The Unmagicking of Disney
marionteniade.substack.com
marionteniade.substack.com
Cartoons are compelling because they're a colorful, heavily abstracted and anthropomorphized, impossibly expressive worlds without the hard and fast limitations of our physical existence. If Excitebike and lazy Hanna-Barbera cartoons are your only animated escapes from the real world, classic style Disney cartoons offer arrestingly compelling visuals and stories.
But 7 year olds probably can't remember a time without Splatoon 2 and Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda Breath of The Wild and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. They've not only been watching, but have been interacting with and manipulating environments with that level of flashiness and abstraction for their entire conscious existence. While they obviously will still enjoy cartoons because they're beautiful and entertaining, they just won't impact them like they did us.
I also think this author erroneously asserts that Disney's remakes solely prey upon nostalgia. Children, not middle-aged fans of the originals, are still the primary audience for Disney movies, so that's not likely. They also assume that our generation's media hit the magic Goldilocks balance while the ones that came before us were contemptibly outdated and the ones that came after us were either superficial, or mocking useful social mores, or guilty of some other moral transgression. You might recognize this behavior from, you know, every other generation.
Kids growing up now will have a level of media sophistication few non-experts in prior generations could ever hope to match.
Same mindset applies to lots of things on HN: C vs Rust, Php vs typescript, email vs chat app.
Majority of HNers seem like they are seething that change happens and what they learnt before is the only correct choice. Best way is to appreciate and learn from the past but be still be open to new things. Being stuck ages you into obsolescence.
Wealth is built up over generations via systems that are extensible and reusable by those that come after. If we changed the standard size of screws because we thought it looked better aesthetically, we'd instantly make massive swaths of previous work unusable.
Exploratory change is needed to figure out where improvements can be found, and I generally enjoy building and working with novel technology much more than trying to interface with older systems, but there should be some sort of purpose for the change. Older systems also need a certain amount of pruning and destruction to remove accumulated cruft, so it's not like it's always best to use what's been accumulated.
The correct balance is hard. Achieving that balance requires intentional effort, not arbitrary change or arbitrary preservation, if only in some sort of testing/evaluation phase (sometimes it does make sense to just arbitrarily tweak stuff and see if it ends up working better, but you need to actually do some sort of intentional verification to see if it's worth keeping).
>Old movies are good because back in my day they just made them better. Now all they make is mass produced crap!
I think what impacts all people, regardless of age, is much less about the medium and much more about message. I disagree with the "medium is the message" idea being applied universally. Zelda Breath of the Wild has the same spirit as the Gameboy games, and the NES games. And before that, the same spirit of the games and fantasy books about knights, and forts with secret passageways made out of sticks and renaissance fairs. Super Mario Odyssey is a digital evolutions of the same kind of playgrounds and energy like jungle gyms, or tag, and running around and collecting things like hide and go seek or a scavenger hunt. Splatoon is like a soccer game, or an airsoft game, or any kind of childhood battle/skirmish game. Each of those types of games I think map to styles of play that are really, really old.
I do think there is a message in the medium, though, and that the message is "we think this game/story is important enough to convey properly that we'll invest cutting edge technology to enable the best possible experience". I think each generation actually does in fact experience the same impact when that message is received. They way it is conveyed changes, because the cutting edge changes.
You can tell when media hits that Goldilocks zone; it's not something frozen in any particular time. It moves and evolves. The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings holds up. The original Star Wars holds up. The first James Bond holds up. The Wizard of Oz holds up. Metropolis holds up. Shakespeare holds up. Etc etc. You can trace stories back eons, and the ones that convey core messages about human experience in a time/era appropriate way are an essential part of how we think of ourselves. People who feel rooted and secure in their cultural context don't find the past contemptible, they are reassured and feel connected to an evolving set of stories.
You can still see that with modern media. It will vary person to person, each cultural niche and personality type has a different Goldilocks zone preference.
