t shy away from taboos, she addresses among other things the size and shape of male penises, the female sex drive and how masturbation can keep a woman out of trouble.

Edge of Alchemy by Stacy Steers

Because of its allegorical power and poetic qualities Edge of Alchemy is not the most accessible story, but that doesn’t make this film any less fascinating. This 19-minute short by American director Stacy Steers, who is known for her process-driven, labor-intensive work, is composed of over 6.000 collages and explores the psychological terrain of women’s inner worlds.

Steers incorporates close-ups and medium shots of the faces of two of the greatest American actresses of silent cinema, Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor, into a surreal and slightly dystopian Frankenstein-ish storyworld. Although the film defies an easy interpretation, it is clearly a commentary on the importance of bees for the sustainability of life. In Steers’ story the bees have all died out and a female Frankenstein-like scientist creates another woman, a kind of supreme queen bee, with the ability to give life to the dead bees. Edge of Alchemy is the natural sequel to Mary Shelley’s original story, that basically handled male jealousy of the female ability to produce life, but it also dives into a very female dilemma: the inevitable moment when a woman has to say goodbye to the life she has given birth to.

Edmond by Nina Gantz

Wait… what? A story about a male character in a list of feminist animated films? That must be a mistake! But it’s not, since feminism doesn’t just address the position of women in society, but of all minorities, as well as the consequences of (toxic) masculine stereotypes for the men in our society.

Edmond, the main character in Dutch animator Nina Gantz‘ breathtakingly beautiful animation short with the same name, is such a man. His cannibalistic tendencies make him painfully unfit for social interaction and he desperately longs for a return to the source of his existence: the womb of his mother who he avoids in real life. Returning to the womb is of course a universal human desire, that is at its strongest when life makes you miserable, but it is hard to imagine a depiction of this theme that is as stunning as this stop motion film, that rightfully won a BAFTA Award for Best Short Animation.

The post Feminist Animations appeared first on Submarine Channel.

By Natasja van Loon

As part of the release of the dystopian motion comic Ascent from Akeron, Submarine Channel looks at the best dystopian stories in popular culture. Previous Top 5: Best Dystpian Tales Ever Told in Comics.

The Man in the High Castle

Dystopian stories are not necessarily also science fiction stories about a faraway future. Some of them are What if-stories. What if history took another turn? The Man in the High Castle, based on a novel by Philip K. Dick and currently an Amazon Prime series, is such a story. What if the Nazis and the Japanese won the Second World War?

The story takes place in the sixties and the US is divided into the American Reich and the Pacific States under Japanese rule, separated by a Neutral Zone. We follow several characters living under both occupations. In East Coast New York Nazi officer John Smith (Rufus Sewell) hides his son’s hereditary illness because of the Nazi’s eugenics politics, while he navigates the power struggle caused by Hitler’s death. In West Coast San Francisco  Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) witnesses her sister, a member of the resistance, being killed at the hands of the Japanese. But not before she hands her a film that Juliana has to deliver to the legendary Man in the High Castle in the Neutral Zone. The film – a book in the original novel – shows our reality wherein the Allied Forces won the war. And then there is Trade Minister Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), who discovers that he has the ability to travel to other realities.

The TV series extends the premise of Dick’s novel – that mostly focuses on art and re-appropriating your culture as a means to resist – with the multiverse theory, but both are equally relevant as a cautionary tale for our times wherein fascism is on the rise again.

If this teaser is not enough, watch the half hour official recap of season 1 and 2 on YouTube.

The Handmaid’s Tale

The Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale is also based on a novel, by Margaret Atwood, and like The Man in the High Castle it is a What if-story, but set in a time much closer to ours. It could be our own present.

Humanity’s future is endangered by a global infertility crisis and the US has been torn apart in a devastating civil war, won by the forces of what is now the Republic of Gilead. Gilead’s commanders have some extremely misogynistic ideas on how to deal with the crisis. Women who are fertile are made into breeding machines for the elite: the Handmaids, who are ritually raped in the presence of the Gilead Wives. The story focuses on the Handmaid June (Elizabeth Moss) and Offred (which means ‘of Fred’). Offred is stationed at commander Fred Waterford’s (Joseph Fiennes), whose wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) is one of the architects of Gilead’s theocracy. Serena is intelligent and gifted but also cruel and bitter. The two women develop a complicated relationship as Offred tries to survive in the Waterford household. Both actresses deliver impressive performances.

