Browsing by Author "Rocha, Margarida Maria Laranjeira"
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- Mulan: the beginning of Disney’s journey in the reconstruction of gender rolesPublication . Kunz, Sahra; Smirnova, Ekaterina; Rocha, Margarida Maria LaranjeiraWe will focus on the animated Disney movie Mulan (1998) and what it is that makes its female protagonist stand out from the Disney Princess group. We will begin by contextualizing how and why, in the 1990’s, Disney female characters shifted from damsels-in-distress to braver and more independent heroes. We will also mention why the character Mulan, who has no relation with royalty, is merchandized and seen as a princess. Furthermore, we will compare Disney’s Mulan with the original story, in order to clarify Disney’s direction in the portrayal of love and gender roles. We analyse the moral function of the animated version and how people received the film on the date of its release and today. We will try to understand the different impacts, considering women’s rights, transgenderism, the female role in military service and finally cultural appropriation. Also, we will refer to how Mulan prioritize other types of love, like the love for family, and how its female protagonist influences princesses from the recent era, making way for more empowering stories for women.
- War memory: the representation of traumatic memories in animated documentariesPublication . Rocha, Margarida Maria Laranjeira; Gomes, Sahra Ursula Kunz; Smirnova, EkaterinaThe vast visual realm of Animation enables us to create alternate worlds and penetrate intangible dimensions of reality - specifically, the mind. In this dissertation, we aim to understand Animation’s cathartic role and relevance in the representation of Memory and Trauma in Animated Documentaries. Our research focuses on War and the collateral damage it inflicts not just on those directly involved, but also on later generations. As such, we delve into the notion of Cultural Memory/Cultural Trauma and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of Postmemory, which essentially refers to an inherited memory, the product of witnessing the further impacts of trauma. In an attempt to better understand these concepts, we examine the representation of War Memory through the ages in the Visual Arts, finally reaching Comics and Animation. We analyse four animated documentaries: Silence (Bringas and Yadin, 1998), I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (Fleming, 2010), Persepolis (Satrapi and Paronnaud, 2007) and Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008). We focus on the role of testimony and the discursive voice that accompanies the visual narratives. Moreover, we observe different perspectives of War, indicating and comparing the position of the narrator in these films. In each film in our analysis, we identify strategies which allow war trauma to become approachable and memories to be exteriorized. We discuss the strategy of masking, both as a form of simplification and concealment, relating it, when relevant, to Paul Well’s and Anabelle Honess Roe’s proposals of other narrative/ representational strategies. We elaborate on these strategies, in order to illustrate Animation’s compatibility to the act of remembering. Finally, we classify the animated documentaries of our analysis within pre-established documentary modes.