inspired by the above video, i was discussing the issue with my partner last week and they said something even more succinct: Disney films outside the Mickey-verse have always been about nostalgia. fairy tales from centuries ago, retold and repackaged, suffused with the agenda of conservative beauty and family values, and marketed to children.
fuckinā yikes, basically, but iāll confess i too am a sucker for a cute princess dress. blame that on the 90s renaissance and that sweet sweet yellow belle gown.
anyway. i know itās incredibly reductive of me to say āoriginality is deadā, but thatās clickbait for ya. of course itās dead, itās been buried for decades, and thatās absolutely fine and not directly disneyās fault. thereās a difference though, between common story arcs, character archetypes, and tropes (as in, no matter what story you want to tell, chances are the surface elements have been done before), and just straight up remaking the same 10 things over, and over, and over again. itās why Disneyās last announcement of a bajillion Marvel and Star Wars things, on top of their pre-planned live-action remakes of their animated classics, had me rolling my eyes into the back of my skull. iām justā¦ā¦ tired of this samey stuff. i see and read all the incredible, and original, new science-fiction and fantasy coming out every year and i know, for a fact, there are so many cool stories being told, that would look amazing on the big screen (or the little one, for however long we need, because plague.)
to tell the truth, iām extra bitter in the wake of Disney firing everyone at the Fox-owned Blue Sky studio, and by consequence axing the upcoming
nimona, based on noelle stevensonās long-running webcomic (yes, noelle stevenson of
she-ra fame). iāve been reading
nimona on and off since 2012, when stevenson went viral with their
thor tumblr comics.
based on stevensonās own tweets, it was shaping up to be incredible. and now weāll never get to see itābut donāt worry! theyāre making a new cruella movie! even though we already have two of them!! and glenn close was pretty darn good!!
i donāt have a closing paragraph except a tired sigh. disneyās gonna disney, as they have for decades, and now that they own such a big piece of the entertainment pie, everything under their umbrella will be subsumed by the nostalgia monster. everything is the past. the future is dead. the present, even more so. i hate it, but thatās the way it is. i donāt expect theyāll change that tune any time soon.
the only way out is to write and make new stuff (the indie way, by the looks of things), and try not to be too cynical as the wheel of disney keeps on turning, paving through the media landscapeāwhile
not paying its authorsāand making every story weāve ever loved into a big flat nothing.
there, thatās a good closing paragraph. better get back to writing, eh?