The mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville is blamed on a longstanding curse that has followed the Baskerville family for two hundred years. Enigmatic sleuth Sherlock Holmes is on the case to uncover the truth about a monstrous, supernatural hound who roams the moors, waiting to attack the latest heir to the Baskerville estate. Written by Echo Bridge Home Entertainment
Outer Banks (2020-) knows its audience: young adults in a country that can’t stop romanticizing good ole’ treasure hunts. Add a little of Riverdale’s (2017-) sex appeal, and no one can look away. Forty years after The Goonies (1985) America’s consciousness hasn’t strayed from the same tropes: treasure hunts, a vulnerable white male lead, and the whitewashing of a racially segregated setting.
Netflix’s Shadow and Bone has a complicated relationship with race. It has a diverse cast, but not without its problems. Based on Leigh Bardugo’s two book series, the show features characters from the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which is very straight and white, and the Six of Crows duology, which is much more diverse. When bringing together a cast and writing about these characters, the team behind the show expanded upon some of the representation missing from the first trilogy, then seemed to take away representation from the duology. Shadow and Bone seems to play a bit of a push and pull game when it comes to portraying diversity onscreen.
Animation as a medium of storytelling can be thought to be open to all ages and as I hope my readings will reveal, they could be interpreted as transgender stories.
It only seems to prove that when the company had their backs against the wall and needed an all pleasing, generic movie that had to make up for The Last Jedi, they chose to sacrifice almost everything that made their main protagonist interesting and that made her stand out as the strong female character that a generation of young movie goers was supposed to look up to. Instead, we were left with a Rey that was so much less than she could have been. And I guess that’s the real story of Rey and The Rise of Skywalker; they could have been so much more, but they were just more of the same.
Amberley Snyder, a young woman whose injury leaves her with a disability, shows viewers that her handicapped state won't stop her from competition.
If the message here is that without a support system, grieving people turn into monsters, it’s not really well-delivered and may be flawed as a message itself.
