Starting with Lion King (LK) to Lilo & Stitch, are the plots a little too deep for kids in places? OK, maybe not all Disney movies since LK, but what do you say about the following two?
a) Lion King’s somber plot borrowed from Hamlet?
b) The psychoanalysis of Lilo?
Couldn’t Disney water down these story lines somewhat?
Disney’s been trying to target older demographics with some of their animated features. They actually seem to be taking a two-tiered approach to it:
There are the theatrical releases that have been animated by Disney’s Feature Animation wing, and those are the one’s that are typically targeted at the pre-teen/early-teen market
The other category are the ones that are animated by Disney’s Televison Animation wing, which are aimed at the demograpic that Disney Animation is more traditionally associated with. This second category includes such movies as Return to Neverland, and The Tigger Movie.
Many of the theatrical releases in this second category were originally planned for direct to video release, but have been moved to the big screen when Disney found that they can actually get parents to buy tickets to them.
The films animated by Disney Television are typically cheaper for the company to produce, because unlike the feature animation wing, they’re not trying to push the envelope of animation technology. They’re usually shorter too, some little over an hour.
Ripped off from Hamlet is the way I would put it. Disney does love the public domain. I was amused at the time that all the attention was on the ‘borrowing’ from Kimba, and no one really commented on the rather obvious Hamlet connection. Not that Shakespeare was Captain Original in any case.
Can’t really comment about Lilo, haven’t seen it. I stopped watching the new Disney stuff when I escaped from Blockbuster.
I recently showed “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” to a group of kids…I never watched a recent Disney movie before…and liked it - but the kids were bored after 10 minutes and only paid attention during the festival scene (the part with cartoon humor). It wasn’t much of a “kid’s movie” I suppose.
Then a week later, I saw “Beauty and the Beast”, which seemed to be the same story as “Hunchback”…- that was disappointing. Does every Disney story has the same archetypes (beautiful heroine, handsome hero, kind but ugly anti-hero, utterly hissable villain, an animal sidekick, and two or three normally inanimate object tag-a-longs.)
Is there any Disney movie without that?
That’s like asking if there’s a Bond movie that doesn’t have a ‘Good’ Bond-Girl, a ‘Bad’-Bond girl and the car-chase sequence at about 45-60 minutes into it.
It’s their formula. Though you forgot the part about the protaginist being an orphan.
I’m convinced that they did Hunchback just so they could do the scene where Quasimodo saves Esmeralda from the stake, and staves off the Parisians from the top of the Cathedral. Those computer-generated scenes were so gorgeous they brought tears to my eyes. You can see the attraction of a lot of the rest of the story – misshapen hero with heart of gold, funny gargoyles, etc. They either didn’t think about the downright dark and scary stuff about Claude Frollo lusting after Esmeralda, or thought it wouldn’t matter.
As for The Lion King – yeah, it seems like they lifted from Kimba the White Lion (even Kimba’s creator thought so) and from Hamlet. But not one person, and certainly no reviewer, seems to have noticed the heavy lifting from Henry IV – what is Simba but Prince Hal with a couple of Falstaffian companions that he eventually outgrows (although, this being Disney, he doesn’t really outgrow them – they’re needed for comic relief)?
Some of the recent Disney movies have been getting away from the standard setup of The Little Mermaid, et al. Most notably, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and The Emperor’s New Groove. The former is a pretty serious drama (and not at all a musical), while the latter is an all-out comedy, with only one in-movie song. Neither of these really follw the Disney formula, and they (along with Fantasia 2000) represent some of the best work Disney has done for some time.
Agreed. Treasure Planet is the most recent example, other than the Johnny Resnick song halfway through, the soundtrack is primarily instrumental.
I wonder if since the Motion Picture Academy split the Best Song Oscar into two categories, a move some say was precipitated by Disney’s dominance in the category for so many years, if Disney just stopped trying.
Honestly, the one thing about the Disney Formula that gets to me is this: every animated Disney movie contains (1) a main character who doesn’t belong, (2) a wacky sidekick, and (3) a villain who dies by falling.
I think the best movies are the ones with Glen Keane’s name on it. His work on Tarzan was stunning, and you can’t really complain about anything else he’s animated.
Disney has some excellent “drama” movies (most notably Tarzan and Hunchback), but they can easily ruin it by trying to add the “fun” characters or sequences to otherwise serious and brilliant work (I always fast forward through the gargoyle song when I watch Hunchback).
Still, I think some of their best stuff is also when they just actually try to make comedy. Hercules and New Groove are among my favorites b/c it’s obvious the people there just let go and had a good time. New Groove was a project that all just fell apart. As impressive as Deep Canvas was in 1999, NG has no special effects to speak of and is still quality work. One of their best. When Disney is funny, Disney is FUNNY.
I’ve always felt that The Lion King borrowed from Bambi.
Film starts with all the aninmals of the forrest/jungle gatering for the birth/baptism of the new prince.
Wise Owl or Babboon runs that show.
