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Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

economist.com

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Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#91

Post by Jtsummers »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #79
Jtsummers wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, outside of thrillers or movies that pretty much rely on a major twist, "spoilers" is nonsense. I'm not going to go around telling the plot of a movie to people (that's a dick move), but if a movie cannot stand on its own even if you've been told the last 5 minutes verbatim (or seen them) before seeing the rest, then the movie is probably not worth watching. And there are very few trailers that are that bad. Agai…

That's cool. Good for you. You've decided what you do and do not care about before seeing a movie. Now let other people do the same.

Read what I wrote:

> I'm not going to go around telling the plot of a movie to people (that's a dick move)

I have let other people decide what they care about. I'm just voicing my opinion about it. I'm not "spoiling" anything here. And, fine, my opinion is that anyone that cares about "spoilers" has first world problems. I have been yelled at (literally yelled at, like I'd just punted a puppy across the room) because I said something as obvious as "The Titanic sinks in the end", and often from movies of similar vintage.

Seriously, don't read reviews, don't watch trailers, and don't ask people their opinions of movies if you don't want "spoilers". Most of us aren't dicks, we won't go around telling you what happens in a movie unprompted (at least, not a recent movie, maybe as a way of explaining our references to older movies).

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#92

Post by JabavuAdams »

olewhalehunter wrote: post #86
JabavuAdams wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that Pixar movies are made by a brain-trust of intelligent, empathetic, and cultured people, right? None of that means that they are immune to their cultural and corporate biases and zeitgeist, but you seem to be implying something much more intentional and predatory. Why?

We don't have clear, culturally relative definitions (nor would we want any) of "intelligence", "empathy", or what is "cultured" other than those that the most psychopathically inclined conquerors of civilizations past brought us, however the display of those characteristics seems to be the most valuable social signifier today, and the people behind Pixar (one them was Steve Jobs, a known psychopath) have been the mo…

I'm not referring to Steve Jobs, I'm referring to the Pixar "Brain Trust": http://www.fastcompany.com/3027135/lessons-learned/inside-th...

Fundamentally, these people are artists.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#93

Post by isolate »

EGreg wrote: post #84
isolate wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean, but sometimes it isn't pure nostalgia. I like hand-drawn non-CG animation a lot, but there aren't a lot of animated movies coming out now that have it. And cultures can change dramatically too. I liked it better when people weren't so distracted by their cellphones. (This is a fairly small change.)

If you really want blatant commercialization, see Pokemon, Digimon, Yu Gi Oh etc. The latter at least had an interesting plot, and deeper characters. But both are basically cheap adaptations of Japanese anime -- draw a few frames with action lines, sell millions of trading cards. Compare that to, say, Spiderman for FOX Kids in the 90s. Every scene was carefully animated and the plot was deep. And to prove it's not ju…

I think part of it is a greater social bias towards capitalism. You used to be awesome if you made art, now you're awesome if you make money.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#94

Post by wavefunction »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #90
wavefunction wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is actually something different with these 80s movies for kids _and_ adults. Part of it was some true courage in the story-telling, for what movie studio of today would allow a character like "Sloth" from the Goonies to end up in a movie? Darkness along with the light. And sincerity in both rather than vapid "sarcasm." These movies have soul and heart. Not saying that similar movie magic is impossible now or in…

Seriously? ANY pixar film puts those to shame in terms of depth. The entire back story of UP was about a widower; Finding Nemo, same story - talk about darkness and light. How about The Incredibles, Wall-E, Monsters Inc, all fantastic story telling and incredible depth. It even goes further back than 80s, to movies like The Sound of Music with the Nazis. Again, your biases are only fuzzy nostalgia and it seemed bigge…

Sorry, you don't understand what I'm talking about. But please don't try to tell me what I'm saying, either.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#95

Post by JabavuAdams »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #87
JabavuAdams wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really have to experience this to fully appreciate it. Social contagion is real.

As a developer, I do my best to engineer it into my product.

How could you shore up human weakness, instead of exploiting it? A question I've been asking myself...

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#96

Post by olewhalehunter »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #92
olewhalehunter wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have clear, culturally relative definitions (nor would we want any) of "intelligence", "empathy", or what is "cultured" other than those that the most psychopathically inclined conquerors of civilizations past brought us, however the display of those characteristics seems to be the most valuable social signifier today, and the people behind Pixar (one them was Steve Jobs, a known psychopath) have been the mo…

I'm not referring to Steve Jobs, I'm referring to the Pixar "Brain Trust": http://www.fastcompany.com/3027135/lessons-learned/inside-th... Fundamentally, these people are artists.

