"Female He", a stop-motion animation film polished by young director Zhou Sheng mythology Wei in six years. In 2018, it was shortlisted for the Best Animation Award at the Golden Jubilee Awards at the 21st Shanghai International Film Festival.
As a "thing animation", the film provides us with the possibility of multi-angle and multi-level interpretation. Some people see the revolution, some people see the alienation of people, and some people see the parent-child relationship. And I want to talk about this film from a feminist point of view.
It is generally believed that feminism had its roots in the French Revolution. In 1871, the women leader of the French Revolution, Olamp de Guge, published the Declaration on the Rights of Women and Women citizens. This document is widely regarded as the pioneering work of feminism.
However, if we look beyond the early days of human civilization, we will find that feminist thought is nothing new, it has been around for a long time, and it coexists with our early myths.
Whether it is Eastern and Western mythology, there are many goddess figures.
In China, for example, the most famous goddesses are Nuwa and the Queen Mother of the West. Nuwa creates man and makes up the heavens. The Queen Mother of the West holds the medicine of immortality, and is often worshipped as the goddess of marriage, childbirth, and protection of women.
Taking ancient Greek mythology as an example, the most famous of the first generation of gods is Gaia, the mother earth goddess of the mother of all things. Of the most well-known of the twelve main gods of Olympus, half are goddesses. They were Hera (goddess of queen of heaven, marriage and fertility), Hestia (goddess of stove and family), Demeter (goddess of agriculture and harvest), Athena (goddess of war and wisdom), Artemis (goddess of the hunt), and Aphrodite (goddess of love and beauty).
It is not difficult to see that in both the East and the West, goddesses are often related to nature, life, and reproduction. Joseph Campbell said that "women represent life, and men cannot obtain life without women", and this recognition has long been implanted in the human mind in the early days of human civilization.
Although the social status of women gradually declined after human civilization moved from a matriarchal society to a patriarchal society, this recognition has not been forgotten.
Although the Abrahamic religions suppressed and even belittled women, the worship of the Virgin Mary can still be seen as a continuation of the early worship of the goddess. Even in medieval France, where the religious atmosphere was the strongest, churches named notre-dame were still scattered everywhere.
In China, the continuation of the goddess cult is even more dramatic. The original male image of Guanyin Bodhisattva, in the long history of transmission, in response to people's needs for the goddess, gradually became the female image of Guanyin Bodhisattva we see now.
In the case of "Female He", the protagonist of the film, the female shoe that disguises herself as a man's shoe and eventually overthrows the male shoe power society, clearly reflects the consistent understanding of women by human beings since ancient times.
The bright red color, turquoise vines and white flowers are all symbols of exuberant vitality.
The resistance and subversion of women's shoes to the oppression of men's shoes in the film also alludes to the history of feminism since the 19th century.
The modern feminist trend has so far gone through two stages.
In the early stages, feminists fought for exactly the same rights as men. Its main demand is the right of men and women to work the same way. Feminism at this stage believes that women and men are indistinguishable in all aspects, and thus requires women to take on the same kind of work as men and of the same intensity. Simply put, it is to use women as men.
But while women fought for this right, as human weapons advanced, the scale and intensity of war became larger and more tragic, and some feminists began to merge with pacifism. They believe that women's aggression is weaker than men's, and only by overthrowing the patriarchal rule and allowing women to occupy a greater power and higher position than men can world peace be achieved. Feminism thus entered the second stage, the period when women were superior to men.
From the film, the experience of women's shoes disguised as men's shoes to enter the factory and then overthrow the men's shoe society is in my eyes the development of the first and second stages of feminism.
However, we also see in the film that after women's shoes subverted the men's shoe society, the world did not become a better place. On the contrary, after the protagonist's death, her children—another new red shoe—create a new class society that is naturally fresh on the surface but is in fact more oppressive.
Such an ending seems to be the same as the "pastoral feminism" that emerged after the contemporary feminist movement went to extremes. Excessive competition for power will eventually lead to the opposite of the original intention.
So, where is the way out of contemporary feminism?
I think the director has already told us the answer through the title of the film.
Plato wrote such a story in his "Drinking Chapter": In the beginning, men and women were one and the same. Such a man had great power that made Zeus fearful. Thus Zeus split the one man in half, dividing it into men and women. Men and women must find their other half throughout their lives in order to become full lives.
Isn't the title of the film "Female He" a combination of men and women?
Only when both men and women correctly understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and cooperate with each other and become one, can they achieve true equality between men and women. This is the latest development of contemporary feminism.