A Disney Adventure

Okay then. There's lots of kick ass stuff going on in the world but like I said previously, there isn't much I can normally say about big national stuff that somebody else hasn't already said better so I'll leave certain supreme court decisions there.

Nope while this blog wears many hats I think it's best to think of it as a journal of sorts, a public record of whatever is on my mind. Sometimes what's on my mind is big political stuff and sometimes it's.



Okay let's back up. I normally don't do small talk at city council meetings. I suck at it. But I do overhear a lot of it. Two people were talking about the recent trend of superhero movies. The recent trend I love by the way.




I kind of wanted to rebut the comment but hey the internet has already done the. "Why are superheroes in?" convo to death.

It was another off hand comment in that conversation that sent my brain flying.

"Why can't they be more like Disney movies."

Okay then.



The reason why that's kind of hilarious should be obvious, but again it got me thinking. How did we get here. How did we get here. How did we get to the point where a Disney movie is a Disney movie and you notice when it isn't?

At least in terms of big hollywood that's kind of wierd. It's not so much with indie studios or indie subsidiaries but with studios themselves it kind of is (not counting marvel).

If I say a movie was put out by Lionsgate or Warner Brothers that tells you nothing about the content of the film at least not in the same way something like who wrote, directed or acted in it does so why Disney.

Well I think I kind of answered my own question there for a bit.

See when people are talking about Disney movies as Disney movies they tend not to be talking about the great continuum but of various eras of Disney.

You have golden age Disney which I shouldn't knock. But the think about Golden age Disney is that it was somewhat brief. We are oddly approaching the point where Disney as a film Company in terms of production history is outstretching the production run of it's namesake producer.

And as such what I consider to be the trademarks a Disney movie may not line up with the older generation who remember the Golden Era.

Me. Well I came up watching the dawn of the Renaissance.


But while love those movies I'll the first to tell you that I wasn't paying attenton to those stories because of plot or character. My parents trusted the mouse so I didn't have to ask twice to get into Lion King.

And while yes I think those movies hold up great the movies I actually started thinking about (beyond the brainwashing) are the ones that signaled the end. And damn it I so want to defend them.



Okay so I'd be an idiot to try to claim Home on The Range was solid gold and I never saw Brother Bear. But come on. Space Pirates are cool. I'm sorry. SPACE PIRATES ARE COOL!




And Tarzan had that cheetah fight going for it.



And once you get past "Reflection" Mulan is pretty straight old school war flick with the usual beats.

My point is that Disney movies of my time were a lot bigger on the adventure than the princess days. So it kind of makes since to me that that they would getting in bed with Star Wars and Marvel stuff now.

Heck I would argue that that's what made the Disney Renaissance the Disney Renaissance. That the company felt a lot more comfortable with and as a result was better at making movies where a lot of action has to take place on camera.


But that of course begs the question of gender. Is the reason why so much fonder of those movies is that more of them were being made for a male audience. Oh god and talking about Disney and gender opens a whole host of issues I don't feel like talking about right now.


Speaking of Frozen. In a lot of ways it is a throw back to the more action heavy renacance movies more than the more romance and comedy stuff of the Golden Age. But all the same it arguably has a lot more drama than even the movie based off of Shakespeare.


Oh and a thousand lit snobs want to kick my ass right about now.

Trying to dissect Frozen is also a little more head work than I want to do right now.  But it makes my list of movies that were meaningful to me, That helped me wrap my brain around some emotional... thingy I was having at the time, helping me contextualize what I was feeling and why? And honestly that is another post.

But back to my point. Walt's been dead for nearly 50 years. And It's hard to say a Disney movie is still a Walt Disney Movie.

There was a time when that may have been a bad thing but I think we're long past that point.