Tag Archives: Disney

Disney Makeover

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When Disney released “Brave” in 2012 I was so excited. First: she’s a red head, second: she’s sassy, third: she’s Scottish, fourth: she doesn’t need a man, fifth: she’s beautiful without being package. She didn’t look like the normal Disney princess.

HuffPost blogger Kristen Howerton put it best when she wrote, “‘Brave’ may be considered by many to be the first feminist princess movie. Merida does not pine for a prince to come to her rescue, and solves her own problems without the aid of a suitor.”

She was a healthy role model for girls. Her hair was frizzy, her body was more athletic than Barbie’s 34-18-32, she was tough and smart—she was perfect. When Disney announced they were formally making her the 11th princesses feminists of the world rejoiced!

But with her new role came a new look—her hair is smoother and the curls are more defined, she’s thinner with a more defined waist and hips, her eyes are more almond and cat like, her lips are fuller and she no longer has  that open smile it’s now merely a smirk.

In short they ruined her. They turned her into every other Disney princess. Her looks are more important than her mind or personality.  A Mighty Girl, a female empowerment website, has taken to Change.org to try and convince Disney to leave Merida alone.

The letter on Change.org reads, in part:

 

The redesign of Merida in advance of her official induction to the Disney Princess collection does a tremendous disservice to the millions of children for whom Merida is an empowering role model who speaks to girls’ capacity to be change agents in the world rather than just trophies to be admired. Moreover, by making her skinnier, sexier and more mature in appearance, you are sending a message to girls that the original, realistic, teenage-appearing version of Merida is inferior; that for girls and women to have value — to be recognized as true princesses — they must conform to a narrow definition of beauty.

The author of Cinderalla Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein, wrote on her personal blog about Merida’s makeover: “In the end, it wasn’t about being brave after all. It was about being pretty.” I couldn’t agree more, I also think Sarah Gray of The Frisky also hit the nail on the head when she said: “If anything Disney should be looking to Merida’s example, and mold the other Princesses in her image: confident, strong and Brave.”

 



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Jar Jar Abrams

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I awoke one day and twitter was all abuzz about JJ Abrams signing on to direct the next Star Wars film. If you have been in hibernation for the past few months, George Lucas sold LucasArts to Disney, and Disney announced that Star Wars: Episodes VII-IX will happen. Episode VI is expected to come out in 2015.

Now, I’ve loved Star Wars for most of my life. That’s true, I think, for a lot of people who were born after the first three films came out. I enjoy the prequels—they do a number of things very well, though they have their shortcomings. Honestly, much better than any of the films is the current series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which is expected to move from Cartoon Network* to DisneyXD after this season, now that ownership of the series has changed hands. Hopefully, none of the content of Clone Wars will change. It’s seriously just . . . so much better than the films. Have a marathon of Clone Wars with some friends and then try to watch one of the films. It’s a weird experience.

I am cautiously optimistic about Disney’s ownership of LucasArts. I mean, Disney is a giant, terrifying corporation. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to quality. This is the company that made the iconic movies that dominated just about everyone’s childhoods. They’re not out to ruin the franchise that they just paid billions of dollars to buy. Plus, Leia is a Disney Princess, now. Super exciting.

Now, JJ Abrams will be directing the next film. Once I have learned all that I can about something, I usually react fairly quickly with “I love this” or “I hate this.” According to high-powered executives on some comedy shows (like Better Off Ted), that would make me a great leader. However, when the JJ Abrams-as-director thing was announced, I had a more cautious reaction.

First of all, JJ Abrams destroyed the planet Vulcan in his first Star Trek film, for which I will never forgive him (yes, the planet is ugly and brown, but seriously the Vulcans are awesome leave them alone). At least now he will be in a setting where the destruction of planets is less of a shock and more of a fact of life.

JJ Abrams’ previous projects are . . . well, interesting. He did a wonderful thing for Star Trek. And while I have some issues with a few things from the 2009 Star Trek film and while all that I know from the trailers for the next Star Trek film is that there will be many explosions and that Benedict Cumberbatch’s face is as ridiculous as his name, I’m glad that he’s doing it.

Lost is much-acclaimed by some people but irritates me to no end. That said, JJ Abrams really just did the pilot of it and then the writers and showrunners after that kind of had no idea where they were going with it. The best things that I can say about Lost is that they had two former cast members from Babylon 5 and that Lost was filmed on the same island as Dante’s Cove.

Fringe is definitely a weird show (and it recently had its finale), but it’s a truly enjoyable show that I . . . did not watch all of the way through.

So I really think that we should be open-minded about JJ Abrams taking on Star Wars. That said, I was “open-minded” about M. Night Shyamalan adapting the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender (one of the greatest shows of all time) into a live-action film, and The Last Airbender turned out to be an outrageous abomination. I’m not saying that I would kill him, but if M Night Shyamalan were dying of thirst and I had an unlimited supply of water, I don’t know that I would share. And I don’t even drink water.

So, JJ Abrams needs to be careful and make something that will please the show’s fans and possibly even attract some new ones. But we should not just dismiss him or these new Star Wars films because we’ve been disappointed in the past.

