Does Disney have an identity in this current generation?

As for the original question. I agree that the Disney Princess line has handicapped Disney into appealing their fairytale movies to girls while making their non-fairytale movies more gender neutral. Limited what they can do as a company and skews opinion of them.

Exactly. The more gender neutral movies they make(King of the Elves, Big Hero 6) is more of a positive direction than princess/fairytale. Heck, Mulan should be more in the gender neutral territory but the princess market keeps on pushing that movie in the princess department to my hatred(just like The Black Cauldron).

While K Ing of Elves is pretty gender equal. Big Hero Six is a little more boys club-ish. Re-in forcing the sort of Girl-Show Ghetto hampering the House of Mouse.

I like it when Disney doesn't make Princess fairy tales. ... the bad news is, those other movies are aimed at boys instead, so they're STILL pigeonholed into a gender!

I like the Princess tales...I just think it's a mistake to marked them for girls so strongly. I think a lot of boys used to enjoy them, too, but now it's considered uncool to like them.

Not the movie. Just the character. The Disney Princess product line has completely overshadowed the films themselves at this point. Which is pretty terrible, because for the most part they are excellent films from an artistic standpoint, and most of the leading ladies are far more interesting characters than the simpering waifs depicted on the packaging and sold as fashion dolls.

Remember the recent debacle over the re-design of Merida when she was added to the Princess line? The main complaint was along the lines of "We finally get a tomboyish, independent princess, and you go and do this to her???" All I could think was "Finally? What do you mean, finally? Did you forget about all her tough-minded predecessors? About Belle, who rejected the script her culture laid out for her life? About Jasmine, who demanded the right to choose her own husband? About Pocahontas, who dove off cliffs and acted as a diplomat between warring peoples? About Mulan, the warrior who was uncomfortable in frilly dresses? About Tiana, who worked for her personal ambition despite naysayers telling her she'd never make it? About Rapunzel, who ventured into the immense unknown outside her tiny world in order to find out things she'd always wondered about?"

And the answer is that yes, they did forget, because Disney successfully obscured the individuality of those characters and assimilated them into the Ballgown Borg Collective. They keep having to reinvent the wheel with their female protagonists because they keep going back and turning them into clones of each other.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/07/06/the-mouse-eats-itself/

Word! The whole Merida discussion bothered me to no end (As did the mindset behind brave). There is nothing wrong with the movies, quite the opposite, I consider Sleeping Beauty as one of the most feminist and artistic movie ever made, Beauty and the Beast is still the only animated movie which got nominated for a best movie academy award before they raised the number of possible nomination, Snow White will always be "the one which started it all", and most of them are the best Disney has to offer. But the whole sparkly line-up just overshadows this. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind them wearing nice dresses, but I really mind them wearing ONLY nice dresses and never what is more typical for them, I mind them staring in idiotic books about tea parties and proper manners, and don't get me started on the new "palace pets" they added.

I think the problem facing the AAA Video Game market is a similar one facing Disney. Not the same, similar.

The recent Tomb Raider reboot sold 6 million copies, and Squareenix considers it a failure (Of course, this was more due to production cost bloating, but still) many games would kill to sell 6 mil copies. Similarly, Disney seems to consider 2D animation bunk, but they would have loved TPAF box office numbers to years earlier.

And for some reason, Disney never fires its marketing section making all the bad decisions with release dates and advertising (The golden Brand Loyalty horse stopped being rideable ages ago).

edited 9th Jul '13 8:27:32 PM by PippingFool

To tell you the truth, I love all of Disney's films. Not just black Cauldron and Home on the Range. I don't even care for the merchandise pulling the humanity out of the films because I go for the movies due to character and good writing. Same with Cars 1 and 2(shame they couldn't call it Route 66). Unfortunately, people feel that what makes a franchise work is the merchandise nowadays. That's why the show Generator Rex was stopped from continuing on. It's sad thinking about what the effort people put into these stories and the executives think not of them but of the 'demographics'.

Most truthful fact ever. That's why most shows most people enjoy that have an independent touch that everyone enjoys gets canceled near the middle of it's run. R.I.P Sym-bionic titan. But, this is Disney, sooo...

Should be talking about Disney, but let me add one more example:

Freakazoid! .

