disney movies – ey i'm blogging here

Was expecting this to be bad, was not expecting this to be this tragically prequel-brained.

I do try not to fall into the same old conversation about these “live-action” Disney remakes and their followups, right, but, like, fuck, man. Consistently they’re worse, duller versions of all-time classics that cost all the money in the world to make and have nothing to say.

What does the director of Moonlight think his take on this world is? What does Barry Jenkins think he’s adding to the history of these stories?

Sigh. What’s good about this one is what’s always good about these, what’s bad about this one is what’s always bad about these.

But like. As an artist, I try not to ask art to justify itself — art inherently has value just for being made, just for you having made it — but when it costs half a quarter billion dollars to make, I don’t think it’s unfair to ask it to have a reason to exist.

Though I suppose at half a quarter billion dollars, from this company, it can’t afford to have something to say because it needs to appeal to literally everyone and their cat to be worth making… So imagine if it actually had something to say. The thought is genuinely unfathomable.

Any time Timon and Pumbaa aren’t on screen having a fight for their lives with the fourth wall, I’m sat here asking, where are Timon and Pumbaa?

Since Disney didn’t fucking bother making 2024’s Mufasa: The Lion King a new movie, either, my review is entirely compiled of bits from my previous reviews of modern Disney remakes. Also on Letterboxd.

Also posted as a review on Letterboxd, derived from a thread on Mastodon.

Never got around to the sequel, thought I’d go for a refresher on this one first.

Their respective games’ fellow characters are bigoted towards Ralph and Vanellope in essentially the same ways — total social exclusion through rigid enforcement of arbitrary rules designed to exclude them — but for different reasons.

Where Ralph’s exclusion is because he’s “the bad guy” who wants to be let into “good guy” spaces, approaching almost a faux “trans predator” thing, this idea that no matter what, in the ideas of Gene and the others he’s always gonna be pretending,

Vanellope is excluded because she has a disability, her “glitch,” when confronted she calls it “pixlexia,” the other racers’ mockery resembles common mockery of physical and learning disabilities, her peers make no effort to try to understand.

Felix, in this read, is the well-meaning cis liberal, the guy who on paper is totally fine with Ralph, but can’t bring himself to prioritise Ralph’s well-being over his own status because doing so would endanger his “hero privilege,” a limitation he only overcomes by figuring out a way to make himself the lead character of part of the story.

Unfortunately in the end Ralph and Vanellope’s conflicts are overcome not because Gene and the other penthousers learn to accept and love Ralph for who he is instead of who he was written to be, but because he “earns his medal” by saving the day, literally just trans exceptionalism, and not because reasonable accommodations are made to help Vanellope thrive but because her glitch is essentially brought under control, her disability “medicated,” the thing that made her unique transformed into something nobody finds too uncomfortable.

I realise 2012 is a different country, but there is simply no goddamn way anybody like me — trans, autistic — was involved in the production of this fucking movie.

We will never be able to look to Disney and truly see ourselves, it’s just never gonna happen.

Anyway, fun video game movie. Cute aesthetic, the fictional games fit right in with the real-world ones. Kinda proves these things can work as a movie in a way nobody has quite managed to do since. I say, actively not looking at the Mario movie.

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Tag: disney movies

Movie Review: “Mufasa: The Lion King” (2024)

Analysis: “Wreck-It Ralph” (2012)