Disney's Strange World

I don't know that being a famous Disney ride would really contribute to the success of Pirates of the Carribean.On the one hand, most of the movie-going public has likely never been to any of the Disney parks. On the other, being based on an attraction didn't help Country Bears or the Eddie Murphy Haunted Mansion.

Pirates of the Carribean was a good adventure movie. Most of Disney's other forays into that area, while many are interesting and have good points, were not, particularly. I enjoyed The Black Cauldron, but it's not a great movie. Tron, while visually interesting, is kinda boring.

I think in the case of Treasure Planet and Atlantis, Disney made the mistake of making them too "Disney." Even allowing for the wildly different setting, the characters in Treasure Planet had that rounded, large-eyed Disney look with which we're all familiar. The color palette is familiar, as is the set design. I mean, if for some insane reason a space-galleon showed up in The Little Mermaid, it'd look like the ships in Treasure Planet. They changed up character design more radically in Atlantis (Mike Mignola, contrary to popular myth, did not do the character designs, but rather did pre-production design on the city of Atlantis itself; he was going to design the monsters for the animated series, had that ever gotten of the ground) but it still looks more like a Disney film than not. The story beats still feel very "Disney" as well, and the end result of all this is the feeling that Disney wanted to give the impression of doing something different while utilizing the same old toolbox. I think Don Bluth's Titan AE actually works better as a science-fiction adventure than Treasure Planet, though I think it suffers from some of the same problem of looking too much like the classic Disney approach adapted to science-fiction. If you're going to do something new and different, do something new and different. On the other hand, Big Hero 6 still looks very much like a Disney film, but storywise it feels like a classic super-hero story, dealing with loss, anger, guilt, and vengeance.

On the live-action films El Squibbinator mentions, the only ones of the more recent crop that I've seen are The Lone Ranger and John Carter, neither of which were great. The Lone Ranger was a comedy-adventure, rather than a straight adventure, which was neither a great fit nor true to the material. Johnny Depp's Tonto was, frankly, awful. John Carter had, in my opinion, a lackluster pair of leads, and they did a horrible job of marketing it (why in God's name didn't they call it John Carter of Mars?" Why would anyone go to see a movie just called "John Carter?). I barely remember hearing anything about Artemis Fowl(I know that one sat on the shelf for awhile before they released it) or A Wrinkle in Time.

Edited by Robbery on Dec 4th 2021 at 8:35:15 AM

From what I hear, Artemis Fowl was absolutely abysmal, so... yeah, safe to assume it didn’t go well.

> why in God's name didn't they call it John Carter of Mars? Why would anyone go to see a movie just called John Carter?

Excellent questions, really. If I had to make a guess, some rando exec probably thought "John Carter of Mars" sounded archaic and the movie would sell just from the fact that a Pixar alumni (Andrew "Make Me Care" Stanton) was directing alone. And look how that turned out.

Side note: to anyone who discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs through Disney's Tarzan, did you guys express surprise that that same guy came up with a book series set on Mars? I always thought that was insane.

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Dec 4th 2021 at 12:32:38 PM

It was actually because Mars Needs Moms had just been a huge bomb for them and the executives, for whatever reason, thought that was because of the word "Mars" being in the title and not, you know, the fact that it was just a bad movie.

They really suck at admitting how shitty a job they do sometimes.

Ohhhhhhhhh. I actually forgot that existed. OOF.

On the other hand, Big Hero 6 still looks very much like a Disney film, but storywise it feels like a classic super-hero story, dealing with loss, anger, guilt, and vengeance.

Funny you should say that, because I thought Big Hero 6 was essentially an ordinary Disney movie with a thin coat of superhero genre paint. Compare that to, say, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, which feels a lot more like a legitimate attempt to recapture the feel of a superhero comic in the form of animated movie. Bringing up DC’s direct-to-video animated movies would probably just be overkill.

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Dec 4th 2021 at 12:47:23 PM

What do you mean with "Make me Care" Stanton?

I can see where you're coming from with that, but my impression of Big Hero 6 (and admittedly I haven't seen it since it was released) is that it doesn't hit the usual story beats for a Disney movie. It looks like a Disney film, but it doesn't feel like one, at least to me. But then, I look at Frozen as kind of Disney's attempt to do a deconstruction of their own Princess movie formula.

It's a reference to a TED talk Stanton did regarding the clues to making a great story.

EDIT: Added the point of interest for more elaboration. Emphasis is mine.

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Dec 4th 2021 at 3:35:15 PM

I honestly didn't see very much deconstructive about Frozen other than its emphasis on non-romantic love (which Disney has done before, in Lilo and Stitch, for example) and its villain, who may have been surprising at the time but ultimately inspired a trend of shallow and unmemorable twist villains in subsequent Disney movies.

Minor quibble - I have a hard time seeing A Wrinkle In Time wasn't really an attempt to capture the 'teen-male audience'; both the original novel and the film are more about Meg Murray than any of the male characters.

