Looks like they were ahead of you.
Posted on 07/03/2019 3:18:30 PM PDT by EdnaMode
Disney’s forthcoming live-action Little Mermaid is set to star actress and singer Halle Bailey, of the R&B duo Chloe x Halle, as Ariel, Variety reports. That means that one of Disney’s most iconic princesses is going to look quite different. This Ariel will be black.
That’s a giant deal, and not just because Ariel is a popular Disney princess with arguably the best “I Want” song in the Disney canon. Ariel is also the princess whose character design set the mold for the astonishingly homogenous run of giant-eyed, small-nosed Disney princesses we’ve met since The Little Mermaid debuted in 1989.
In 2015, a Tumblr user named Alex made a post titled “Every woman in every Disney/Pixar movie in the past decade has the exact same face.” She traced the face shapes for male and female characters from the past 10 years of Disney/Pixar movies, and she found that while the men had a variety of face shapes — square jaws and short noses! round jaws and long noses! the list goes on — the women’s face shapes were nearly identical: they all had round cheeks, giant round eyes, and tiny button noses. In extreme close-ups, it was almost impossible to tell the difference.
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
Thats true. Not good.
Just watch the old stuff that you love!
These people are in the business of making money, and that’s the bottom line - even though they often have screwy ideas of how to do that. They’re not in the business of creating or continuing myths for you to attach to and live by. They don’t give a damn about what you may cherish.
Ignore what you don’t like; enjoy what you do. And, perhaps, you could try to create the kind of inspiring thing yourself that you’d like to see in the world.
Looks like they were ahead of you.
I can understand that. This place often appears very hostile to Black people who may be looking at it from the outside-in. Big mistake - especially right now.
Like the black Little Orphan Annie.
Regarding Uncle Remus, Disney is so politically correct, that they have locked away “Song of the South”. They have never released it on home video, and it has not been shown in theaters in decades. The PC types who run Disney refuse to acknowledge this great old movie.
I watched the movie, didn’t like it at all, couldn’t sit through it.
It cost $105 million to make, only brought in $207 million, it was a bomb by Disney standards. The critical reviews were overall negative and several critics declared that “Princess and the Frog” ended the “Disney Renaissance.”
Cost $105 million to make. Marketing normally figures at least 1/2 of the production cost. Theater owners get 1/2 the ticket price. There is also the distribution cost.
Go into a Disney Store and the only time you see any Princess and the Frog merchandise is when she's a part of the Disney Princesses.
It was definitely a bust.
Disney can certainly absorb that kind of loss, but they don't like it.
I thought “Frozen” was just AWFUL!
Way too much singing, movie was too long, same old Disney formula characters. And in general, I’m a big fan of Disney animated movies and musicals.
Other than the prince actually being a bad guy, there was nothing original in this movie.
It wasn’t a loss but it didn’t make enough. The articles said it was profitable but not profitable enough. I think Lasseter had a nostalgic attachment to 2D animation due to his previous work. Audiences except for a few weren’t coming to see the movie for the art method. And as you say the thing cost a lot to make. That and AFAIK 2D Disney animators were mostly old guys with no one coming up the ranks to replace them sealed the fate of the medium.
$$
Copenhagened? Isn’t that where the statue of Hans Christian Andersen is?
Have a copy, from another country that didn’t follow copyright laws of the US. It is in VHS as that was the format when I got it. It is probably a collector’s item as much as a watchable movie. My grand kids watch it on occasion as I gave it to them since my daughter kept a lot of the old Disney tapes and still has a VHS. But she’s finding it harder to get someone to service it when it gets sick as they were not made to last too long and the formats have really changed. I told her she might want to get a friend to upgrade the format of the movies I got but as you know, Disney is on the lookout for copyright infringements so it would have to be done quietly and behind closed doors. Then the original could be saved or sold, whatever the kids want.
As for Disney’s infatuation with PC, in the old days when Walt and Roy were alive, everyone was equal. They all spelled money and money drove Walt’s animation studios. So they didn’t care who’s hand dropped it into the tills, it was a means to keep the studios alive and active.
This effort toward being PC started when the family stepped out of the active control of the studios and outsiders were brought in to run them. And those outsiders were flaming liberals that were transitioning into the liberal agenda.
