Web Video / Paint

aka: Jon Cozart

You'll never see your favorite Disney characters in the same way again.

If you ever wondered why
Disney tales all end in lies
Here's what happened after
All their dreams came true...

Jon Cozart is an American film grad and YouTube celebrity via his channel "Paint". He is best known for creating the viral music video "After Ever After" and its sequels, which won acclaim for their dark parodies of Disney's Happily Ever After endings. Cozart's gimmick is recording himself in multiple parts and editing them together to create self-duets or self-quartets.

WARNING: The trope list below spoils the videos, and the videos themselves spoil the endings of the films (both literally and figuratively). You have been warned.

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Examples of tropes in "Paint" videos:

• A cappella: Most of Cozart's music videos are sung without instruments; his self-backing tracks include the melodies as well as the lyrics.
• Adaptational Gender Identity: In the "After Ever After" continuity, Mulan has a gender crisis and transitions to become an actual man.
• Anti-Hero: In "After Ever After," Pocahontas starts murdering the colonists — rather violently, at that. But when you consider how appallingly the Natives were treated by the settlers (both in the video and in real life), it's hard not to take her side.
• Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better: Jon and Thomas Sanders did a version of this as a song pitting YouTube against Vine.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: The townsfolk in Belle's village appear to believe this, as they burn her at the stake for her assumed relationship with Beast.
• Boy Band: "Boy Brand" parodies the phenomenon by riffing on its hyper-commercialization and the decline of the bands once they reach adulthood.
• Dark Parody:
  • "After Ever After" involves Disney characters singing about bad stuff which happened after the end of the movie. It highlights real-world problems such as Simba's pride dying.
  • Their parody of boy bands such as N Sync, One Direction, Jonas Brothers, and Backstreet Boys sings about bad stuff the bands went through in real life.
• Downer Ending: The "After Ever After" series changes Disney's happy endings into downers by setting them in the real world. All except for Mulan, of course, who is happy after his transition, but feels bad when he realizes how awful the others have it.
• Fangirl: According to "Boy Brand", being a member of One Direction is rough on your love life, as anyone you date gets assaulted by jealous fans.
  A horde of girls threw my date down an empty well / After they threatened to drown me in styling gel
• Formula-Breaking Episode: "After Ever After 3" not only lays off the Disney Princesses for a bit by hitting just males, but retreads on a past target by doing Aladdin after the first one had Jasmine, leading to some Continuity Snarl.
• "Gaining Confidence" Song: "An Awkward Duet,", his collab with doddleoddle, is Exactly What It Says on the Tin- an awkward, uncomfortable duet between two nervous singers, singing about how nervous they are to sing. Toward the end, they start to get into the song and proudly claim that they both sound pretty good...until Dodie goes for a bold, unscripted bit that stops Jon's singing. The duet returns to being awkward as a result.
• Gender Flip: "After Ever After 3" focuses on Disney princes/male leads as opposed to Disney princesses.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Elsa becomes a real evil queen, takes over the world, and puts the survivors in concentration camps to stop the destruction of the environment.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: Implied to be the main source of Hercules' conflict in "After Ever After 3", as the Christianization of the Mediterranean world such as Ancient Greece would have deprived Herc and his fellow ancient Greek deities of their traditional base of followers.
• Happy Ending Override: According to Cozart, Disney fairy tales are set in a world completely unlike our own, where happy endings are not only possible but expected. He wanted to call this out.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: Peter Pan has been stuck like this for 80 years, and as consequence, Really Gets Around.
• Mistaken for Insane: In the second "After Ever After", Cinderella tells the prince all about her Fairy Godmother's magic and how she made it to the ball... and he promptly throws her into the literal Bedlam House.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Elsa's march to take over the world intentionally invokes Nazi Germany in imagery and lyrics.
  Let it snow, let it snow / I hope you concentrate in camp (Heil Elsa!)
• Now, Buy the Merchandise: "Boy Brand"'s One Direction segment ends with a command to go buy the band's... stuff.
• The Oner: Cozart records each part of his songs in a single take and then edits them together.
• Parody: Cozart's parody songs use the original melodies but his own lyrics.
  • "After Ever After" and "After Ever After 2" are parodies of Happily Ever After endings in the Disney franchise.
  • "Boy Brand" is a parody of Boy Bands and their eventual descent into mid-life crisis — except for One Direction, which is about their manufactured teen appeal.
  • "Progressive Christmas Carols" 'modernizes' famous Christmas songs by changing them to deliver faux-progressive messages.
• People Puppets: "Boy Brand" parodies "No Strings Attached" by having Cozart and Hollens act as if they were being controlled by strings.
• Refuge in Audacity: Part of the appeal of "After Ever After" is that nobody expects Disney films to be given such a dark, sarcastic treatment. Cozart milks this for all it's worth.
• Self-Backing Vocalist: Cozart sings all his parts a cappella in one take each, then edits them into a single song with the parts arranged side by side.
• Send in the Clones: According to "Boy Brand", One Direction was grown from cloned cells by soulless corporate marketers.
• Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion:
  • In "After Ever After 2", Cozart dodges the obvious rhyme for Mulan's sex change operation.
    I sank like a brick / Prince thinks I'm sick / Ice is melting quick / Now I have a... lot of self esteem
  • In "Boy Brand", the One Direction part almost ends with a curse before being shushed.
    We all know we're beautiful / That's what makes you buy our shhhhhh...
• Take Over the World: Elsa creates a horde of evil snowmen to conquer the Earth in order to stop global warming.
• Take That!:
  • Jasmine calls Bush and Obama "crazy" and "lazy" in her song, respectively.
  • Belle laments that PETA's going to take her Beast away.
  • All four of the singers at the end of After Ever After 3 shout "Screw Trump!", in reference to Aladdin's last song about refugees.
• Target Audience: According to "Boy Brand", Backstreet Boys' current demographic is Your Mom: middle-aged housewives desperately trying to recapture the ardor of their youth by worshiping a group of aging has-beens.
• Terminally-Ill Criminal: In the first "After Ever After" song, Pocahontas talks about her tribe being abused by the colonists through genocide, rape, slavery, and exile. She takes it upon herself to start fighting back and slaughtering the foreign men by the dozens, ending her verse with "I can murder if I please, 'cuz I'm dying of disease". Later, she mentions having STDs.
• Wrongfully Committed: In the second "After Ever After", Cinderella gets sent to the literal Bedlam House by the Prince after telling him the story of where she got her clothes and carriage. The rest of her segment involves her being tortured by doctors who tell her she's insane, and whom she compares to Satan.

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