Also interesting to note, anecdotally (both from like, once having been a kid myself and having worked at a fast food place that sold toys for these movies) there's actually a lot of boys who really like the Disney films that feature female protagonists and vice versa. I suspect it's more about the volume of toys they can sell to adults buying for their kids, as from what I recall that's a bigger part of Disney's sales. From my experience, parents care way more about if their kids have toys for the 'right' gender than the kids themselves do.

Indeed. Disney actually tried to launch a boy-targeted equivalent to the Princess line in the early 2000s, called Disney Heroes, with a lineup consisting of Aladdin, King Arthur, Hercules, Peter Pan, Robin Hood and Tarzan. But because by that time Disney had established a reputation as "girly", they didn't sell too many. In fact, I've seen it speculated that the failure of the Heroes franchise directly led to Disney's decision to purchase Marvel and later Star Wars.

Yeah, I always enjoyed Disney movies, regardless of whether the protagonist was male or female. I never felt to me particularly like there was a dearth of one or the other. I know, for instance, that changing the name of Rapunzel to Tangled (why Tangled? Because Rapunzel has long hair and hair gets tangled? But her hair never is tangled in the film...) was reportedly based on the fear that little boys wouldn't go see a movie that sounds like it's exclusively about a female protagonist (I don't know if it was the same thing with The Snow Queen and Frozen, given that Frozen doesn't bear much of any resemblance to The Snow Queen other than, you know, all the snow). I don't know what they were basing that fear on, exactly, because I'm pretty sure boys went to see The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and such, even if you didn't see a lot of little boys in Ariel t-shirts.

Edited by Robbery on Dec 4th 2021 at 8:15:55 AM

Well, a lot of those movies were made before the Disney Princess brand was a thing, so they were marketed differently then than they are now. For example, when Aladdin came out in 1992, it was marketed as a gender-neutral movie, with Robin Williams's Genie as its flagship character. But once the Princess franchise was launched, pretty much all of its merchandise became focused on Jasmine and aimed at girls.

The Princess product line created certain, shall we say. . . expectations regarding what Disney movies were, what they were "supposed" to be, and the kind of people they were aimed at. Expectations that certainly existed before, but not to the extent they did after the brand was launched.

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Dec 4th 2021 at 12:21:32 PM

One of the names they considered for Tangled was The Hidden Tower, which in my opinion fits much better. They decided to change the name after The Princess and the Frog didn't meet expectations. The change happened a few months before the film premiered. Yes, Frozen's name was changed because of that too, though it didn't receive a pointless name like Tangled did. Thank god Moana didn't suffer the same fate.

Yeah, it feels like they looked at the box office for Princess and the Frog and instead of saying "huh, maybe it's because we put it up against a continuation of a wildly popular series directed at an overlapping audience (New Moon), and one of the biggest films of all time (Avatar)?" they somehow blamed the title and traditional animation as a whole. As mentioned last page, this is similar to what happened with Treasure Planet; I'd argue this is also what happened with Winnie the Pooh, which was again, released alongside a Harry Potter movie.

(As someone who once wanted to be a traditional animator, I'm totally not salty about any of this at all. Nope, all fine here.)

Well, in all fairness to Disney, the marketing for The Princess And The Frog didn't really do much to distinguish it from its 90s forebears. And Winnie the Pooh was, well, Winnie-the-Pooh.

It wasn't *supposed* to distinguish itself from the 90s forbearers. It was supposed to be a throwback or return to form.

And that, I think, was part of the issue, at least as far as attracting audiences other than young girls was concerned. Like I said, those 90s movies came out at a time when Disney 1) had monopolized the animated film market in a way it didn't 10 years later, and 2) had not yet created the Disney Princess brand, so they weren't seen as inherently feminine.

It reminds me of a story from another field I'm fascinated by— that of aviation. In the 1930s, the Douglas aircraft company was the most successful in the world, and its DC-3 passenger plane carried nearly 90% of all airline passengers. But by the late 1940s, the DC-3 had become obsolete. Douglas tried to remedy this by introducing the improved Super DC-3. But airlines didn't order it— they thought it looked old-fashioned, and didn't want to buy anything that looked so outdated.

Disney had the same issue with The Princess and the Frog. Trying to sell it as a completely un-ironic 90s-era musical was going to be an uphill struggle regardless of circumstances, because audiences' tastes had changed too much.

Edited by ElSquibbonator on Dec 6th 2021 at 2:39:42 PM

I heard that the name of the film will be "Strange World".

Where? A reliable source would be nice.

https://twitter.com/DisneyAnimation/status/1468943681587531777?t=C1744x-8CicOj8ohrA_ceQ&s=19

This teaser art looks so cool. . . I'm just afraid they'll pull a Raya and the Last Dragon and squander it with a sub-par story.