One of the greatest accomplishments of the past few years is the rise in strong female characters. While they have always been around, there’s rarely been a better time to see them headline movies, giving hope to wide audiences seeking escapism. It’s empowering and nice to know that this extends beyond your typical superhero stories. It even goes into the young adult movies, where the heroes are more cunning because of their wits, their ability to navigate mazes and puzzles with the best of them. It’s the type of experience that makes one want to go on their own adventures, exploring a world full of this rich potential.
The latest example is also one of the best in Netflix’s Enola Holmes (2020). Sure, one can argue that it’s a bit tired to have the younger child of a famous family be given their own movie. In that respect, this latest spin-off of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” mythology is set up for mediocrity. However, it’s the perfect context for a character like Enola, brought to life with vibrant energy by Millie Bobby Brown. It’s a quizzical journey about personal identity, and it becomes endearing as she travels on her own quest. Unlike her older brother Sherlock, it’s one of the self. We feel gratified not because the mystery is complex, but because of how familiar she is in spite of being exceptional at combat and mysteries.
It all comes down to her name. Her mother named her Enola because it is “Alone” backward. It’s the idea that she’s fine being off on her own, discovering corners of the world that nobody would think to look. It’s the idea of self-motivation that drives her to continually look for answers, realizing that her brother doesn’t have time to pay attention to her. It may be why she is continually talking to the camera, letting the viewer in on her personal deduction. Along with stylized title cards to indicate her matriculation, the style has a phenomenal impact on this story, managing to make it feel like a grander journey.
Depending on how you view things, Enola’s commentary on women in 19th century Europe is an odd tapestry. On the surface, it’s an empowering commentary on how culture has shifted, commenting on how women’s garments like bodices were used to shape women, or how they had certain expectations. She was a rabble-rouser at heart, never settling for the stereotypes and instead having enough of androgyny that she can infiltrate places as everyone from an elegant maid to an unassuming boy. She has a physical charisma to her performance that she manages to wink at the camera while evoking confidence within the film’s context.
She feels organic, managing to feel like a cute antagonistic sister at one point, and someone striking out on her own in another. Following her mother’s death, she goes on a quest that ultimately reveals how she was taught to find happiness in her own life. This comes in martial arts training, where she learns how to flip someone and pin them on the floor. She’s pretty good with a crossbow, and her eloquence comes in handy as she hides in plain sight, managing to convey her many characters. She has a universal appeal, managing to turn this mystery into a coming of age adventure where every new obstacle brings with it a moment of interactive bliss for everyone to try and figure out. What does this all mean? How does it all come together?
It almost doesn’t matter because even at two hours, director Harry Bradbeer has this way of making everything flow into each other. The style is exquisite, constantly subverting the Sherlock imagery in favor of something more feminine. It’s the idea that just because we don’t conform to societal standards that we can do these amazing things. Every one of us is capable of something more. All we have to do is have that spark of curiosity, that desire to find answers where others aren’t looking.
It’s essentially the story of feeling like an outcast, like you don’t belong. The major difference between this and other stories that feel like pandering is that it doesn’t just tell you that Enola is special. She is special because there’s a clear effort into finding your own skills. Bradbeer lets us see her struggle, have this interior conflict and self-doubt that keeps her from being immediately brilliant. She doesn’t receive special treatment because she’s different. She merely tries to cope with the world around her and sometimes comes up short, like when she comes on too strong while dressed as a maid. She has to work through her own mistakes, and watching her instincts evolve throughout the story is rather endearing.
Another recent adaptation that takes female heroes on interesting adventures is Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019). Like Enola Holmes, it’s part of a bigger franchise that caters to adventures and problem-solving. The major difference is that its source, Dora the Explorer, is a TV series geared at five-year-olds. Every episode has cut-and-paste formatting that would be difficult to make lively in film form. How do you evolve a Y5-rated series into something that appeals to a bigger audience, especially when their reputation is so omnipresent that Dora is seen more as a simpleton than a virtuoso?
What Dora and the Lost City of Gold ultimately achieves is being Tomb Raider (2018) for kids. Sure, Dora is nowhere near as charismatic or rugged as Lara Croft, but there’s something to be said with how director James Bobin updates everything. While Enola Holmes and Dora can be considered upbeat movies with plenty of whimsical joy, there’s something to be said for how irreverent and strange the Nickelodeon adaptation actually is. As a result, it’s way spottier and uneven, maybe lacking an elegance that could make it a masterpiece, but even then it’s an amazingly effective, goofy, sometimes juvenile experience.
