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The Unmagicking of Disney

marionteniade.substack.com

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Re: The Unmagicking of Disney

#21

Post by wrp »

civilized wrote: post #8

As a millennial who grew up watching the great Disney movies of the 90s, I just pretend the remakes don't exist. Disney (classic Disney-Princess-Disney, excluding Pixar, Marvel, and all the "properties" they've acquired over the years) has made a great movie once every 3-8 years for the past few decades. In between, they've always made utter garbage to squeeze every dollar out of the great ones. Almost every Disney s…

For me, the quality of Disney movies has been in a downward trend ever since Walt Disney himself died, but if you look at the whole of the Disney catalog, you'll see that they always produced a lot of films that are best forgotten.

Re: The Unmagicking of Disney

#22

Post by gsatic »

What's unbelievable is the scale of the ops, the high quality of ppl, and the amount of work that happens behind the scenes and yet the output is garbage. Money making garbage for sure.

A large majority of people are just locked into processes of the mega machine without having any say into what the output is.

So when someone does this stand up routine or makes a speech, which happens regularly, all you get is pin drop silence.

Once these money printing processes start up the chimp troupe looses control over them. And its happening faster and faster.

Some ppl still believe we are on a ship where if you cry loud enough the captain gets moved to change heading.

But corporations don't resemble ships anymore. They resemble hurricanes. The reason for the pin drop silence is no one can change the heading.

So the only worthwhile thing to do, if you have a choice, is to go work on something controllable. Or break the machine.

Re: The Unmagicking of Disney

#23

Post by yial »

gsatic wrote: post #22

What's unbelievable is the scale of the ops, the high quality of ppl, and the amount of work that happens behind the scenes and yet the output is garbage. Money making garbage for sure. A large majority of people are just locked into processes of the mega machine without having any say into what the output is. So when someone does this stand up routine or makes a speech, which happens regularly, all you get is pin dr…

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulha...

“ There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop!“

Re: The Unmagicking of Disney

#24

Post by badRNG »

civilized wrote: post #8

As a millennial who grew up watching the great Disney movies of the 90s, I just pretend the remakes don't exist. Disney (classic Disney-Princess-Disney, excluding Pixar, Marvel, and all the "properties" they've acquired over the years) has made a great movie once every 3-8 years for the past few decades. In between, they've always made utter garbage to squeeze every dollar out of the great ones. Almost every Disney s…

> They're still making good ones: Frozen, Moana, Encanto. Just watch those and pretend the rest doesn't exist.

Probably the most objective way to view this is to actually look at the list of films from any given decade and see how many flops they had [1]. There's a bias at play here: the only movies we remember Disney making a decade+ ago are the hits. We don't often remember the misses.

Apparently Disney's "Renaissance" ended with Tarzan in 1999; but here are a list of movies that have come out since the end of this golden era:

- Monsters, Inc.

- Lilo and Stitch

- Treasure Planet (a personal favorite)

- Finding Nemo

- Pirates of the Caribbean

- The Incredibles

- Ratatouille

- WALL-E

- Up

- Tangled

- Brave

- Wreck-It Ralph

- Frozen

- Inside Out

- Encanto

I'm sure there's many great ones that you might love that I'm missing. But I'd say this lineup is potentially better than the list of movies spanning The Little Mermaid to Tarzan. To the author's credit, I will say there's part of me that's nostalgic for the traditional style of 2d character animation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Pictures_f...

Re: The Unmagicking of Disney

#25

Post by geerlingguy »

A lot of similar points are made in The Critical Drinker's most recent video, "ENOUGH with the remakes" [1]. It seems like the latest way to stir up more interest (whether good or bad) is something that I do think they're doing, 'fan-baiting', where they intentionally play up a very small subset of criticisms as being anti-[whatever social issue is hot at the time], and use that as a shield against any real criticism.

