bbartonshaw

I am a huge fan of Disney and have spent most of my life researching the history and theory behind the classic animated pictures. As someone working in the film industry, it’s my job to know the ins and outs of what a company like Disney is thinking when it comes to marketing and box office, and how it effects a film comes out black and white — but, I’m also a history buff. History and the film’s place in said history reflects the values of society at that time. Snow White, for example, was the first animated feature film in America circa 1937, the first being a German-made “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” 1926 by Lotte Reiniger. Snow White was the frontier-breaking lady whose success allowed us to enjoy some of the greatest fantasy (and even sci-fi) movies like Star Wars and Wizard of Oz, and the Disney Animation Studios worked for years during the Great Depression on making such a historical film. So, in order to save his animation studio, Walt Disney had to take some liberties and “fix-up” a Brothers Grimm fairytale to make it palatable to an audience who lived a life of hardship and strife, to make a world, and a heroine, that represented, as you said, hope and the belief that there was still good in the world despite the evil that “hunted” us all. This movie would be the template for every princess movie listed and in the Disney Vaults today. We’re seeing more of a feminist agenda, as we know it, because feminism and blatant gender equality is becoming a backbone in our literature and media. We will see more of what we want, it will take time, but someday Disney will realign with its audience and make a movie that reflects us as a people and what we want, like it had with Snow White in 1937. It will just take time.

There are days when I can’t believe how a book written nearly eighty years ago predicted how dependent we would be upon technology. Though the book wasn’t anti-nuclear, anyone reading Fahrenheit 451 could see how ashamed Bradbury was of his fellow man for never listening to the signs they heard all around. The over-head rockets, the fear, the hopelessness that naturally drew the sheep to their television shows hoping to ignore for the next hour that their world could end. I love that book, every time I reread it, there’s something new and exciting to understand.

The lack of creative integrity is really at the hands of the Disney-owned side of the Marvel Universe. It’s a shame not to mention the failures and successes of the Netflix-owned or 20th Century Fox-owned sides of the same comic books production banner. If you take example of Jessica Jones or the massive success of Deadpool, it’s easy to see how Disney is forfeiting their integrity and the reason those comic book characters were substantial originally, for a wider audience and safer ethic content when developing their tent-pole hero movies. Both Iron Man and Captain America were politically important in their comics, as was Black Widow and Bucky Barnes, Spiderman, and all of the Avengers as they were originally, but do to competitive marketing and movie rights, we will never see timeless stories onscreen as they deserve to be. Disney can’t make an Avengers movie without Wolverine, nor Spiderman. Their integrity is polluted with the legalities of sharing the Marvel brand and insisting on creating an ever-expanding world in which they’re blatantly, and rather clumsily, avoiding canon storylines and character development to get more and more money with films that are less and less satisfying.