To put it simply, this is a story that’s high (sometimes literally) on clever references to the series. While most of the story has realism and practicality, there is room for references to the series, such as a talking backpack, Boots the monkey is voiced by Danny Trejo of all people, and a Wizard of Oz (1939)-esque hallucination scene where the live-action story breaks out into the series’ animation for a few minutes. The journey into the jungle is full of wild twists that make it an entertaining experience. Sure, there’s room for fart humor and mating rituals, but at its core, it understands what makes this form of Dora so endearing.
Much like Enola, she feels removed from a bigger context. Dora has lived most of her life in the jungle, going on wild adventures as her family waited at home for her to return. As she grew older, her adventures grew bigger and soon she finds herself risking potential injury. They decide to ship her off to the states where she attends a regular high school. Being an explorer, she upsets everyone on day one by having a traveler’s kit full of knives and explosives be confiscated at the entrance and holding up the line. Even if she has her cousin Diego to guide her, she still has to find ways to make it.
Unlike Enola Holmes, the journey is mostly initiated without her consent. Upon visiting a museum, she is kidnapped along with classmates that have varying degrees of relationships with her. They’re mostly annoyed to be thrown into the jungle, believing that they’re stuck with a girl who is out of touch. After all, she recently shimmied like a bird at a school dance, and it didn’t curry her any favors. If anything, she was too weird.
True, Enola Holmes is more regal and finds characters needing to adapt to their environment. There is a need to find costumes that make Enola blend in with her surroundings. Dora meanwhile just needs to survive. From here you get a variety of action-adventure tropes, all presented with a fresh exhilaration thanks to kids constantly freaking out, worrying that they are entering the worst of the peril. As anyone who knows tropes can predict, it’s only going to get worse, leading to tombs full of booby traps and ancient tests that are used to unlock freedom. Unlike Enola, Dora’s big lesson is that she must learn to work with others to escape a prism full of optical illusions and mystical hoogajoob.
To be honest, Dora feels like it doesn’t follow the three-part journey approach of the series all that closely. While there’s definitely gradual obstacles that become more complicated, it’s not as obvious in establishing conflict and solving it. They simply stumble upon it and Bobin manages to make it all work. Dora, played by Isabela Moner, has this wide-eyed optimism and confidence that makes her sometimes cartoonish nature work, making you believe that this young kid can swing from trees and use reason to escape potential doom.
Both of these films also feature a certain skepticism between children and adults. For Enola Holmes, that comes in the presence of an older brother who ignores her ability to be as great as she thinks. It’s almost a test for her to win his approval while secretly understanding that she’s not solving mysteries because it’s a family trade, but because she finds exhilaration in it. She has so much fun navigating the world, managing to fool adults in convincing fashion.
Meanwhile, Dora is a bit more complicated, presenting Alejandro. Considering Eugenio Derbez’s star power internationally, it makes sense why they cast him. Still, he is mostly used as comic relief, sometimes to incompetent levels. It works if just to prove how cunning and capable teenagers are. However, it’s because Alejandro was a spy who was using them to get to the titular City of Gold. It’s a genuine twist and one that works within the story. This isn’t just paying lip service to its source material. In some ways, it’s improving it by aging it to the appropriate audience, showing what Dora would be like if she was to be in our world.
The third act of Dora is much more complex than anything in Enola Holmes. To put it simply, it follows in the mystical tomb dynamic, full of elaborate set pieces that are designed to be big on spectacle. It’s intense and fun in all of the right ways, reflecting on Dora coming to terms with various small details gathered throughout the story. More than being a story about working together, it’s a story of Dora accepting her own identity and morality, realizing that there is a way to be both an explorer and a high school student.
This isn’t to suggest that Enola Holmes isn’t trying to be interesting. It manages to bring every major theme together in a significant way. The only difference is that they’re all struggles that are more insular, presented in flashback as they become useful in her final mission. There is a reason that we’ve seen her train for martial arts, doing word puzzles, or trying to unlock clues in a newspaper. She has a voracious appetite that is compelling to watch. You want her to succeed because the games she’s playing are fun for the viewer. Where watching Dora escaping peril is fun, trying to understand Enola feels satisfying because it requires the audience to find something in themselves.
These are only two of the recent examples of young adventurers solving the day with nothing but their wits. While they both exist in a larger franchise that they pay respect to, they manage to forge their own identity and do so in brilliant ways. While Dora and the Lost City of Gold may be more groundbreaking (a largely Latinx cast in a big bilingual blockbuster), both have their place in the modern conversation. Both are smart characters treated respectfully, reflecting a struggle every viewer faces to feel like they belong. As a result, it becomes something grander, more rewarding. This isn’t just a blanket statement “You go, girl!” This is showing them pushing themselves to go there. They’re way entertaining, proving that live-action family films are still viable in the right hands. It just takes someone who knows what they’re doing.
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