The first season of the series stays true to the novel and explores Atwood’s original storyworld. The book was written in 1985, but the series is clearly also intended as a commentary on our own reality. At times the similarities to current alt-right ideas are downright chilling. It’s easy to imagine Gilead as Trump’s dream for America, ruled by Men’s Rights Activists, Incels and Evangelicals, which is why the series is sometimes labeled as ‘misery porn for liberals’.

Altered Carbon

If The Handmaid’s Tale reflects the Evangelical fear of science and the conservative nostalgia for a past that never existed, then Altered Carbon embraces the opposite. This Netflix series is a faithful adaptation of Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk novel and dives deep into the Frankenstein dream of our age: transhumanism, or the creation of a better human species by scientific progress. Think designer DNA and cloning. But it wouldn’t be dystopian without also addressing the fragmenting effects of those technologies on human identity. If this reminds you of Blade Runner, that’s no coincidence. Altered Carbon is not only visually indebted to Ridley Scott’s cinematic masterpiece, but also thematically.

Main character is the rebel Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman), who is punished by being put into cryogenic sleep for 250 years and finds himself in a new body when he wakes up. After his release he is hired as a private eye by billionaire Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who has bought an endless supply of cloned bodies for himself and his family, but wants to know who is trying to murder him clone by clone.

The Altered Carbon world shows a form of hyper-capitalism that even surpasses our own capitalism in terms of speed, and its 1% hasn’t improved with the existence of eternal life. Its rich are even more dysfunctional, megalomanic and depraved than our own.

Altered Carbon would leave us with little hope if it wasn’t for Poe (Chris Connell): an AI hotel owner with more empathy than most men of organic origin. Poe’s love of Edgar Allen Poe provides us with some necessary comical relief.

Black Mirror

No contemporary vision on our nearby future reflects the digital age so strikingly as the BBC series Black Mirror.

Black Mirror is the brainchild of Charlie Brooker, who earned his credentials as a humorist, screenwriter, author, producer and presenter. Every episode of this anthology is a complete story that addresses a theme connected to our digital age. Sometimes the line between fiction and reality seems dreadfully thin. Like the episode about a soldier who discovers that the monsters he is supposed to kill are not monsters at all, but frightened people just like himself, whose appearances were changed by technology. Technology as an allegory for xenophobia.

Another apt example of life imitating art was the episode ‘Hated in the Nation’ about robobees. These robotic bees are sold as the ultimate solution for the global pollination disaster after the natural bees have died out. But robobees are being hacked and used in a deadly popularity game on social media. Shortly after that episode the news spread that real robotic bees are in the making.

All episodes of Black Mirror are like this: beautifully wrought views on the consequences of the digital revolution on humanity. And the future is not a pretty sight.

Orphan Black

By now you must be wondering: why in the hell do people watch dystopian stories? Perhaps because dystopias provide lessons on how we can avoid those dark futures. How? By connecting to and caring for each other.

It’s an often forgotten fact that we are a species that thrives because of our social abilities. And there are few dystopian stories that proof this so well as Orphan Black, a tv show by BBC Canada – which may be quite telling since Canada proudly embraces the democratic socialism that is so controversial in its great neighbor the United States.

Orphan Black focuses on the concepts of human cloning and nature versus nurture. Key character is the British grifter Sarah Manning and her clones, played by Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany who delivers a groundbreaking performance. Besides Sarah there is also soccer mom Alison, evolutionary scientist Cosima, ruthless business CEO Rachel and the tragic Russian Helena, who is trained as a professional killer. All female clones, fourteen in total, are products of Project Leda. They are also subjects of special interest for several other shady organizations locked in a power struggle with each other, including a Project Castor, dedicated to the creation of an army of super soldiers. But while the male Castor clones are plagued by fatal flaws causing them to malfunction, the female Leda clones survive by bridging their differences and creating strong mutual connections. After all, the ability to work together is our greatest evolutionary advantage as a species.

The post Most Relevant Dystopian TV Shows appeared first on Submarine Channel.