#Shadowhunters huli jing license

Yan’s mother is splashed with urine by (male) hunters and trapped in a half fox, half-human form.

#Shadowhunters huli jing license

Robot by Thor_Deichmann ( Pixabay License / Pixabay)Īn example of this fragmenting gaze appears early in Netflix’s “Good Hunting”. Seen in fragments, the female body becomes an object of (male) sexual desire. The male gaze emphasizes pieces of the body over the whole person. The camera is positioned in ways that construct the female characters on screen as objects. As theorized by critic Laura Mulvey, the male gaze is a mainstream cinematic convention that aligns viewers with a typically male perspective. This is accomplished through a male gaze. Throughout the animated episode, objectification and graphic sexual violence control how Yan’s body is seen. At fault is the way scenes of Yan’s bodies are visually constructed. The Netflix adaption covers the same ground but stops short of freeing Yan’s metal body from oppressive sexualization and male desire. In the fox shape, she can occupy a body that hasn’t been sexualized. In the metal human shape, she is strong enough to strike down a man trying to force himself on her. In Liu’s original text, Yan escapes male power and control through her shapeshifting metal body. Second, male power and presence dictate the action in places where Yan is meant to shine-and does shine in the original story. First, the female body is viewed through an (animated) lens, which gravitates toward graphic nudity and fails to make the jump from objectifying to uplifting the female body. But the devil is in the differences, which undermine female empowerment in two key ways. The Netflix adaption is faithful to Liu’s story, except for a few seemingly minor plot tweaks and, of course, the fact that it’s animated. Liang, a childhood friend turned engineer, builds Yan a new metal body so she can regain her shapeshifting powers-and by extension, her freedom.Īt first glance, both are similar versions of a familiar story: strong female character takes control of her life and destiny through decisive action. Trapped in her human body by industrial pollution, Yan is forced into prostitution and later turned into a cyborg sex slave by a member of the colonial upper class. Both Ken Liu‘s story and the 2019 Netflix adaption follow the transformation of Yan, a huli jing or shapeshifting spirit with fox and human shapes. “Good Hunting” is set in Hong Kong during the height of European imperialism. Better still, comparing the episode with the 2012 short story it was adapted from reveals where certain conventions in visual storytelling undermine female agency by mistaking objectification for empowerment. How, in a medium which has historically objectified and commodified women’s bodies, can female agency be visually represented? “Good Hunting”, an animated episode of Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots anthology, captures the complexity of this struggle in a compact 16-minutes. Applaudable and long overdue, this change presents filmmakers with an intellectual struggle. The “strong female” character is rapidly becoming a fixture in contemporary films, part of a cultural push for better representation of women.