![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Disney may dismay
Thursday, 22 June 2006 09:37 amOne of the occasional side-effects of what for want of a better word I'll call my academic "career" is the need, now and then, to spend an evening watching strange and unlikely movies. Last night the exigencies of encyclopedia entry formation required me to view two recent Disney films I haven't seen. Yes, this means I sat through Brother Bear*, gritting my teeth, curling my lip, drinking rum, and at intervals muttering or shouting imprecations, among them "patronising colonialist sods", "get a zoologist, dammit!" and "aaargh." It's a crappy little film, full of cute bears, brotherly love, noble shamanistic savages, inspiring pristine vistas filled with Exciting Wildlife, TM, emotional uplift and irritating music. I hated it. (Apart from anything else, it was incredibly short on actual female characters).
Chicken Little, on the other hand, was a surprisingly agreeable little film which suggests that, against the odds, Disney may be slowly waking up to the twenty-first century from their Sleeping-Beauty-like residence in the 1950s. I didn't have much expectations from the new Disney foray into 3-D computer animation, but in fact bedazzling technological skill has always been their raison d'être, and there are some wonderful effects in this one: the sensibility is very much the squash-and-stretch playfullness of the early 2-D cartoon. The animal-town is pleasantly goofy and at times slyly satirical, and while the usual rampant stereotyping is prevalent, the core characters who, predictably, win through, are rather endearingly geeky. Also - and this, given my known proclivities, is possibly the bit I enjoyed the most - the alien spaceships are simply cool. However, the heart of a potentially postmodern and rather entertaining alien invasion degenerates rather limply into the usual Disney family-values clichés, which horribly undercuts the inventiveness and off-the-wall subversive possibilities in the early parts of the film. So, an improvement in terms of postmodern sensibility and wit, but in the final analysis, alas, it's business as usual, and Disney is Disney still.
* Thank the gods, Home on the Range is a Disneyfied western, rather than a Disneyfied folkloric perversion, so I felt able to ignore it. There is a limit to my dedication.
Chicken Little, on the other hand, was a surprisingly agreeable little film which suggests that, against the odds, Disney may be slowly waking up to the twenty-first century from their Sleeping-Beauty-like residence in the 1950s. I didn't have much expectations from the new Disney foray into 3-D computer animation, but in fact bedazzling technological skill has always been their raison d'être, and there are some wonderful effects in this one: the sensibility is very much the squash-and-stretch playfullness of the early 2-D cartoon. The animal-town is pleasantly goofy and at times slyly satirical, and while the usual rampant stereotyping is prevalent, the core characters who, predictably, win through, are rather endearingly geeky. Also - and this, given my known proclivities, is possibly the bit I enjoyed the most - the alien spaceships are simply cool. However, the heart of a potentially postmodern and rather entertaining alien invasion degenerates rather limply into the usual Disney family-values clichés, which horribly undercuts the inventiveness and off-the-wall subversive possibilities in the early parts of the film. So, an improvement in terms of postmodern sensibility and wit, but in the final analysis, alas, it's business as usual, and Disney is Disney still.
* Thank the gods, Home on the Range is a Disneyfied western, rather than a Disneyfied folkloric perversion, so I felt able to ignore it. There is a limit to my dedication.
