Scarygirl review – Tim Minchin, Deborah Mailman and Sam Neill add star power to tedious animation
Scarygirl is one of those animated productions so loaded with colour and bling, so lit up like a pinball machine, that merely absorbing it makes you feel old. While watching I couldn’t help but wonder if today’s youth consume too many flashing lights and loud noises – and, by the way, keep it down, some of us have to work in the morning.
Once accustomed to the film’s retina-straining shininess, it became increasingly clear the creative elements conjured by the directors Ricard Cussó and Tania Vincent are relegated almost entirely to the surface, because under the hood it’s very familiar indeed. An archetypal hero’s journey in which a youngster heeds the call of adventure, steps out of their comfort zone and encounters various friends and foes en route to confronting a blabbering villain with an emotional backstory. The villain is Dr Maybee, voiced by Sam Neill, who verbally chews the scenery and joins a stacked cast including Tim
Minchin, Deborah Mailman, Anna Torv, Dylan Alcott, Mark Coles Smith and Rob Collins.
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The question going through most adults’ minds will be whether they can sit down and watch Scarygirl next to their child the way they did, perhaps, during the fabulous pathos-filled Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and both of the terrifically invigorating SpiderVerse movies. Sadly the answer is probably no – not without getting itchy feet. None of the film, which is based on the Australian illustrator Nathan Jurevicius’s graphic novel, is done terribly, but for viewers whose age exceeds their shoe size, it’s likely to be a “so what?” experience, the aesthetic jumping around like a cut snake but the scripting rote and same-old.
The protagonist is Arkie (voiced by Jillian Nguyen), an anthropomorphised goth octopus (you’ve never heard of one?!) with black hair, an eye patch, a tentacle-like arm, a large bobble head and disproportionately small body. She resembles a Tim Burton creation, Halloweenish but cute as a button. Before we visit Arkie’s idyllic peninsula community, which is beachside and mountainside, a prologue spells out the trouble about to come for her father, Blister (Rob Collins), a rare giant octopus who looks like a toy squid crossed with a broccoli shoot.
In a dive bar in the appropriately
titled City of Light, a robed customer with glowing yellow eyes implores a blue mouse-like underworld figure with a thick Aussie accent to get his bounty hunters to bring her a squid. At this point I might’ve contemplated the elasticity of consciousness, the doors of perception, the sheer strangeness of it all. But there isn’t time: hurtling forwards, the location switches to the aforementioned peninsula, where
Arkie visits her dad, who for reasons that escaped me has the ability to regenerate life. When a giant ominous beam reaches towards the sky, like a baddie’s big weapon in a superhero movie, we learn that “dangerous and selfish” folk who “don’t see the world like we do” are draining resources from the sun.
My thought that perhaps this will turn into a climate change analogy solidified when Blister says, “C’mon, kiddo, let’s go help some plants.” But the environmental messages are halfbaked, put to the side in favour of the aforementioned conventional villain, who operates that beam-like energy zapper. This cranky chap’s backstory gets much attention in the last act, during which an unexpected connection is revealed between him and the hero because – plot twist – “this time it’s personal”.
I wouldn’t say the film’s aesthetic is original, but it certainly looks bold, if a little cutesy and computery, like cutscenes from a child-oriented video game informed by a vaguely stop-motionesque look. It would have been wonderful for some of that boldness to have made its way into the screenplay. All the expected boxes are marked, then filled. Prologue? Tick. Smidge of worldbuilding? Tick. Emotional bonding scenes before disruption of the status quo? Tick. Crossing the threshold into dangerous scenarios? Tick. A potentially planet-destroying crisis? Tick. A moralistic resolution? Tick.
The best family movies awaken the adult in the child and the child in the adult. This one mistakes colour for creativity, pumping its surface full of vim and vigour but letting the writing wither on the vine. The screenplay could have done with some of Blister’s life-regenerating powers.
• Scarygirl is out in Australian cinemas from 26 October
touch. Our social media use beautybased algorithms to predict what we might like to look at, and to digitally “rank” us when we post. We may not be aware of it, but we are still likely to be engaging with it.
It’s no coincidence that the beauty industry has boomed in the last decade. In 2017, according to one study, it was valued globally at $532bn – and it’s expected to reach $806bn (£662bn) by the end of this year. That comes with some benefits of course: a decade ago, I couldn’t walk into a high street shop and be guaranteed to find makeup to match my skintone in the way I can now. But there is always a flipside to progress, and the casualties include those affected by our unrelenting modern-day beauty standards; the societal requirement to look young and be filter-perfect at all times. “The timing of this exhibition is serendipitous,” says Li. “There is a lot of attention around beauty, its huge economic potential and the influence of the industry.”
