Blog Talkback: What's Wrong with Disney Feature Animation? - Parts 1 and 2

BTW, before I forget again, a blanket welcome to all the new forum members who registered to comment on the article. Surf around, find other discussions, comment on our other reviews and interviews and things.


I had considered the weakening of the brand before writing the article, but largely from the perspective of increased competition (and cut the section from the final run because I couldn't get it coherent in time). DreamWorks, Pixar, Fox, and Sony are muscling in on feature film territory that used to belong almost exclusively to Disney (pop quiz, who else was doing family feature animated movies when The Little Mermaid came out?), and they're also expanding and broadening what can be done in the field. Disney used to be the sole player, but now it isn't. I think your perspective on Disney diluting its own brand is an idea I grazed with the familiarity and negative-halo arguments, but what you're talking about is still separate from those ideas.

It's as good an explanation as any, and your addition of the home video angle would also at least partially address why Tinker Bell is popular. I don't think Bolt did too well on the home video charts, and am still waiting on numbers for The Princess and the Frog, but if something sells really strongly, there's usually an announcement of it in advance of the video sales numbers and I didn't see anything like that from Disney.

Well, you know what they say: once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a conspiracy :). Disney Feature Animation's hit the trifecta by now, which is why I think there are some underlying reasons for the whole thing. Increasingly, though, I'm leaning towards that negative halo effect and a lot of individual cases about the specific movies.

I do agree about the Meet the Robinsons marketing, but I would say that it did reflect the slightly manic, ADD nature of the movie as well


My biggest issue with Cinderella (which I do like quite a bit) is that after a certain point in the movie, Cinderella just gets everything handed to her. I think it's a bit of a betrayal of the "do good" part of Walt's theme because she doesn't DO anything. She's just a passive participant in things happening around her. In the newer movie, she has to work to get what she wants/deserves. I thought this was one of the nicer angles of The Princess and the Frog, too -- Tiana isn't waiting for her prince and she works to earn her happily ever after.

It's not that I dislike Cinderella, since I think it's a ravishingly beautiful movie with some really terrific songs. I just think it inadvertently sends a terrible message to the girls in the audience that they can be more passive than they should be.

You're right that I hadn't thought of it, but only because your rationale boils down to "the movies aren't as good as they used to be," and I don't agree with that. I think The Princess and the Frog is a good bit better than The Little Mermaid, which was the last movie to revive Disney Feature Animation (apparently nicely chronicled in Waking Sleeping Beauty, opening today, he said promotingly ;)). If anything, most of the complaints I see about The Princess and the Frog aren't that they didn't do it "the Disney Way," but that they did it in the same "Disney Way" that they were doing in the late 1980's and 1990's, and we've seen that already. The "Disney Way" needs to grow and change. The mythic archetypes that make fairy tales enduring find new ways to express themselves (like Star Wars), and if I'm going to criticize P&tF for anything, it's that they just changed the surface details.

I would also say that I don't think the filmmakers really thought of it as trying to make a "Disney Princess" movie any more than they did when they made The Little Mermaid. I think Disney's marketing of "Disney Princesses" has been so effective that the public considered this a "Princesses" film, no matter what anybody else said about it. I still claim that this is not a sufficient explanation for the movie's disappointing box office.
 
That relates solely to Dreamworks Pictures not Dreamworks Animation. Dreamworks Animation was spun off from Dreamworks as a seperate publicly traded company back in 2004. They are 2 seperate companies. Dreamworks Animation is distributed by Paramount. Also once again as I've stated before, the term "Princess" movie is nothing more then a marketing term used by Disney for it's merchandising which is primarily towards girls. Any Disney movie that has a Princess usually receives much more marketing then 1 without 1 mainly involving the "Princess" of that movie. It's a marketing ploy to sell merchandise based around the Princess such as lunchboxes, bookbags and dolls. It's no different then the Disney Vault. They are both marketing aspects Disney use in order to make more money. When it comes to the "Princess" situation it's used to sell that princess related merchandise and has very little to do with the movie. It's a reason why they are called Disney Princesses when you loom at all the official marketing for the merchandise. There's a reason films like Bolt or Home on the Range had far less merchandise then movies they can market that Princess aspect.
 
When you think about the "history" of Atlantis and it's location there's a chance that Princess Kidagakash could be African (most likely San) but I don't think so.

Jasmine is Arabic and we could possibly go into the whole race categorization discussion but that would be off topic and we don't need to go there.
 
You know, as much as I do love Cinderella, I always thought there was SOMETHING a little off about that film. That point summed it up exactly.
 
I find myself agreeing with the whole "safe and formulaic" explanation. I myself had a feeling that the film would be the usual formula. Whether or not that factor led me to not seeing it is still unclear to me. But is there a possibility that Tron Legacy might break that problem?
 
That didn't affect Bolt. People around here really overstate the extent to which normal audiences supposedly dislike Disney animation; they may not be interested in seeing a particular film, but the brand certainly isn't "ruined" (particularly given how much money it makes them).
 
The script for Enchanted was originally written in 1997, back when Disney was making "Princess movies", although it was written as an R-rated parody for Touchstone. Interestingly, it was toned down, and turned into what it was making fun of just after people got sick of seeing "princess movies". Enchanted "tricked" people into seeing "princess movies" again, and it was apparently successful enough to warrant a sequel that'll come out in 2011. With Tangled and The Bear and the Bow coming out, and assuming they do well of course, maybe Disney will return to "The Snow Queen", that is if the reason they stopped it wasn't because of 2D, but rather because the title had the appearance of a "princess movie". All we need is one 2D hit for hand drawn to return. We need another Roger Rabbit.