I don't think variety and saturation with more different forms of expression than we could dream of is actual sophistication. In a lot of ways it's actually more difficult than I think it's ever been to really convey a compelling story in a cutting edge manner. The army of people and resources needed to make a modern movie is insane, as it is for a cutting edge video game. I think that's leading to less sophistication, because the inevitable bureaucratic behemoths that are needed to create cutting edge story telling tends to kill off a lot of the best storytellers. The best story tellers should be more discoverable than ever, but it's increasingly difficult to plug them into these incredibly expensive projects.
The general subject is remakes of old Disney movies. It's the same story in a new movie, making the message the independent variable.
Beyond that, we'd see vastly more radio programming aimed at kids if that was true. It's several orders of magnitude cheaper to create and distribute. What most people who don't work professionally in the A&E and Visual Arts fields don't realize is how much those visuals affect them. That's why they're so effective. The communicate deeply and viscerally in ways that aren't immediately obvious, but are incredibly powerful. That's why advertisers spend as much money as they do creating commercials with virtually no obvious story arc. We've already got most of the story in our heads and they're just pushing the buttons to activate it in ways that are useful to them.
> I do think there is a message in the medium, though, and that the message is "we think this game/story is important enough to convey properly that we'll invest cutting edge technology to enable the best possible experience". I think each generation actually does in fact experience the same impact when that message is received. They way it is conveyed changes, because the cutting edge changes.
The vast majority of adults don't take that much context into account when consuming media, even if they think they do... let alone children. Grandiosity is obviously a part of the message, but you just can't constrict the effects of visual communication to neatly defined categories like that.
Have you ever been listening to a song or watching video media or playing a game with someone nd they say "oh, this is my favorite part!" ... and you just don't get it? It triggers something in their brain that just doesn't connect with you. The difference between your perception of that media and theirs is the context in which it was processed-- your brain chemistry and all of your lived experiences and mood and pharmaceutical influences and thoughts and dreams and insecurities combined receive that stimuli and generate emotional responses.
> You can tell when media hits that Goldilocks zone > each cultural niche and personality type has a different Goldilocks zone preference.
You're putting things into buckets that aren't representative of the real world. Everybody can tell when media hits the Goldilocks zone because their own tastes define it. It goes far, far beyond personality types and cultural niches. Baby bear and Papa bear were likely perfectly happy with their porridge and Goldilocks liking Mama Bear's porridge didn't mean shit other than mama bear and goldilocks had narrow but overlapping heat tolerances.
I liked a lot of the 'Disney Renaissance' animated films, but most of them worked because they were animated (and could really bend reality). The hyper-real look to these remakes throws them straight into uncanny valley, and any additions to the new films tend to be (as the OP article states) pretty mediocre in quality.
It seems like a plausible explanation for some of the media controversy. But I can also believe that the fuss isn't organized by the studios or perhaps by anyone at all.
A large majority of people are just locked into processes of the mega machine without having any say into what the output is.
So when someone does this stand up routine or makes a speech, which happens regularly, all you get is pin drop silence.
Once these money printing processes start up the chimp troupe looses control over them. And its happening faster and faster.
Some ppl still believe we are on a ship where if you cry loud enough the captain gets moved to change heading.
But corporations don't resemble ships anymore. They resemble hurricanes. The reason for the pin drop silence is no one can change the heading.
So the only worthwhile thing to do, if you have a choice, is to go work on something controllable. Or break the machine.
“ There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop!“
Or go find value in something else in the world besides your job. I work on a big team that's a small part of a big product that's a small part of a big company. My work is in Java, not the latest hot frameworks. It doesn't involve machine learning or any buzzwords (though we get asked at least once a year to consider a hackathon on how we could try to shove some machine learning in there to do......well, that's for me to figure out). If I make the most catastrophic screwup I can, I won't move company revenues by anything close to a percentage point. If I am the biggest success I could possibly be and motivated my immediate teammates to be their best selves as well we would not increase corporate revenues by anything close to a percentage point. So we do fine work, and at 5PM I go home.