I liked a lot of the 'Disney Renaissance' animated films, but most of them worked because they were animated (and could really bend reality). The hyper-real look to these remakes throws them straight into uncanny valley, and any additions to the new films tend to be (as the OP article states) pretty mediocre in quality.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU453ZDqTG4

Re: The Unmagicking of Disney

#26

Post by tarakat »

Tangential to the article, I urge the reader to read Andersen's original Little Mermaid, and not settle for Disney's beautifully animated, but watered-down (heh), bowdlerized version. And I don't mean the remake.

The same could be said for most of their works.

Re: The Unmagicking of Disney

#27

Post by baryphonic »

robg wrote: post #12
the_lonely_road wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2019 box office versus 2021 will never be comparable. COVID has to be factored into almost everything when doing time series analysis but movies more so than most as it was devastated by the one two punch of not wanting to go to theaters and streaming existing now.

Sure, but would Encanto have surpassed more of the remakes? I’m not sure. No recognizable IP, no big explosions, trailers didn’t exactly lend themselves to an event movie. Not exactly characters for the theme parks either.

My kids and their friends could sing many of the songs from Encanto from memory, especially "We Don't Talk about Bruno."

Frozen, which had an inferior story and even score, also had that quality.

The live action remakes have no soul and are forgotten as soon as they're over.

Re: The Unmagicking of Disney

#28

Post by tehnub »

badRNG wrote: post #24
civilized wrote: post #8

As a millennial who grew up watching the great Disney movies of the 90s, I just pretend the remakes don't exist. Disney (classic Disney-Princess-Disney, excluding Pixar, Marvel, and all the "properties" they've acquired over the years) has made a great movie once every 3-8 years for the past few decades. In between, they've always made utter garbage to squeeze every dollar out of the great ones. Almost every Disney s…

> They're still making good ones: Frozen, Moana, Encanto. Just watch those and pretend the rest doesn't exist. Probably the most objective way to view this is to actually look at the list of films from any given decade and see how many flops they had [1]. There's a bias at play here: the only movies we remember Disney making a decade+ ago are the hits. We don't often remember the misses. Apparently Disney's "Renaissa…

These are mostly Pixar films — different studio, but owned by Disney. The list you want is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_....

Re: The Unmagicking of Disney

#29

Post by DrewADesign »

Hm... don't think I agree with a lot the author says, here.

Cartoons are compelling because they're a colorful, heavily abstracted and anthropomorphized, impossibly expressive worlds without the hard and fast limitations of our physical existence. If Excitebike and lazy Hanna-Barbera cartoons are your only animated escapes from the real world, classic style Disney cartoons offer arrestingly compelling visuals and stories.

But 7 year olds probably can't remember a time without Splatoon 2 and Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda Breath of The Wild and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. They've not only been watching, but have been interacting with and manipulating environments with that level of flashiness and abstraction for their entire conscious existence. While they obviously will still enjoy cartoons because they're beautiful and entertaining, they just won't impact them like they did us.

I also think this author erroneously asserts that Disney's remakes solely prey upon nostalgia. Children, not middle-aged fans of the originals, are still the primary audience for Disney movies, so that's not likely. They also assume that our generation's media hit the magic Goldilocks balance while the ones that came before us were contemptibly outdated and the ones that came after us were either superficial, or mocking useful social mores, or guilty of some other moral transgression. You might recognize this behavior from, you know, every other generation.

Kids growing up now will have a level of media sophistication few non-experts in prior generations could ever hope to match.

Re: The Unmagicking of Disney

#30

Post by CoastalCoder »

geerlingguy wrote: post #25

A lot of similar points are made in The Critical Drinker's most recent video, "ENOUGH with the remakes" [1]. It seems like the latest way to stir up more interest (whether good or bad) is something that I do think they're doing, 'fan-baiting', where they intentionally play up a very small subset of criticisms as being anti-[whatever social issue is hot at the time], and use that as a shield against any real criticism…

I've been trying to decide if the fan-baiting allegations are true.

It seems like a plausible explanation for some of the media controversy. But I can also believe that the fuss isn't organized by the studios or perhaps by anyone at all.

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