After finishing the book this morning, we downloaded the movie, “A Wrinkle in Time.”
It’s really good. Watching it, I realized there’s even a female I missed mentioning in my review of the book: the Happy Medium. Though in the movie, this character is played by a man, yet still referred to as she.
No surprise that the book is better. The special effects are low budget and cheesey, but I don’t think my kids noticed.
One scene from the movie that is better than the book is when Mrs. Which explains a tesseract, or a wrinkle in time. In the book, Mrs. Which brings a string together, in the movie a piece of material, to show how a bug can shortcut across a big space by ‘wrinkling’ the distance. In the movie, Mrs. Which refers to the bug as “she.”
One last cool thing about the movie. My four year old daughter burst out: “I want to be Meg! Don’t you?”
Is the unicorn in the book and movie female like many of the human characters or is it male?
In many works with both humans and animals in it, even if many of the characters are or the protagonist is female, most or all of the female ones are human. That leaves most or all of the animal characters male. For example, Dora of Dora the Explorer are is a female protagonist. But aside from Isa the Iguana, most of the main and major animal characters (Boots, Swiper, Tico, and Benny) are male.
Some of Rhino Reads posts talk about female animal characters and protagonists and the lack thereof, as well as the gendering of animal characters in general.
These include:
1) Female Animal Characters in Picture Books: http://rhinoreads.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/female-animal-characters-in-picture-books/
2) More Fab Female Animal Characters: http://rhinoreads.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/more-fab-female-animal-characters/
3) Gender Non-Specific Characters: http://rhinoreads.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/gender-non-specific-characters/