The unmagicking of Disney

No art. No statement. Just money.

Like a lot of internet moaners, I have reached a saturation point with the Disney “reimaginings.” These Disney live action remakes are, of course, cynical by their very nature. The entire point is money. The point is beautifully summed up by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, star of every behind-the-scenes clip on all of my VHS tapes, in an internal memo he wrote 1981:

“We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement...But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement. In order to make money, we must always make entertaining movies, and if we make entertaining movies, at times we will reliably make history, art, a statement, or all three."

The Xennials and millennials who grew up with the Disney Renaissance (unofficially, starting with The Little Mermaid and ending with Tarzan) are hitting our childhood nostalgia crest AND have kids to take to the movies and theme parks. We’re the perfect target to be thusly entertained.

These remakes have proven to be pretty critic- and critique-proof, too. 2019’s Dumbo is the lowest grossing theatrically released Disney remake so far, making $114 million in the U.S. and 355 million worldwide, so…still not a flop. (I am curious about why Dumbo did gross so much less than the others. My bias would say that it was a visually off-putting film; it also has no princess, and therefore no easy way to wedge girlboss energy or an “actually, true love is the love between royal female family members” storyline in there. But more on all that later.)

So yes. Disney is here to make money and not art. And that principle has translated into draining the art and magic out of every remake. Any dialogue that isn’t lifted straight from the original is pretty ‘first draft’ in quality. The movies often follow a fractious, fun-killing impulse to “explain” “plot holes” in the original story, because joyless scolds on YouTube point out things that don’t make real-world sense in a goddamn fairy tale from the 1600s. (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.) Actors, including and especially celebrity voice actors, keep giving dress rehearsal energy. Saving all their spark and charisma for the blooper reel, I guess. And visually, the remakes just keep getting uglier.

There are some technical reasons for this. All these movies are filmed on digital cameras, which intentionally shoot with low contrast and low saturation. This style allows for maximum creative control when it comes to recoloring images - you can add in whatever you want without having to fight existing colors and shadows. Which is not in and of itself a problem. The problem is that the color range used most often on live action and/or photorealistic Disney and Marvel movies doesn’t actually contain a true black color. Black makes every color pop. Just look at comic books. Color grading also takes more time, a resource that more and more artists are publicly saying Disney/Marvel gives them very little of.

And the biggest technical limitation is reality - or at least, photorealism. It’s such a basic observation that it almost goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: cartoons can just do more things. Once you’ve freed yourself from the constraints of “how would that make sense in real life?”, you can animate a lion cub on top of a technicolor pyramid of elephants, anteaters, and antelopes; or a man who is SO especially good at expectorating that he can ricochet his spit across the saloon. But once you say it has to look “realistic,” you lose the ability to draw a lioness eyefucking her childhood bestie, and now all you have is Animal Planet But They Mouths Move. No art. No magic.

NEVER FORGET WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU.

But again, none of this really matters. The nostalgia train is never late, and in case it is, Disney has its latest trick: weaponizing representation.

For about 15 years, Disney’s bold new frontier was corporate feminism. A few self-aware quips about The Disney Princess™️ brand, a chance for a female character to punch or kill a secondary antagonist, and some overblown PR about more equitable costume design did big numbers for Disney, giving them cover for not having any female-led superhero movies until after 3 Iron Mans, 3 Thors, 2 Ant-Mans, and 37 Captains America. But they avoided doing anything so bold about race, beyond some pointedly colorblind background actor casting, because there was no racial equivalent to corporate feminism. Plus, cartoonish misogyny is a lot cuter on-screen than cartoonish racism. Just ask the Disney+ team responsible for writing the apologetic content warnings for Peter Pan, The Aristocats, and poor Dumbo.

In a competition between “Squaw gettum firewood,” the minstrel murder of crows being led by Jim Crow, and the Siamese cat playing piano with chopsticks …whoever wins, we all lose.

But then Black Panther happened. And despite Disney’s genuine ambivalence about this property compared with its tentpole movies, we turned Black Panther into a cultural moment. They saw how we transformed it from the second-tier backstory filler that they expected it to be (T’Challa’s disintegration in Avengers: War Games Or Whatever was so low-key that you could tell they didn’t expect him to be anyone’s favorite character) into one of the biggest hits with the longest staying power in Marvel’s history. That kind of grassroots groundswell works as a great profit generator and a great defense against any critiques, which is what is already happening for The Little Mermaid. The teaser trailer dropped and created a firestorm. Racists who bristle at the logic of brown skin on a singing half-human half-fish are upset. Children who don’t seem old enough to already feel starved for on-screen representation, but whose parents have, directly or indirectly, trained them now to act when the iPhone camera is on, are delighted. And Twitter denizens who are already dismayed at how muddy the visuals look are getting challenged on why they have this energy for a remake with a Black lead, but not for any of the other remakes. All of this conversation is happening without Disney doing anything beyond dropping a 60-second teaser. No art, no statement, no magic. Incredible.

As for me, I have already decided that I have to buy a ticket to support the movie, though exactly what “support” means when talking about a movie from the biggest media conglomerate in the world is still unclear. Whether I will actually watch this movie in theatres, however, really depends on how they’re going to physically depict Flounder. I already watched a photorealistic dung beetle form an actual ball of shit for a full minute in The Lion King. I don’t have it in me to watch a photorealistic fish with two eyes on one side of his head for any amount of time.

Aw Flounder, don’t be such a guppy.