Am I the only one on this forum who likes “disneyfied” things. I don’t like how they equate “family friendly” to mean no queer and little minority represenatation(AND GUESS WHAT ELSE IS BAD WITH THAT) but I don’t think making hopeful adaptions of storybooks and fairytales(which again is nothing new and tons of fairytales are even more sickeningly sweet than the Disney movies, it gets very broad) is a bad thing at all. I think we kind of need more hope?
We need to be not afraid to address darker themes but not let them consume us and convince that we’re operating on a new, more mature and REAL level of reality because we’ve accepted all these bleak, grown up things and oooh drugs and oooh sex and oooh gang violence and oooh drive by shootings and because these things exist and you accept they exist you’re on the highest more realist level of reality and there’s no going back or telling a hopeful story in spite of all this crap despite the fact that there are real people in the world every day that have to live with that and many of them still end up having happy stories, and a lot more could if we didn’t convince ourselves this was the natural state of things. I am transgender, I know these things. We go to some dark places. Many of us don’t come back – but a lot of us do.
Like some really dark stuff happens in OUAT, and even in Wicked to an extent(though it’s more undertones in a lot of cases, alluding to but not mentioning stuff from the book) but it doesn’t act like simply showing dark things means that’s all there is and we can never overcome it, as I think that’s a crappy narrative we’ve had far too much of in TV especially with people selling shows like Breaking Bad as high art – not simply because it’s a good show but because it deals with gritty real issues and that makes it better, because it’s bleaker, darker and more depressing.
That’s not what art is, it’s not what entertainment is and a lot of people forget this stuff unfortunately.
One of my favourite other modern fairytale adaptions is Princess Tutu where more or less the point of series is to fight against the author that fetishises tragedy and hopeless endings. Aside from the fact that Drosselmeyer would make an AWESOME Once Villain(who built the clockwork stuff in the clocktower/library?) I really liked that approach, because Team Bleak tend to like to think they’re on the top level of reality and maturity and don’t need to be put in any sort of place ever because dark stuff is more mature and anyone who has a problem with it is obviously 12.
There’s nothing wrong with stories with sad endings and they can be beautiful and artistic, but not INHERENTLY more so. I understand we do tend to get a lot of Hollywood […] that’s endlessly sugarcoated, but those are generally empty movies. When people try to do something seriously good or artistic, they tend to make something dark with no real hope of a positive ending and we need to stop pushing this false dichotomy. Though a sort of third option, Bittersweet endings are pretty much the norm in japanese animation too, and it gets fatiguing too(generally because they err on the side of bitter).
Whereas I can look at something like Frozen or Princess and the Frog, still see it’s beautiful, still see others consider them to be beautiful even though they don’t go down that road.
So screw people complaining about “Disneyfication”. Disney has a whole load of problems but selling hopeful narratives is not one of them.
I don't cause commotions, I am one.