Movies/Rant

Last night I watched 'Drachenzahmen', or as it is referred to in English, 'How to Train Your Dragon' (this is what happens when you favour counterfeit over the real deal). For those missing my regular formatting, here is a picture of the film's movie poster.

The story is pretty standard, complete with all your tropes and idioms: Misfit, Nordic boy (Hiccup), who is potentially bringing dishonour to the family discovers he is not like his kind, befriends most feared dragon of all the Nordics, cleverly gains respect of community by being adept at dragon subduing, makes intense discovery, shit gets real, father has new found pride for son, town changes for the better.

Now, here comes the beef!

There are countless childrens' stories that deal with this issue of the outsider, who is only an outsider due to lack of trying to understand what outsiders true nature is. Majority may be hostile and violent towards outsider because they had one bad experience with a certain person of their kind, or perhaps generations have passed down stories of certain outsider being 'an enemy' and no one has ever stepped up to question the authority except for Protagonist in current time of movie watching.

You see where I'm going with this?

It's pretty clear to me that these films can easily parallel the issue of bigotry in our regular lives. I am certain there are some jerks who will watch this film and feel moved by the plight of the dragons and how they were unfairly treated yet after the film ends decide to go egg a mosque because they hate Muslims.

If you can empathise with a character in a movie because they have been the victim of mistreatment why can you not look outward and apply that empathy to your life? Although that character in the movie is fictional there are plenty of "dragons" out there in the human world (oh, any minority you can think of) and the "Hiccups" in the world are the ones you're saying are "being too politically correct", or are "angry feminists" etc.

Look, perhaps I'm drawing this parallel to make sense with my way of thinking and some right wing, everything-phobe would parallel the movie in a way that favoured their belief system. Who am I to know. Alls i'm saying is that this seems pretty apt.

I'll give some credit here, and this could be my crack pot theory and do correct me if I'm wrong. If I think back to movies in general that were being fed into our all consuming mouths, they started to take a slightly more empathetic turn some time around the 80s and 90s. For this reason I think this is why our generation is a lot more aware of social injustices. It sounds naive but let's just clear the air, I'm not insinuating that movies are the sole purpose of any sort of radical social change. Obviously, greater access to the internet and all that jazz. Everything!

All I want to happen is that when people view a film to actually think about it. Especially children's films because that is the shit that's getting passed onto the next generation.