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Walt Disney Urban Legends

The upshot of the Russian controversy is that no child under the age of 16 is allowed to see the new Beauty and the Beast because of one throwaway line about homosexuality, which obviously could bring the country crashing down around their ears if they're not careful.
 
GNC said:
It sounds like the remake is basically "Stockholm Syndrome: How Romantic". I suppose it's excused because it's a fairy tale, but earlier Disney tapped into something truly strange about its fantasy stories that modern Disney is reluctant to get to grips with. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is such a weird, elemental film.
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Fairy tales have a curious unconscious power to them that I haven't yet fully understood. I didn't see Disney's Snow White or Sleeping Beauty until I was grown, but as a youngster was disturbed and fascinated by Angela Carter's translation of the fairy tales of Charles Perrault.
http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/angela-carters-translation-of-the-fairy-tales-of-charles-perrault
And much later on, Carter's famous reworking of such tales, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. The text is online here if anyone's interested. http://www.angelfire.com/falcon/rote/CARTER.html
Despite having read these stories dozens of times, they still make my skin crawl in a way that's hard to describe.

Carter had said that she'd extracted the "latent content" from the various version of the tales and wrote from that. The same latent content is probably what Disney's early films were tapping into as well.

Many fairy tales are cautionary tales at heart. Walt, in his desire to be our benevolent overlord, was probably just trying to warn us. ;) Later Disney films seemed to move away from that.

There's some idea rattling around in my head about the way these old stories still resonate in a way that doesn't entirely square with modern life, but I haven't been able to fill out the whole picture yet.
 
Most of the really resonant ones draw on archetypes, which have a cultural context, plus lots of emphasis on being lost, separation from a loving environment, people and things not being as they appear (in both a positive and a negative way), accepting and embracing change - all things that children will need to deal with at some point. Also there's a strong virtue thread, ie integrity, honesty and noble intent will ultimately prevail to hold true to yourself: this motif crops up in Disney a great deal. Walt and co do cannibalise stories to stress certain elements and downplay others. Pinocchio was originally an allegory about the unification of Italy, for example.

Agree that Disney has become a little safer again these days, In the 90s it produced some quite progressive stuff, such as Hercules: very witty script, terrific voice performances and above all designed by Gerald Scarfe! I think personally that once Pixar got its own life, and Dreamworks and Universal started producing much more subversive stuff (a couple of the Shreks and especially Despicable Me are all much better scripted than any recent Disney) then the Mouse retreated back into what it does well, namely sharp, slick, instantly recognisable as Disney and above all marketable. Look at Frozen (if you can bear it) - ticks every box, and in many respects could have been made in 1955.
 
Personally I can't stand DreamWorks, I think you either fall into the Disney/Pixar camp or the DW one. For me they are lowest common denominator, smug laughs, pandering self-improvement message, stick an oldie on the soundtrack, one eye on the TV series spin-off and lunchbox marketing. Only the Ice Age movies are worse, out of the mega-successful stuff.

If Pixar are coming into a slight doldrums, Disney are at a better place artistically since the mid-90s, I read Zootopia described not inaccurately as Chinatown for kids and Moana was an adventure film obviously in the spirit of Ray Harryhausen. Mind you, all the cool kids like Laika - Kubo was fantastic, in both senses of the word.
 
Walt Disney wanted to or did set up a search for the thylacine. That's not an Urban Myth though I don't think.
 
GNC said:
Personally I can't stand DreamWorks, I think you either fall into the Disney/Pixar camp or the DW one.
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I think you can fall into both. However I also acknowledge that my view is entirely informed by what my kids watched at various stages in their childhood - they were the target age for the post Lion King Disneys, then Toy Story, then Shrek.. a couple of years older or younger and there'd be those I'd have missed. Also acknowledge that not all DreamWorks pics are gems. The third Shrek was appalling, for example, and I know for a fact that Aardman found them as a studio really hard to deal with (micro-management never garners great results.)
GNC said:
If Pixar are coming into a slight doldrums, Disney are at a better place artistically since the mid-90s, I read Zootopia described not inaccurately as Chinatown for kids and Moana was an adventure film obviously in the spirit of Ray Harryhausen. Mind you, all the cool kids like Laika - Kubo was fantastic, in both senses of the word.
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As I said most of these I have missed: my kids are both in their 20s now, and neither has kids of their own yet, so I don't see much of the new Disney (or DW) stuff as a matter of course. I came into professional contact with Frozen, repeatedly. I needed therapy afterwards.
 