.....and I love it. I have friends, and hobbies. I ride my bicycle without worrying about having to be on-call every other week, I go to experiences, I come home and spend time with my family. And you know what? My bonus target and salary band are the same as a bunch of people working crazy hours doing "worthwhile" things in divisions that have higher stakes. They're dramatically higher than most of my friends at startups working long hours trying to "change the world" right until their company goes broke or (best case) gets acquired making the founders rich and leaving all other option-holders underwater.
So you tell me which of us has the job that's worth doing.
Frozen, which had an inferior story and even score, also had that quality.
The live action remakes have no soul and are forgotten as soon as they're over.
Like many people you fell in love with some aspects of the presentation and music, but the film doesn't hold up and that's why it's going to be a sad, forgotten entry in Disney history.
If you rewatch Encanto and think about royalty, think about Ferdinand Marcos, think about how poor everybody else in this town is and how they jumped to rebuild the house of the richest, most privileged people, you may find you like the movie less.
If you look again at Bruno's strange arc and how weak his predictions are, how little justification there is for exiling him, you might see that every plot development happens because it's time for a plot development now.
Encanto was written backwards, reverse-engineered from successful stories. It is not art. It is garbage imitating art with a thick layer of lyrical frosting on top.
Coco will live forever because it's well-written and means something. Encanto is a direct-to-DVD level production.
As an aside, I noticed a couple days ago that in the live-action Lion King, the person voicing Simba sings, "everywhere you look, I'm standing in the spotlight" in place of just "I'm standing spotlight" in the older version, which is almost a metaphor for the differences since that little verbal error in the animated version feels more humanistic
I just picked up Cyberpunk 2077 half price on steam and I’m really enjoying it. But I remember when it came out there was an endless stream of hate and complaining. So I just step back, let the dust settle and the rough edges get polished out and then enjoy it later for what it is and not what I read on reddit or HN.
Disney (classic Disney-Princess-Disney, excluding Pixar, Marvel, and all the "properties" they've acquired over the years) has made a great movie once every 3-8 years for the past few decades. In between, they've always made utter garbage to squeeze every dollar out of the great ones. Almost every Disney sequel has been a turd. Doesn't anyone remember how disappointing it was? This is just more of the same.
They're still making good ones: Frozen, Moana, Encanto. Just watch those and pretend the rest doesn't exist.
This great advice whenever a piece of media is making you angry. We’re probably justified in being angry at these soulless assembly line remakes, but spending your time and energy complaining does no one any good.
But let’s not forget the movie that was right after The Matrix but also much better: Equilibrium
Will check it out next Movie night.
Probably the most objective way to view this is to actually look at the list of films from any given decade and see how many flops they had [1]. There's a bias at play here: the only movies we remember Disney making a decade+ ago are the hits. We don't often remember the misses.
Apparently Disney's "Renaissance" ended with Tarzan in 1999; but here are a list of movies that have come out since the end of this golden era:
- Monsters, Inc.
- Lilo and Stitch
- Treasure Planet (a personal favorite)
- Finding Nemo
- Pirates of the Caribbean
- The Incredibles
- Ratatouille
- WALL-E
- Up
- Tangled
- Brave
- Wreck-It Ralph
- Frozen
- Inside Out
- Encanto
I'm sure there's many great ones that you might love that I'm missing. But I'd say this lineup is potentially better than the list of movies spanning The Little Mermaid to Tarzan. To the author's credit, I will say there's part of me that's nostalgic for the traditional style of 2d character animation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Pictures_f...
Disneytoons movies only cost about $15M to make and usually made over $100M.
Dumbo (2019) was not a Disneytoons movie. It cost $170 million to make. The problem Disney now faces is that classic low-end animation won't sell, and photorealistic with live action is very expensive to produce. So they now lack a low-end product line.
The same could be said for most of their works.
I’m low-key disappointed they said “Ant-Mans” and not “Ants-Man”, though. ;)
Hooked
I sure hope this is a reference to a specific movie. I'd love to watch it.
However in recent years they actually did have a couple of truly wonderful titles. Luca and Soul are pretty good, and Coco is really one of the best Pixar movies. So perhaps not all hope is lost.