| dc.description.abstract | The thesis will research girlhood and lostness in the young main characters of ten fantasy films directed by Del Toro, Jackson, Gilliam, Henson, McKean, Singh, Jordan, Selick, and Miyazaki in the period 1984-2009. The research will focus on adolescent traumas relating to girlhood and specifically identity and society, sexuality and repression, abandonment / isolation and fantasizing. The research will investigate the filmmakers’ paralleling of those issues with archetypes and tropes originating from myth and fairy-tale traditions as nostalgic and/or subversive representations of girlhood.
The research will investigate the journeys of ten ‘lost girls’ in ten films which epitomise the cycle of the ‘lost girls’ genre. Each of these films focuses extensively on the figure of the lost girl and the implications lostness and girlhood, investigating issues of isolation, suppression, sexuality and coming of age. Each of these issues are confronted through imagination and through a clash between fantasy and reality. The chapters are each focused on a pair of two films, in which the lost girls are both at a similar age and they explore the type of imaginations and worlds that the writers and filmmakers envisage girls at that age would generate and inhabit. Investigating the similarities and shared tropes in each pair of films, the chapters explore the filmmakers’ take on what imagination and fantasy can accomplish as a genre and as a coming-of-age engine for different age groups and in different cultures. | en_GB |
