Michael Ramirez: DEIsney 2-19-25
From America's Premier Editorial Cartoonist
DEIsney. -Michael
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Editor’s Note: I was raised on some of the best movies Disney ever made. I was born a year before the official beginning of the Disney Renaissance, and had those films readily available on VHS as soon as my grubby little fingers could figure out how to work the VCR. And to this day, I think that Ariel might be my very favorite princess. I always go back to her, appreciating her perfect imperfection. Real teenagers sometimes disobey their parents, fall in love with boys, make bad choices, and seek out the advice of wise older women (she just got unlucky with Ursula.) It’s grown popular in recent years to hate on Ariel for “throwing her life away for a man,” but I will always pedantically (and correctly) point out that Ariel’s human obsession and “I want” song come well before she glimpses hunky Prince Eric. She also has an explosively angry father who destroys her possessions in a terrifying show of power, making this the more likely catalyst for her consultation with the sea witch Ursula, but that tiptoes too uncomfortably close to making her sound like a victim, and Disney does NOT want us to believe for a second that any of their damsels are in any amount of distress.
Disney’s 100th animated film “Wish” became available to stream with Disney+’s basic plan recently. I watched it with my whole family, with my husband cautiously optimistic and my kids excited to watch a new Disney movie with a new princess, villain, and adorable side characters. I am not exaggerating when I say that it was a train wreck of breathtaking proportions. By the halfway point we were wisecracking through this sleek, corporate piece of trash, which might have started out as a concept with a soul in the writer’s room but came out as a muddled and confused failure that undermines its own message. The “activist” hero is the story’s instigator and aggressor, and the villain bizarrely comes across as a reactive victim who is only trying to protect his kingdom and whose evil turn is the result of a curse which effectively removes his freewill. I questioned whether AI made this movie, it was so empty, and when I dug into notes about the production twists and turns it took, things started to make more sense. Apparently there was a love story at the heart of this originally, and a committed villain power couple. Wouldn’t that have been neat? Instead they allegedly changed the star boyfriend to a sidekick with no spoken lines and put the queen in a position to betray her husband for the benefit of the protagonist. At various points you can see the original concept if you squint before it’s completely derailed by bland humor and an absurd, fragmented narrative that almost certainly resulted from too many cooks in the kitchen and an absolute refusal to do anything even slightly risky.
Disney walking back the empty platitudes that please no one is a good sign. It’s a company with a rich, spectacular, and deeply magical history. The movies of my childhood weren’t afraid to get dark sometimes. Disney attempted to make The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Tarzan digestible for young audiences, and the effort alone was admirable. They explored themes like parental abandonment in Treasure Planet, the horrors of war in Mulan, and genocide for pay in Atlantis! The results were hit-or-miss, but occasionally extraordinary. Now they’re making movies where the villains are so sympathetic you could easily mistake them for the victim, or even the hero trying desperately to defend their city against an unknown and powerful threat. It’s time to start telling good stories again instead of spiraling into neuroticism over who might get offended.
-Bree
Editor’s Choice Links:
Disney+ to change content warnings before old movies like 'Peter Pan' as DEI strategy loses steam- Marc Tamasco, Fox News
Take it away: Star Tribune or Jeff Anderson?- Scott Johnson, Power Line
Democrats in Congress Lack Trust From Their Own Voters: Poll- Andrew Stanton, Newsweek
Sex Isn’t A Bad Word, But ‘Gender’ Is- Neeraja Deshpande and Beth Parlato, The Federalist
Of course all cultures aren’t equal- Rakib Ehsan, Spiked Online
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