Freakazoid was suppose to have merchandise?

Not exactly merchandise(though they poke fun at that in-show), it's more Executive Meddling. Due to the fact that it didn't follow what executive had in mind for children, they kept screwing up with the time slot so it could be taken off the air.

edited 9th Jul '13 6:52:49 PM by minespatch

Or, in other words, it didn't pull in the demographic the execs wanted, so it was canned.

Do execs realize that one decision affects the lives of thousands?

They don't care unless it's hundreds of thousands or more. A Million Is a Statistic, but the statistics are all they care about.

Jim Sterling did a episode on this problem.

Honestly, in this Lasseter-Era, I think Disney is still trying to find it's new niche. Dreamworks has sort of overtaken them in the "All Animation Is Disney" department (i.e. there still being animation that attempts to imitate the Shrek formula).

Given how Frozen looks, I think Tangled is becoming the Codifier for the new era of Disney like how The Little Mermaid was 25 years ago.

edited 11th Jul '13 8:11:02 PM by Lionheart0

Oh boy, I hope that isn't the case when King Of The Elves and Big Hero 6 come around.

I'd say King of Elves stands a chance. But then again, it's in development so who's to say?

I remembered the original plan before Princess and the Frog disappointed was to alternate between CGI and Traditional Animation, but I honestly wouldn't mind if they were to alternate between "Tangled-style" and "Wreck-it-Ralph" styled movies.

edited 11th Jul '13 8:13:26 PM by Lionheart0

There needs to be more films like Wreck-it Ralph. Films where gender isn't the focus but existential journeys and how people use their weaknesses as power.

I wonder what it would be like if Alejandro Jodorowsky directed a Disney movie?

edited 11th Jul '13 10:07:57 PM by minespatch

It's not like the DP movies are the only thing Disney does. Never was. They like to revert back to them whenever they need a hit, and since they usually provide a hit, those are the movies which are remembered the most. But they always did other kind of movies, too, especially in recent years. Lilo and Stitch was about Family, Treasure Planet was about a teenager growing up and finding himself, Home one the Range, weather you like it or not, was about three middle-aged female protagonists going on an adventure.

Some character designs may have been too similar but WDAS would have been extremely silly not to incorporate Tangled's aesthetic style into Frozen, considering the former is one of the most beautiful animated films ever made.

By the way, King of the Elves has been shelved indefinitely. WDAS's current slate looks like this:

Frozen (2013, Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee) - based on fairy tale

Big Hero 6 (2014, Don Hall) - based on obscure Marvel comic

Zootopia (2016, Bryon Howard) - featuring animals, main character is apparently a fox, Jason Bateman voicing a character

Giants (2016, Nathan Greno) - possible adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk, either way it looks like a fairy tale of sorts

Moana (2018, Ron Clements, John Musker)- featuring Polynesian culture, apparently a hybrid of CG and traditional animation

Untitled film (2018, Dean Wellin) - set in space

Looks like no sequels until at least 2018, which is a relief, considering that Lasseter has allowed Pixar to make so many.

And yes, princess films or even fairy tale adaptations have always been a minority. Of 53 films, the only fairy tale adaptations are Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, TPATF, Tangled and Frozen. Even then, I don't really consider Aladdin a fairy tale and The Princess and the Frog is more of a deconstruction of one, it features the fairy tale in universe after all. At most, there are 9/53 films based on fairy tales. Not all of them feature princesses either, Cinderella, Belle and Tiana are decidedly not princesses for the majority of the film. The common perception that WDAS is all about princesses is mostly driven by marketing.

"There needs to be more films like Wreck-it Ralph. Films where gender isn't the focus but existential journeys and how people use their weaknesses as power."

How has gender been the focus on other recent WDAS films. Princesses or not, the films do feature unique themes of their own.

edited 13th Jul '13 12:06:56 AM by qindarka

Well, they do think about a sequel to Wreck-it-Ralph, apparently...but when they come up with a good story, I wouldn't mind. This is one of the few movies, for which a sequel would make sense...and if you ignore the cheapquels, their track record for sequels is actually not that bad. Fantasia 2000 was not perfect but made sense, Rescuers down under was a little bit too much of an action flick but made sense.