Yahoo News Peter Pan sequel The Lost Girls with Emma Thompson is the Disney story we need
Disney stories have moved far beyond their original, two-dimensional animated remit. The tales have become live-action remakes, sequels, stage adaptations, video games and experiential theme parks, to name a few.
But they are far from original; most stem from long-ago folk tales, such as Brothers Grimm. Famously, Peter Pan is JM Barrie's creation, borne out of his fatherly relationship to the boys of the Llewellyn-Davies family.
Barrie, however, wasn't the only person to pen a Peter Pan story. The 2011 novel The Lost Girls by Laurie Fox will now be getting the cinematic treatment and it is the exact kind of Disney reinvention we need.
Ellen Burstyn & Emma Thompson Among Cast For Female-Fronted Multi-Generational Peter Pan Pic ‘The Lost Girls’ — Toronto https://t.co/ypWNL8CUu8 pic.twitter.com/TUXopCZO8a
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) September 12, 2019
Fox's The Lost Girls is the story of the Darling women. Four generations since Peter Pan first visited their home, the women have been left confused and conflicted from their time with the boy who never grew up.
This story isn't entirely a reinvention of the wheel. The seeds for a multigenerational Darling women work were sewn by JM Barrie himself.
The final chapter of Barrie's 1911 Peter Pan novel is called When Wendy Grew Up - also separately published as a one act play When Wendy Grew Up (An Afterthought). In it, Barrie describes the deterioration of Wendy's relationship with Peter.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. After all, Wendy was both his 'mother' and basically in love with him.
Barrie writes that Peter will return each spring to captivate a Darling girl for his annual spring cleaning (you read that right, she has to go clean his house!) as long as the girls are "gay and innocent and heartless."
Um. Yeah...
Barrie's original work frames Peter as the 'syndrome' for which his name now shares. He is entitled, impulsive, selfish, and refuses to grow up and, thus, accept any responsibility for himself, his actions and those around him.
In The Lost Girls source material, Wendy goes on to fall in love with and marry "an exuberant and irreverent man-child" thus perpetuating the pattern she learned from her formative relationship with Peter Pan.
Deadline wrote that The Lost Girls will follow how Wendy (Livia De Paolis, also the screenwriter and director) struggles to retain her creative spirit after her fantastical journeys with Pan.
It continues: "Like her grandmother (Ellen Burstyn) and her mother Jane (Emma Thompson), Wendy must escape Pan’s hold on her and the promises he desperately wants her to keep. As her daughter Berry (Gaia Wise) comes into Peter’s orbit, Wendy must fight to save her relationship with her daughter while reconciling her legacy."
In The Lost Girls, the Darling women are all stunted by their time with Peter. What they expect of men, or rather how little they expect, plagues them as adults.
This is not a far cry from reality. Now, we are at least poking fun at it and learning from it - just take a look at the beam_me_up_softboi Instagram account and Florence Givens' illustrations.
A post shared by FLOSS (@florencegiven) on Aug 19, 2019 at 12:50am PDT
But movies still teach us this. Just look at Netflix's Tall Girl as a recent example of reinforcing how little (pun intended) teenage girls should settle for, and how grateful for it they should be.
Many young women believe, whether informed explicitly or implicitly by society, that attention from men is something we should be honoured to receive; even if it is couched in belittling, sexist language and behaviour. As a teen growing up on the cusp of the Internets omnipresence, it was almost impossible not to fall into the trap.
Peter Pan was the pinnacle of this kind of come-here-go-away attention so many of us sought as teenagers, a vicious cycle that interwove criticism with care and mothering with girlfriending.
The Lost Girls should, hopefully, remind us that it's okay to grow up, it's okay to know your worth, and it's okay to require respect as a pillar of a healthy relationship - even if it angers the Peter Pans in our lives.
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