But there has also been a shift of late suggesting that we’re inching towards a “post-beauty” era. Celebrities such as Ariana Grande and Bella Hadid have spoken about how they regret the cosmetic procedures they underwent (lip filler and Botox for Grande; nose job at 14 for Hadid). And a recent study examining the effects of lip filler signposted potential links with body dysmorphia and “tweakment” addictions, positing repeated exposure to unrealistic beauty standards on social media as the likely cause of women’s dissatisfaction with their appearance.
With Pamela Anderson’s decision to not wear makeup at last month’s Paris fashion week proving enough to make global headlines, it’s no surprise that research from the Mental Health Foundation concluded that over a third of adults in the UK felt anxious or depressed about their body image. It looks like we’re finally starting to clock that, amid this beauty boom, we’re not always being made to feel better. Maybe it’s time to ask why.
“The pressures are only increasing,” says Emma Dabiri, author of Disobedient Bodies: Reclaim Your Unruly Beauty. “I think selfies and digital communication have given us this forensic knowledge of our faces, which reduces us to two-dimensional avatars of ourselves. That isn’t healthy.”
During the pandemic, there was a rise in facial dissatisfaction – or socalled “Zoom face” – as a result of staring at ourselves at such length on screens, which led to a spike in cosmetic surgery and other procedures. Such self-examination, which in some cases became obsessive, is documented in the Wellcome show by photographer Juno Calypso, who explores our quest for perfection through her dystopian self-portraits and her alter ego Joyce.
“I remember reading Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth at the beginning of my career and it was the start of a revolution in me,” says Calypso. “It shifted my focus. I realised I didn’t want to take pictures of other people or models because that felt like pushing beauty standards on others. So I started photographing myself. I started collecting old beauty props like the Linda Evans Facial Rejuvenating System, an electric face mask from the 90s. It’s fascinating that beauty devices often look like horror and sci-fi props. They’re readymade surrealism.”
The exhibition also explores incredible untold stories. “Beauty,” explains Burke, “is often seen as trite or ‘women’s stuff’. But it’s proper science and, throughout history, has involved a really impressive knowledge of processes, chemistry and materials. There’s an installation in the exhibition of makeup recipes I found, many of which originated from Islamic medicine, or via Jewish refugees who were expelled from Spain in the 1490s, which is fascinating.”
Other works explore Black queer visibility in British history, including the film and portrait project Permissible Beauty. This work, which featuresnew portraits of six Black queer Britons, is based on paintings of ladies at the 17th-century court of Charles II who were celebrated for their appearance and elegance. “The film is set in stately homes,” explains Li. “It’s interwoven with grand manifestos, intimate interviews and fictional scenes exploring why some forms of beauty are more acceptable and highly valued than others.”
No less intriguing is Shirin Fathi’sThe Disobedient Nose, whichuses photography and sculpture to investigate the beauty ideals imposed on women in Iran, her native country, which is a world leader in terms of nose job numbers. The work concerns “a nose that doesn’t want to be tamed”, with London-based Fathi using her own face to examine women who defy the pressures placed on them by society. And it’s not just Iran: one portrait references an early Indian technique of skingrafting to encourage growth on nose.
If this all sounds a little intense, there are plenty of jovial moments. “One of the pleasures of having a body,” says Dabiri, “is being able to adorn it and indulge in sensory pleasures like oils and scents.” One thing that still holds true across the ages is that beauty can be sociable. “Women of the renaissance were prevented from education beyond the basics, and had little freedom,” says Burke, “so beauty was a way they expressed identity and friendship. They would spend time together having their eyebrows done for example. Beauty was also an income for women who were widowed or had been dumped by their husbands, so it offered an underground economy. There was a lot of enjoyment too. It was a safe space.”
Many of the show’s narratives, says Li, centre on our relationship with ourselves. “Coincidentally,” she adds, “I stopped having any mirrors at home around the same time I took on this project – and the relationship I have with my appearance has gradually transformed. I still enjoy dressing up, but I now have a compassionate self-acceptance and I treat myself well regardless of how I fit into definitions of beauty.”
Honestly, who doesn’t need that in their life?
• The Cult of Beauty is at the Wellcome Collection, London, 26 October to 28 April; free to visit. Anita Bhagwandas is the author of Ugly: Giving Us Back Our Beauty Standards
Mouches were worn to hide smallpox scars. They became fashion accessories and sex workers wore them to attract clients