All that’s left of the family that are fighting over around $400M is the three grand kids and their families, a lot of it in stock. So the majority of the worth of the company is run by outsiders now and they are basically liberal pundits. Hence the PC attitude as they are sure they are right in their attitude about people. But if it wasn’t for Roy and his dollar sign mind, the traditions would not be able to support the company as their PC attitude has overstepped their artistic greatness.
rwood
“It was the movie that killed Disney traditional animation.”
Eh, that’s not quite true. Princess & the Frog did deal damage towards Disney traditional animation, but it didn’t really kill that medium. That “honor” goes to the 2010 Winnie the Pooh movie, the actual last Disney traditional animated feature film to ever be released. Though in Winnie the Pooh’s defense, the only reason it did so poorly was because it was stupidly released the exact same week as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2’s first week (which would never have ended well regardless of whether it was CGI or traditionally animated). Also, to be fair, P&TF also ended up released around the time Avatar was released and that movie being a box office hit (allegedly regarding that last bit, anyway).
Not going out past where you can see your feet is a Southern woman thing. My wife swears by it
Speaking as someone who had in fact watched the 1991 original version of Beauty and the Beast, I’d beg to differ regarding whether or not Beauty and the Beast needed one.
Long story short, it was filled with several plotholes, and many times the film just tried to push an agenda depicting men as dumb or evil, and even depicted women who actually wanted to marry at all as being dumb blondes who fall for the town hunk. Oh, and those same girls failing to even qualify as actual foils for Belle regarding the actual moral of the tale despite being treated negatively. Oh, and it was so divorced from the original story that, other than the title, there’s barely anything similar to that story. Say what you will about the remake with Emma Watson, at least THAT movie fixed quite a few of those plotholes, as well as fixed up a lot of characterizations (at least now, Belle has a reason for not liking the village or even why she’s bothering to stay in the village despite clearly not liking it that didn’t amount to an arrogant sense of self-worth and viewing herself as being above the rabble). Ultimately, the remake was necessary thanks to Jeffrey Katzenberg and Linda Woolverton deciding it was more important to push far left feminist rhetoric onto children than to actually adapt the original tale (and the Jim Cox version would have worked very well, considering Michael Eisner back when he actually CARED about maintaining Disney’s wholesome reputation actually thought it was a good enough story adaptation to personally request to him that he make a full-fledged screenplay).
But I do agree, The Little Mermaid definitely didn’t need a remake. It was fine as is (and if you ask me, it was a MAJOR improvement from the Andersen fairytale. I personally thought the original tale, with all due respect to Hans Christian Andersen, was one of Andersen’s worst works, and not merely because the mermaid died, but because she came across as a karma Houdini who got exactly what she wanted despite literally leaving everyone with a lot of misfortune, even with her death.).
Never order your Whitefish blackened or you might be called a Racist Bigot, or something...
I fully agree with you about the film (well, save for it being a “lame baby movie”. I actually think the movie was actually pretty good viewing for the whole family and actually respected its audience rather than talking down to them), and I also fully agree with you that changing up Ariel like this in the remake is just stupid of Disney (which unfortunately isn’t even the first time recently that they’ve done something grossly stupid, and I’ve got a whole list of things they’ve done, from their constant mishandling of Star Wars, to making LeFou gay as well as adding gay moments to Star vs. the Forces of Evil, to the whole thing about forcing the IT members of Disney World to train their replacements if they wished to keep severance packages, their botching Path to 9/11, their trying to boycott Georgia over the Heartbeat bill, among other things).
I disagree with you, however, in your reference to Ariel as being a soulless ginger, or more specifically the “soulless part”. She actually had far more of a soul than her original counterpart did (and I don’t just mean that literally. The original Little Mermaid was a selfish brat who in existential angst just ran away from home, didn’t even think about how her family was going to suffer because of that, and then instead of cleaning up her mess by at least taking a third way that ensured the prince didn’t die and their misfortune was reversed, she offed herself, and came across as a karma Houdini. At least Ariel actually cleaned up her mess).
Princess and the Frog was supposed to be one of the tentpole franchises, and Tiana was supposed to be up there with Ariel, Snow White, etc.
Princess and the Frog didn't fail because it had a black lead. The story was convoluted, it didn't have an earworm song like "Let it go" or "Colors of the Wind," and there wasn't a strong sidekick character, although I kind of liked the firefly.
Disney had been dithering on traditional animation for a while, and Princess and the Frog was a test case to see if it was still viable.
Most of what is called traditional animation now is done on a computer, anyway.
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