Ah, right, I don't have kids, but I like a good cartoon and seek them out, though wouldn't watch anything just because it was animated. I don't have a stash of Tinkerbell DVDs, for example. Frozen I thought was pretty great, but I've only seen it once, and have not had the experience of a younger relative watching the same thing over and over ad nauseam. Even when I was a kid I'd prefer to see something new rather than the same thing I'd watched yesterday, and find that kind of repetition quite alien.

Aardman are another great animation studio, though they seem to have gone a bit quiet in recent years, Shaun aside. High hopes for their new caveman movie.
 
Ulalume said:
Fairy tales have a curious unconscious power to them that I haven't yet fully understood. ...

Despite having read these stories dozens of times, they still make my skin crawl in a way that's hard to describe.

Carter had said that she'd extracted the "latent content" from the various version of the tales and wrote from that. The same latent content is probably what Disney's early films were tapping into as well.
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Classic folk tales exhibit discernible regularities which recur within and across socio-cultural contexts. These regularities have been the subject of scholarly analyses and the inspiration for theoretical frameworks for quite some time. The results of such investigations are diverse, and adherents of one are often severely critical of others.

Some such frameworks are essentially high-level categorizations of story types based on descriptive features. A good example would be the Aarne–Thompson Tale Type Index:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne–Thompson_classification_systems

Other ones provide detailed specifications for the story lines themselves. Perhaps the best-known example would be Propp's analysis of the Russian folk tale:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp

http://changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/propp/propp.htm

These sorts of analyses and frameworks were sometimes mentioned by writers interested in the emerging notions of memes and memetics back in the 1980's / 1990's, but I don't recall the purported memetics crowd paying much attention to linking the earlier folklore work with the new fad.
 
Adam The Woo is so obsessed with Disney parks he was once banned from them .. I love him in a hetrosexual way..

 
Sorry - I think in trying to be non-controversial, I managed to be too vague.

By some fairy tales resonating in a way that doesn't entirely square with modern life, I meant -
these days, daughters aren't supposed to be sold off to pay off their father's debts, or married off to monsters (human or otherwise) or have to wear fetid animal skins to ward off their father's sexual attentions, etc...
and yet, the stories still resonate in the here and now.

Look how many novels aimed at young women hit on similar themes, and the books fly off the shelves.

I suspect I have a hard time pinning down this disturbing element, not because I'm unfamiliar with the vast literature on the subject, but because I'm female. The lizard part of my brain understands what the stories mean, even if the modern world insists things shouldn't be this way.

Don't even get me started on the mixed messages of what's beautiful is good/what's ugly is evil, and goodness always wins the day, except that if you are too beautiful and good, your step-mother will kill you. She may even cook you in a stew just for good measure.

I also know very well what these things mean, it's all part of a double bind that's been with us since time immemorial. That doesn't make it any more comfortable, though.
 
Advertising is similar and gets it both ways , beautiful models sell the goods . And the girl becomes merchandise for consumers as well . Who live ever after with beautiful kids in beautiful whatever..
 
Beauty doesn't always denote goodness in fairy tales, The Snow Queen is beautiful, The Wicked Queen in Snow White is beautiful, the seven dwarves are ugly, and good doesn't always win (bye-bye, Gingerbread Man and Chicken Licken) in the more extreme examples The Brothers Grimm used to gather. It's interesting that's the perception of these stories now, is that because of Disney? Or does it go back to the Victorian era?
 
The beautiful people were Greeks who sculpted the ideal forms . They wouldn't allow animals to have that role and seem to have rejected prior Celtic or tribal traditions. So the early Python ( "muddy") snake at Delphi as the oracle became the Pythia maiden oracle .

", a woman older than fifty years old was chosen, but still a virgin who dressed and wore jewelry to resemble a young maiden girl."
 
It's usual in Aboriginal tribes in Australia that men don't speak to their mother-in-law . Something about keeping the peace , law and order.
 
Step-mother rings a bell.
"Hera was one of the most heavily re-interpreted Olympian Gods in Disney's version of the story. In the original Greek Myth, she was not Hercules mother, but rather his stepmother, after Zeus had an affair with his mortal mother. She was known to have hated Hercules with a passion, going so far as to try to kill him on multiple occasions."
 
Ulalume said:
A girl falls in love with the ravening man-beast who kidnaps her, and all they can worry about is a little gayness? Jeez. Priorities.:rolleyes:
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I've just watched a Good Friday matinee performance of the new Disney 'Beauty and the Beast', and it is stunning. The level of visual detail is transcendent/amazing/brilliant.

And Emma Watson is beyond beautiful (she appears not to have a single speck of unneeded makeup uoon her...her naturalistic beauty includes every freckle and wrinkle, what an amazing looker she is)

It is a bit too 'on message' in places (not the mild gay pride, cleverly-but-shockingly interwoven) but the smart-girls-read-books-in-a-vague-but-fulfilling-way is oft overstated.

