Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by chetanahuja » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 6:25 AM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #37

rayiner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we weren't raising our kids to be such consumers--turning stupid shit like Star Wars into "cultural experiences"-- Disney wouldn't have any power. They can't own sticks and dirt.

You know the worst part? You can't even prevent it if you are raising your kids otherwise. My 5 year old has never seen a Disney movie, yet she told me today that for her 6th birthday she wants a Cinderella shirt and an Elsa costume - both characters she has never actually seen on screen. Her friends at school all talk about it though and recount fantastic stories. I hear from people saying that we will raise a kid w…

"At a certain point as a parent, it's kind of like, it doesn't really matter what we do."

Congratulations. You've discovered the true essence of parenting ;-)

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

#102

Post by techdragon » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 6:28 AM UTC

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…

Oh yeah, tracking down video of Samurai Pizza Cats wasted many hours of my 20s, nothing like trying to rewatch the cartoons of your youth.

As for comercialised, TMNT was hardly pure on this front, in fact they helped pioneer it in western cartoons. Nothing blatantly commercial in the the 94 strong cast of the original 1988-1997 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures line. http://turtlepedia.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Teenage_Mutant_Nin...

Farmer Don and his Modern Mutant Tractor are totally not trying to fleece your parents hard earned money.

But seriously, at least they started out making awesome toys like the Turtle Blimp -http://turtlepedia.wikia.com/wiki/Turtle_Blimp_(1988_toy)

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

#103

Post by bitwize » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 6:33 AM UTC

olewhalehunter wrote: post #18

codemac wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched it and I thought it was cute. I would like to hear more about what made you so furious - it's a perspective I didn't get while watching or with other people I spoke with after. Maybe I'm already disney brain washed.

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…

Actually psychologists have identified seven basic emotions: fear, anger, joy, sadness, surprise, contempt, and disgust. "Surprise" was considered similar enough to "fear" that Pixar made one character out of them; the same goes for "contempt" and "disgust". Complexity in emotions arises from their interactions, much like how we perceive a spectrum of colors as a mixture of three primaries.

Most of the professionals in the field who saw Inside Out have praised it for getting the basics of emotion and memory right, even if it isn't super accurate. It is after all a cartoon.

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

#104

Post by EGreg » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 6:44 AM UTC

techdragon wrote: post #102

EGreg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh yeah, tracking down video of Samurai Pizza Cats wasted many hours of my 20s, nothing like trying to rewatch the cartoons of your youth. As for comercialised, TMNT was hardly pure on this front, in fact they helped pioneer it in western cartoons. Nothing blatantly commercial in the the 94 strong cast of the original 1988-1997 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures line. http://turtlepedia.wikia.com/wiki/List_o…

What I meant about TMNT is that back then the cartoons were fully animated, not showing 0.5 FPS with action lines. Japanese Anime got away with it by having deep story lines and funky stuff. US knockoffs in the 2000s had the worst of both.

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

#105

Post by PhasmaFelis » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 6:44 AM UTC

olewhalehunter wrote: post #65

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the impression you got was "anger is bad and abstract thought is risky," then I'm not sure what movie you watched, but it definitely wasn't Inside Out. You're mistaken about "anger" being purely a cultural/linguistic construction, and about the authenticity of Inside Out's psychological model in general: the film was inspired by (and admittedly somewhat simplifies) solid psychological research, particularly the wo…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman#Criticisms

So have we dialed back from "Inside Out's psych theories are monstrous corporate brainwashing lies" to "Inside Out's psych theories are mildly controversial"?

I get that you didn't like the movie, and that's okay, and it's certainly reasonable to not like Disney in general; but I don't think you have any grounds to extrapolate that to the movie's message being actively and specifically harmful.

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

#106

Post by JabavuAdams » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 6:45 AM UTC

olewhalehunter wrote: post #96

JabavuAdams wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there anything you're trying to accomplish? I love myself a good rant, and most of us love to be righteous ... but ...

What's the state of the world that you want? Does being this angry help you get it there?

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

#107

Post by deciplex » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 6:46 AM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #74

deciplex wrote: post #45

Basically nothing about Disney's strategy would be wrong, or even harmful, provided copyright terms were something reasonable rather than infinite as a practical matter. By now anyone should have been allowed to make "The Force Awakens" and without paying $4.1 billion for the privilege, either.

I'm not so sure I agree. First of all, it's not like anyone could have made this movie without significant financial resources -- reportedly it cost $200 million to make, and it looks it (not to mention, Harrison Ford isn't coming back for cheap). Nobody without a large commercial stake in it was going to be able to make a movie like this. That doesn't justify current copyright laws (trademarks alone might be suffici…

You're assuming that the monopoly on IP is necessary to get a good return on a film like this. It's also arguable that copyright law made this film more expensive than it otherwise would have been - I don't think your $200 million figure includes the cost of buying the franchise in the first place.

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

#108

Post by isolate » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 6:47 AM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #103

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…

Actually psychologists have identified seven basic emotions: fear, anger, joy, sadness, surprise, contempt, and disgust. "Surprise" was considered similar enough to "fear" that Pixar made one character out of them; the same goes for "contempt" and "disgust". Complexity in emotions arises from their interactions, much like how we perceive a spectrum of colors as a mixture of three primaries. Most of the professionals…

The original Tomkins model had dissmell in place of contempt, but it's similar. I think it's limited because it's based on facial expressions and doesn't account for things like shame and guilt and compassion.

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

#109

Post by PhasmaFelis » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 6:48 AM UTC

lfowles wrote: post #64

knughit wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nemo movie created a holocaust of clownfish pets.

101 Dalmations also had a effect on the dalmation breed, but does that mean we should stop featuring animals in movies? Should movies have a cultural influence limit before we stop showing them to children? Should we add a lecture before/after the movie on responsible pet ownership?

More broadly--to what extent are entertainment creators responsible for what stupid people do after watching/reading/listening/playing? I do think children's media has more responsibility than adult media, but how far does that responsibility go?

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

#110

Post by forrestthewoods » Mon, Dec 21, 2015, 6:54 AM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #91

forrestthewoods wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The root comment was one warning readers that the article contained information that they may consider spoilers. At least if they're the type of person who actively avoids reviews, trailers, and opinions.

If someone wants to go to great lengths to avoid everything then that's fine. If people want to warn their fellow "blackout" fans that's fine too. If someone wants to say something isn't spoilers and it's just an action movie then, uh, ok then, I guess.