6 ms·
The Unmagicking of Disney
- taneq 4y agoWow, this certainly has a… distinctive… turn of phrase. And I think makes several fair points. I’m low-key disappointed they said “Ant-Mans” and not “Ants-Man”, though. ;)
- klyrs 4y ago> If you can’t enjoy Beauty and the Beast because the logic of the enchantress’s spell is inconsistent, I beseech you, go watch a documentary about printing user manuals or some shit. Hooked
- csande17 4y ago> go watch a documentary about printing user manuals I sure hope this is a reference to a specific movie. I'd love to watch it.
- dullcrisp 4y agoNo, I think Ant-mans and Captains America is correct. Ants-man would be that thing from Rick and Morty.
- comex 4y agoAnt-Men?
- robg 4y agoA lot of good points in here on degrading art for photorealism in the remakes. But we’ve really been loving the originals that keep coming and changing the formula from princesses and villains to families and growth. From Soul to Encanto to Coco, Onward, Turning Red, and Luca, just high quality, good wholesome stories that we can watch as a family and talk about afterwards.
- robg 4y agoAnd yes, I recognize that most of those are Pixar, but Encanto from Walt Disney Animation is extraordinary in every way. Yet the worldwide box office was less than the Dumbo remake. I respect Disney bc they make money and art, even when art is less commercial than what the masses want. The author is dismissing the art that remains.
- the_lonely_road 4y ago2019 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.
- robg 4y agoSure, 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.
- robg 4y agoTo the point, the photorealistic Lion King doubled the box office of Coco ($1.6B vs $800M). No comparison on what’s better art. Respect that the same company does both.
- baryphonic 4y agoMy 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.
- pferdone 4y agoWasn‘t Encanto straight to Disney+?
- firasd 4y agoI think the trick with some of these debates is just stepping back from the media cycle. I really noticed this with Captain Marvel where for a few months any criticism was suddenly seized-upon as evidence of the person undermining the future of girls/women worldwide, but now, a few years later, nobody thinks that the movie needs defending so vigorously. As an aside, I noticed a couple days ago that in the live-action Lion King, the person voicing Simba sings, "everywhere you look, I'm standing in the spotlight" in place of just "I'm standing spotlight" in the older version, which is almost a metaphor for the differences since that little verbal error in the animated version feels more humanistic
- Gigachad 4y agoYeah I typically just ignore new media while it’s still in the hype cycle. I just picked up Cyberpunk 2077 half price on steam and I’m really enjoying it. But I remember when it came out there was an endless stream of hate and complaining. So I just step back, let the dust settle and the rough edges get polished out and then enjoy it later for what it is and not what I read on reddit or HN.
- civilized 4y agoAs 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 sequel has been a turd. Doesn't anyone remember how disappointing it was? This is just more of the same. They're still making good ones: Frozen, Moana, Encanto. Just watch those and pretend the rest doesn't exist.
- vlunkr 4y ago> I just pretend the remakes don't exist. This great advice whenever a piece of media is making you angry. We’re probably justified in being angry at these soulless assembly line remakes, but spending your time and energy complaining does no one any good.
- Cerium 4y agoIf one of my friends tells me that a remake is crap, don't watch it. I trust them. I still have not seen the sequels to the Matrix.
- personalidea 4y agoI recently rewatched the first Matrix movie and came to the conclusion that it is as well crap, when compared to Dark City.
- helf 4y agoLooooove Dark City! But let’s not forget the movie that was right after The Matrix but also much better: Equilibrium
- personalidea 4y agoOh, thanks for the recommendation on Equilibrium. Somehow that one went under my radar until now. Will check it out next Movie night.
- steele 4y agoThe kicking and screaming won't slow aging.
- pram 4y agoThe Critic monologue about bad movies remains perennially relevant: https://youtu.be/HSWj5_-F9Q4 https://youtu.be/HSWj5_-F9Q4
- geerlingguy 4y agoA 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU453ZDqTG4
- CoastalCoder 4y agoI'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.
- tarakat 4y agoTangential 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.
- gsatic 4y agoWhat'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.
- yial 4y agohttps://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm 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!“
- Arainach 4y ago>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....So the only worthwhile thing to do, if you have a choice, is to go work on something controllable. Or break the machine. Or go find value in something else in the world besides your job. I work on a big team that's a small part of a big product that's a small part of a big company. My work is in Java, not the latest hot frameworks. It doesn't involve machine learning or any buzzwords (though we get asked at least once a year to consider a hackathon on how we could try to shove some machine learning in there to do......well, that's for me to figure out). If I make the most catastrophic screwup I can, I won't move company revenues by anything close to a percentage point. If I am the biggest success I could possibly be and motivated my immediate teammates to be their best selves as well we would not increase corporate revenues by anything close to a percentage point. So we do fine work, and at 5PM I go home. .....and I love it. I have friends, and hobbies. I ride my bicycle without worrying about having to be on-call every other week, I go to experiences, I come home and spend time with my family. And you know what? My bonus target and salary band are the same as a bunch of people working crazy hours doing "worthwhile" things in divisions that have higher stakes. They're dramatically higher than most of my friends at startups working long hours trying to "change the world" right until their company goes broke or (best case) gets acquired making the founders rich and leaving all other option-holders underwater. So you tell me which of us has the job that's worth doing.
- DrewADesign 4y agoHm... 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.
- foxes 4y agoBased comment. Same mindset applies to lots of things on HN: C vs Rust, Php vs typescript, email vs chat app. Majority of HNers seem like they are seething that change happens and what they learnt before is the only correct choice. Best way is to appreciate and learn from the past but be still be open to new things. Being stuck ages you into obsolescence.
- didericis 4y agoBeing stuck due to arrogance is bad. Changing arbitrarily is also bad. Being open to new things does not mean all new things are automatically good. Being like old things does also make things automatically good. What is "good" is very very tricky to define, and context dependent.
- michaelwww 4y agoI learned something and enjoyed this to boot. Excellently written with a sharp writing style and incisive comments. It's quite a trick to make a children's movie that pleases everybody or at least doesn't turn off some group too hard. There's such a wide range of views about what's appropriate for children that I'd think it would darn near impossible.
- irrational 4y agoUnfortunately, I feel like Disney has also been unmagicking Pixar. I used to be so excited for each new Pixar movie and felt like Pixar could do no wrong (I’m a weirdo who even liked Cars 2), but the last couple of years have been lackluster from my perspective.
- magic_hamster 4y agoNot sure what the "last few years" mean to you. Personally I got to see Pixar's movies in the cinema all the way back since Toy Story. They certainly had an incredible run for about 15 years. Up is the last "Pixar classic" in my view. However in recent years they actually did have a couple of truly wonderful titles. Luca and Soul are pretty good, and Coco is really one of the best Pixar movies. So perhaps not all hope is lost.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoObviously, art is subjective and my opinion is no more valid than yours… but man, I cannot fathom how you could like Cars 2 more than Coco, Luca, Soul or Turning Red.