Deconstructing Hop

[skogkatt]

After I posted about Hop last week, my friend Kayleigh (you may remember her as my partner in snow squid construction) said she'd go with me. So. I've seen Hop, and Internets, it was far weirder than I expected. Because I am a giant nerd, I spent the flight from Boston to San Francisco yesterday trying to unpack the tangled gender/class/race

Comments

[skogkatt]

I think this is a combination of things. One: the Easter Bunny must be big. Carlos is a fat chick, but not big. Fred is big. Two: Fred is born of a superior race. Before he becomes the Easter Bunny, he's one of the people the Easter Bunny serves. Carlos is one of the people who serves the Easter Bunny. Three: If you want to get super fanwanky about it, Fred only touches the scepter with E.B. (let's just not go into the Freudian analysis of that...), which could mean that E.B.'s bunnyness makes it okay.

[skogkatt]

You did, but I had no idea even from your comments about the true extent of it. Wow.

[banshea]

YES.

Now if you can articulate why the scenes in China made me squirm a bit, this would be absolutely perfect. I just can't put my finger on why those bits stuck out in my mind as wrong.

[skogkatt]

Oh, the China scenes. I sort of cheated and left them out in the big review because I felt like they'd take too long to explain. But... I think it comes down to universalism.

In the beginning E.B. is willing to consider that perhaps everyone in the world doesn't share the same essential beliefs and experiences. This is good, except that Bertie Woosterbunny and the invisible empire are pushing him to force their beliefs on everyone else, and E.B. doesn't recognize that as a bad thing. Instead he feels resentful of the Chinese woman (who must stand for EVERY Chinese person given the conceit of baskets being delivered everywhere) for rejecting his advances.

This scene also made me uncomfortable because the set seemed really really fake, as if China was a fake place anyway.

But yes, so, later when Fred becomes co-Easter Bunny, and they go back to China and the one woman who lives there is happy to see him, it shows us that yes, actually everyone in the world does love Easter. It was only the talking bunny that upset her, says Fred.

[ekaterin24]

Thanks for watching and amusingly/instructively deconstructing Hop so we don't have to! What a wtf movie! ::wants to watch My Neighbor Totoro again where the girls do the cool stuff::

[skogkatt]

Ooh, yeah, Miyazaki is awesome!

[memoriesofearth]

I saw that Hugh Hefner has a voice credit for Hop. That was my canary, but I had no idea the coal mine would have so many twisty passages. Thanks for mapping it.