Every scene is so cleverly designed, each blade of grass / grain of sand / beam of light is astounding.

Masses of Fortean imagery. And Emma carries it off, at every level (so glad she dropped the short-haired waif look, and went for 20something Hermione on a mission)

Clever referencing from Les Mis (in all sorts of ways), good new (and old) music, all expertly delivered (lyrical content added-in by a Tim Rice, that guy's going to go far, mark my words)

Suspend your vomit reflex and watch it. You won't regret it....

ps Mods....this post should maybe be relocated to elsewhere....
 
Ermintruder said:
I've just watched a Good Friday matinee performance of the new Disney 'Beauty and the Beast', and it is stunning. The level of visual detail is transcendent/amazing/brilliant.

And Emma Watson is beyond beautiful (she appears not to have a single speck of unneeded makeup uoon her...her naturalistic beauty includes every freckle and wrinkle, what an amazing looker she is)

It is a bit too 'on message' in places (not the mild gay pride, cleverly-but-shockingly interwoven) but the smart-girls-read-books-in-a-vague-but-fulfilling-way is oft overstated.

Every scene is so cleverly designed, each blade of grass / grain of sand / beam of light is astounding.

Masses of Fortean imagery. And Emma carries it off, at every level (so glad she dropped the short-haired waif look, and went for 20something Hermione on a mission)

Clever referencing from Les Mis (in all sorts of ways), good new (and old) music, all expertly delivered (lyrical content added-in by a Tim Rice, that guy's going to go far, mark my words)

Suspend your vomit reflex and watch it. You won't regret it....

ps Mods....this post should maybe be relocated to elsewhere....
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What a wonderful review. Sounds brill.
 
Is there a formal name for the creative process of animated movies being recreated/reimagined, cross-medium, into being a live-action film? Such as, recently, Beauty & the Beast, or Jungle Book? Or even The Flintstones?

Or Lion King being transferred onto the stage? Similarly War Horse?

I feel that the word "adaptation" is far too basic a word to describe what is being done, when these preceding productions are reworked.

If there isn't a name for this process: maybe there should be.
 
Ermintruder said:
Is there a formal name for the creative process of animated movies being recreated/reimagined, cross-medium, into being a live-action film? Such as, recently, Beauty & the Beast, or Jungle Book? Or even The Flintstones?

Or Lion King being transferred onto the stage? Similarly War Horse?

I feel that the word "adaptation" is far too basic a word to describe what is being done, when these preceding productions are reworked.

If there isn't a name for this process: maybe there should be.
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'Sweding'?
 
Mythopoeika said:
'Sweding'?
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I beg your... What?

davidplankton said:
Cashing in.
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Yeah, but let's presume for the purposes of this philological query it's being done because there is sufficient latent capacity within the orginal artistic creation to justify the re-whateverthewordis into another medium.

Book into film. Film into book. Book into film into stage eg 'Matilda'.

Surely we can't just call these an 'adaptation'? That's something you do to a spare room.
 
I used to be a fan of Marina Warner's books, many of them concerning the academic, psychological symbolism in fairy tales and folklore. Also Marie Louise Von Franz, who worked with Carl Jung was a great writer on this subject if the concept interests you.

I'm sure I recall Warner's (or perhaps someone else's) theory that step mothers were such a frequent thing in fairytales due to many women dying in childbirth and the child being brought up by a 'stranger' of sorts. Suggesting that many children had an inherent fear of who their birth father may later take on as a wife (inheritance fears, cruelty, etc).

As for beauty and the beast......I've heard the beauty could never be a male due to folklore's role in socializing small girls into getting used to the idea of accepting older, ugly partners out of love, honor, tolerance - as opposed to the socialized male's encouragement to choose the youngest most visually pleasing bride.

These were my fave reads on the subject:
71DN45DTE8L._SX317_BO1,204,203,200_.gif
517H7EDDVYL._AC_UL320_SR210,320_.jpg


Not sure what I think of any of this, but it fits.
Thing is, you can pretty much apply an academic analysis to any damn subject and create an interpretation to fit your intentions, whether feminist, marxist, religious, etc.
 
merricat said:
step mothers were such a frequent thing in fairytales due to many women dying in childbirth and the child being brought up by a 'stranger' of sorts.
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Fairy-tales have been subjected to a wide range of interpretation, as you say, but the demonized step-mother has an explanation which can be verified. The early editions of the Grimms' collections were scholarly transcriptions of traditional German Fireside Tales and were not aimed at children. Neither were the stories! Subsequent editions bowdlerized the texts, which found a larger readership among the young. Evil mothers were turned into step-mothers, though their acts remained quite horrid enough to be entertaining. :hide:
 
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