Has two friends, one funny one stinky Thumper and Flower, Timone and Pumba
Has close relationship with one parent and that parent dies.
Suddenly turns into adult.
Has sex with childhood sweetheart to worst musical number in the film.
Then there is big fire/ fight (actually Bambi fights another stag to get to boff his girlfriend, it’s a beautifully animated sequence)
he becomes just like dad at the birth of his kid.
So some people think that Bambi losing his mother and the fire are too much for kids. Or maybe Pinocchio turning into a donkey or a step mother ordering the murder of her child in Snow White was a bit much. The serious side has always been there and when it’s lacking the movie suffers. Aristocats anyone?
Jinx, Disney made its name doing classic fairy tales and all fairy tales have darkness, evil, and fear in them. That darkness, paired with love, light, and happiness, appeals to the whole range of human emotions. It’s what makes the stories resonate in the imagination, and it’s why they endure.
Kids need to be exposed to these emotions in safe ways like stories. It helps them learn to deal with the fears and worries that are part of life without anything bad actually happening to them.
If anything, I’m far more likely to be offended by Disney trying to cutesify and sugar-coat an adult story than by them leaving the darker stuff in. I never watched Hunchback because I couldn’t imagine them not utterly ruining the story by making it a shiny happy kiddy movie.
Having never read the book, but having seen “adult” versions of HOND and the Disney version. I can say that aside from the talking gargoyles theres not a lot of difference. Disney even allows the Cardinal to be a bit of a lech towards Esmerelda. (The main difference here being that Disney will not allow any good guy deaths…)
On a sidenote-- I’m glad somebody else liked the Emporers New Groove… I thought it was fantastic.
That and Disney, who’d already pissed off the Catholic church for an earlier movie (Monsignor[?]) or two, changed the lecherous religious figure Claude Frollo into a Judge instead.
I think it’s a good strategy on Disney’s part. They’ve adopted a formula that was first fine-tuned by the old Warner Brothers cartoons; make it flashy for the kids, and make it funny for the adults.
See, little kids will laugh at anything; they pick up their emotional cues from the visuals and the sountrack, and enjoy the colors and the motion on the screen. Please see the Teletubbies for an example. If these are the only other merits to the film, the adults who buy the tickets will be miserable.
If, however, you target a good percentage of the jokes at the adult level, as well as making sure the movie has an overriding theme that appeals to both age levels, you have a movie that kids will drag their parents to, without the parents objecting too much.
In the case of Lilo and Stitch, and Stitch’s aberrant behavior, it takes a mature outlook to see that her bizarre outlook is a product of the tragic loss of her parents; a little kid will probably just see her as a quirky little girl. The depths are never dwelled upon, just outlined. For instance, the one sentence in which Lilo refers to her parents’ death: “It was raining, and they went for a drive.” It’s unlikely that a kid under eight would catch the full repercussions of that statement.
Kid-safe, but with adult appeal. I’d say that the formula works.
And if you haven’t seen Lilo and Stitch, go get the DVD immediately. It’s astonishingly funny, and charming, and odd.
If you have seen it in the theatres, get the DVD, if only for Stitch’s bedtime story.
I was at the drug store and they were playing the movie, trying to sell it. I saw a bit of the opening (?) where Stitch makes his escape. The alien captain asks for information on Earth. Another alien hands him an old ViewMaster full of stills from old Disney cartoons. And the second alien was a cyclops! (you need two eyes to get the 3-D effect of a ViewMaster, see…)
Now I wish I had seen the darn thing at the theatre. That sequence was funny and clever for kids and adults.
I find it ironic that without much hype from the studio, Lilo and Stitch did very very well in the box office, while Treasure Panet, which had lots of hype, is bombing.
The L.A. Times recently had an article on Planet which said that the director/writers Clements and Musker were so devastated by the film’s poor showing, they didn’t want to talk to the journalist.
It’s not every day two guys make the biggest bomb in the history of Disney animation.
I don’t know if it’s bombing…reports I heard placed it in the Top 5. Maybe this is low compared to how other (esp. recent) Disney movies fared on the opening weekend? Not sure. If it falls out the top 5 next weekend, then I’d agree… I think it’s too early to say.
{Also, I should add, dollars from ticket sales are meaningless figures. They never adjust for inflation when drawing comparisons, and ticket prices are not constant at all theatres at any one time, etc. The TRUE measure of a movie’s poularity would be volume of tickets sold, not the dollar value alone.}
Several posts refer to Disney’s “formula”. But, what about 101 Dalmations? Fox and the Hound? Jungle Book? I’m sure there are others, if I give it more thought. - Jinx
The point regarding its bombing is substantiated by Disney restating its projected earnings based solely on the low reciepts from its opening week. The film opened way below projections and there is no sign that its going to get any better.
Two links of interest regarding:Box Office Prophets Analyis of 12/6-12/8 Weekend
TP is about 2/3s of the way down.
And:
Regardless of its presence in the top ten, its gross to date in relation to its budget pretty much earn it the description “bomb”. It could work its way out, but I doubt it at this point.