EDIT: oops. this should've gone in this thread.
 
How so? As I noted in the article, Bolt underperformed even worse than The Princess and the Frog at the box office, costing almost $40 million more but only pulling in an extra $10 million in ticket sales.
 
I lost a lot of respect for Disney after it bought the Muppets and Marvel. Why would it need those, if it was doing so well? I don't think Walt Disney would even think of buying stuff like that. The people running Disney now have forgotten that Disney used to mean something. It used to mean innovation and creating memorable characters within the company. Even if it used characters someone else created, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the characters were given the Disney magic and that made them unforgettable. And Disney used to be about ideas. Walt would create things because he was enthused about them, but now the Disney company creates things because of marketing. It's sad what's happened to that company. It's being run by accountants now. There's no creative genius that really controls it. And it shows.
 
I find it bizarre how people are sick of "princess movies" when there are not that many of them. Even if Disney's marketing insists on including Mulan and Aladdin in the "Disney Princess" line of toys and crap for little girls and tries to brainwash people into thinking those are "princess movies", most of Disney's movies still are not "princess movies".

I could understand if people say: "we're getting sick of all these damn musicals", because Disney makes a lot of musicals, but I just don't get what the fuss is about about "all the damn princess movies", yeah, all 6 or 7 of them... out of 49.
 
"We're getting sick of these damn romance movies between a prince/princess (or someone of high-class) and a commoner/non-royalty."

Not that I'm agreeing, but that's probably a more specific statement than "princess movies" which might be mistaken for a film that features just a princess.

Cinderella
Sleeping Beauty
Lady and the Tramp
The Aristocats
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
Hercules
The Princess and the Frog

There were a lot of films I didn't know if they fell under this category though, like:
Snow White (A prince arrives, but it's at the very end and not the main focus)
Tarzan
Mulan
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Pocahontas

So maybe it's to an extent, we're sick of "romance movies", which even Lion King has, but it's weird, because Disney didn't make as many romance films in the 2000's and they didn't do as well [compared to the 90's films] (Atlantis, Home on the Range, The Wild, Bolt. They did have a few successes like Brother Bear [I think?] and Lilo & Stitch.)
 
Oh, I love the musicals, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that getting sick of musicals makes more sense then getting sick of "all the Princess movies" as there aren't that many that could be classified as such.
 
I'm really late answering this, but it's only three points:

First point, with Cinderella. Just wanted to point out that in fairy tales wishing is a way of doing something, it is a way to try to make something happen. Cinderella sings "If you believe and have faith in it, it will happen." Even Walt Disney himself seemed to believe this, that yes, you have to work hard, but believing is the most important thing. But Cinderella also told her stepmother she deserved to go to the ball, and she tried to do chores and make her dress to get what she wanted. She failed, but still believed, then the fairy godmother said "If you lost all your faith, I couldn't be here, and here I am" and helped her. Then she also got Bruno to chase away Lucifer to get the mice to give her the key.

I just wanted to show how Cinderella was active. If you don't think she was active enough, well, maybe, but just like Tiana, she tried to work for what she wanted, failed, and then some magic and believing helped her.

Second, I wasn't saying the films just weren't as good, even though from the ones I have seen I do feel that way, but I was trying to say that they weren't making them the same classic, traditional way. Previously, fairy tales (even Enchanted) had been in magical european kingdoms of their tales origin, something audiences got. I wonder if an African tale set in Africa would have done the as PatF, but that's getting away from what I think, tha perhaps the "surface details" change was bad. Like...if you're going to do a classic fairy tale, do it the classic fairy tale way. If you're going to do that again, might as well do it right.

I also don't feel it was just surface details, though. Making the princess also become a frog, go on a bayou adventure to see some voodoo godmother, meet a singing alligator who wants the same transformation...it wasn't just twisting the setting and characters, but twisting the story.

It's the twist. Disney films weren't "twisted" before, when they started pulling a "twist" then the films stopped doing well.

Now that I think about it, Pocahontas, the start of the non-Lion King type numbers, was the first Disney film based on history, something majorly different. No Disney film had previously not been based on literature or an original animal idea (Lady and the Tramp was Disney's actual first original film). When Disney did different, the box office went down.

Now, that doesn't mean I think Disney shouldn't have done different, because they need to be able to make whatever they want (in the Disney way), they need to be creative and all that, but if they want the same numbers they got before...maybe they should make them the same way they were before. Do the same to get the same. Just maybe.

I thnk Disney could do one or two films however they want, to take a chance on, during one year or one half of the year, and then do traditional types of films the alternating year/half of the year. So maybe they make smash numbers one year and bad numbers another year. Oh well, that's how they can take chances and recuperate.

That was all I wanted to add. Even Rapunzel is veering away from tradition making the prince a bandit and the title...Tangled...and I think that spells uh-oh (mainly the title), but I guess we will see!

I like this forum. Glad I came here.
 
Oh cool, thanks for reminding me. This here blog has a comment that reports that Princess and the Frog did well on it's first week being released.

That is pretty good overall. I think if nothing else it's proof enough that there is some market for these types of Disney movies to still be made.
 
I'm not sure if it can really be called the whole story, but I agree that the movie marketing and timing has been flawed. For some odd reason Bolt and The Princess and the Frog dodged the summer season, which is a mistake. I always found this strange. Yes, there is more competition in the summer, but it's also when more people are seeing movies. And TheVileOne is right, it doesn't help to premiere a week before Avatar.

Now maybe we come to it: Pixar movies come out in the summer.

Surely there can be room for both. A May release isn't going to crowd a movie that comes out in late June or July.
 
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