Fundamentally their films are there to make money in a global economy and to ensure the artists stay hired there. And their art is shit, repetitive, and horrifically ethnocentric, they draw all their eyes the same, big, colorful, inviting, with nice clear whites; their bodies are soft, squeezable, like big babies, with fuzzy or gleaming hair, to exploit humanistic reactions.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#97

Post by xerophyte12932 »

LukeShu wrote: post #55
Jtsummers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure there are no spoilers in that first paragraph. In fact, I'm pretty sure most of what's referenced was available in pre-release materials (trailers, press events, and such). I just saw the movie and just read this article, it's less spoilery (in my opinion, not spoilery at all) than listening to coworkers in the lead up to it who were making conjectures based on their knowledge of other Star Wars media…

Pre-release materials are the worst, and often contain awful spoilers. I intentionally avoided them for Star Wars. During the previews when I saw Star Wars, one of the people I went with did his best to ignore the Captain America trailer, because he didn't want it spoiled at all. You watch enough ads/pre-release materials to decide you want to see it, then once you decide to see it, you ignore everything you can.

I found it interesting how Maleficent trailers all somehow use the movie footage to make her seem evil, where as the movie is actually about her NOT being evil. So the in that pre-release material didn't spoil anything at all.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#98

Post by Jtsummers »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #95
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer, I do my best to engineer it into my product.

How could you shore up human weakness, instead of exploiting it? A question I've been asking myself...

You can exploit the weakness to help people in another way. How many of us grew up and mastered arithmetic with Math Blaster or similar?

Gasification works and exploits a human weakness. Incorporating it into a game like many mobile games (FarmVille) just wastes people's time and encourages them to spend money on meaningless tokens and trinkets that will literally disappear at some point (as opposed to the still silly and useless trinkets you might get from an arcade prize shop, but at least those you can keep). Incorporating it into something more useful (or at least with a more valuable output) is a good start.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#99

Post by hyperpallium »

DannoHung wrote: post #22
olewhalehunter wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emotions are so much more complex than our terrible labels for them, and much of your emotional sense of self comes from the language your parents branded you with for the most cultural convenience: '"Anger" is bad! It's your fault in not handling "it", not ours or the systems', but "Anger" in-of-itself doesn't exist outside of language, just the nebulous array of feelings and reactions we've been to coniditoned to l…

Did we watch different films? The end of the movie was about realizing that emotional experiences are complex and that it's ok to be sad about things and that you shouldn't run from negative emotions. Every person had an anger too. Not sure how you got the notion that the film makers thought anger is bad.

\philosophical: Showing growth requires showing "before" and "after". Yet, if the bulk of a movie is the "before", it can be a way of celebrating that behaviour, and the brief "after" at the end is a way to slip past the censors. [In general - not saying Inside Out would be censored!] The greater screen time and scenes means "before" leaves the greater impression on viewers.

Inside Out's is a dissatisfying explantion for emotion, because each emotion-character themselves exhibited a variety of emotion (e.g. Joy was sad), implying by the conceit of the movie that they each had a set of emotions within their own head... ad infinitum. That's the problem with the homunculi theory of mind: it doesn't explain anything.

Did anger ever make a useful contribution in the movie? IIRC only a source of humour, or a problem to be worked around.

BTW The outtake-like scenes at the end included a bus driver who was all anger.

Re: Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

#100

Post by chetanahuja »

rpgmaker wrote: post #75
zekevermillion wrote: post #30

There was some magic to the 80s childhood movies -- Star Wars, ET, Last Starfighter, Goonies -- that I don't think can be bottled. Whatever stories hold that place for our kids, I don't think they will be the same movies that did it for us. There's just something about seeing Star Wars in the context of that time, and it's not the same as seeing it now.

As someone that watched the Star Wars film for the first time relatively recent, I concur. I did not like ANY of the films at all (I watched them in the order they were released). The scripts of the first three seemed utter shit to me. It works as a family movie I guess but not one an adult should be able to enjoy. Needless to say this opinion makes me part of a despised minority but I understand why many people love…

With you all the way brother. Stripped of nostalgia (I also saw the original movies for the first time only this year), It's a fun little space drama with the eternal good vs evil fight... with lasers and death rays.
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