 

*This is probably for the best, as Cartoon Network apparently likes to cancel its best and most well-rated shows. Like, for example, Young Justice is ranked #2 on IMDB of Cartoon Network’s shows, but they have failed to renew it for a third season. I am all kinds of outraged over this. They’re keeping The Annoying Orange and some of their other, um, “stellar” programming. Oh, and they’re continuing to air live-action shows. On Cartoon Network. Because that makes so much sense. (No but seriously I am so irate with them)



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Watch This: Once Upon A Time

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photo of once upon a time pictures
You guys, my Super Best Friend has only recently started watching Once Upon A Time. He and I tend to watch a lot of different television shows and put off watching others or giving others a try. When we finally do, the result is usually similar to Squidward’s first time tasting a Krabby Patty on SpongeBog Squarepants: “All the wasted years!”

I mean, he’s the guy who first got me to watch Gossip Girl, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Dante’s Cove, Titan Maximum, and Gundam Wing. And, soon, Revenge, which I know is totally up my alley. “This is not a story about forgiveness.” That line could be the blurb under my biography.

Right, so, the show comes on ABC on Sunday nights and, honestly, I was not all that impressed when I watched the first few episodes. Well, the first episode. It’s one of those shows that has an awkward beginning but gets better and better until you can no longer remember a time when you were not in love with the show. Every week slows to a crawl as you anticipate the arrival of the next episode.

Yeah. This show also has a very rabid fandom.

I want to talk about the women on the show. Women have not, historically, had the best roles in fairy tales. They tend to be the villains or the helpless damsels. And while Disney “villains” are typically the most interesting parts of the films (and ABC is a part of Disney, so there are overt references on the show to Disney’s interpretations of a few fairytales. Jiminy Cricket is a character, the “Evil Fairy” from Sleeping Beauty is called “Maleficent,” etc), the princesses did not really possess a great deal of agency until more recent years.

Regina Mills is, as far as I am concerned, the main character. In season one, the writers try to make her out to be the primary antagonist, but …

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Not A Tale As Old As Time

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I was born in the later 1980s and I grew up in the 1990s. Disney’s Aladdin was the first film that I ever saw in a theater. While my two favorite Disney films were Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid, I also watched and enjoyed Beauty and the Beast. Not as much, admittedly, because Disney films are all about the villains, and Beauty and the Beast is one of those Disney films that did not have a “Disney villain,” but rather an actually detestable, genuinely villainous antagonist—Gaston. As a preschooler, I wanted to be friends with Maleficent, Ursula, and Jafar. I genuinely hated Gaston.*

Speaking of Gaston, who else loved the fate that befell him on Once Upon A Time? (And who else is totally shipping Belle with Ruby? Oh, that’s right. Almost everyone who watches the show.)

Once Upon A Time is not the only recent show to borrow from fairy tales. I am speaking, of course, of The CW’s Beauty and the Beast, which premiered a few weeks ago and plays on Thursday nights after The Vampire Diaries (a show which I absolutely adore).

Now, I love The CW. Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Arrow, Gossip Girl. For every unwatchable Heart of Dixie, they have something that I look forward to every week. The CW has been very good to me. The Secret Circle was also just wonderful, but was for some reason it was canceled. And this year, Beauty and the Beast has taken its time-slot.

Unfortunately, this show is . . . not the best.

I found the pilot episode reasonably enjoyable. I love the leading actress (she was Lana Lang on Smallville, which was a great show if you can ignore the terrible writing and just concentrate on Tom Welling), and this show’s biggest strength is the protagonist, who is a detective, and her partner, another female detective. I love their interactions and their dialogue. And it’s almost primarily a crime drama, and I love crime dramas. Plus, the protagonist kicks ass, and I love kickass female protagonists. As you may have noticed.

It’s shortcomings? Well, it’s a reboot of the kind of the weird Beauty and the Beast series from the 1980s, but with a lot of differences. It borrows from Dark Angel (remember Jessica Alba in post-apocalyptic Seattle?). The crime in the pilot episode is directly stolen from a season one episode of The Closer. The type of poison used, how the poison was delivered, and even the motive for the poisoning.

But, possibly more importantly, the “beast” himself is just not terribly interesting. I mean, he’s a handsome guy. But his entire story has to do with his deep-seated anger issues which arose from being the subject of horrible experiments. I . . . I am just not interested in watching a show in which one of the main character has explosive outbursts of anger. It makes me uncomfortable, and I spend any scene with him in it feeling anxious. Not everyone feels that way, but a lot of the comments on tumblr seem to be that his behavior is “triggery.” And that’s accurate.

The CW is a wonderful network. But Beauty and the Beast just did not appeal to me enough to keep up with it. Does anyone disagree?

 

*Plus, “every last inch of him’s covered with hair.” Gross. I know that they didn’t have Nair or laser hair-removal (which, thanks to ambiguities in the English language, sounds like a process that removes laser hairs) back then, but they had scissors, razors, and wax. Pick one, Gaston.



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