Disney General - The saddest fandom on Earth

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Which is Better

  • Chicken Little

    Votes: 433 27.4%

  • Hunchback 2

    Votes: 57 3.6%

  • A slow death

    Votes: 1,088 68.9%
  • Total voters
    1,578
Salubrious said:
1) Most of the plot revolves around Aladdin trying to hide from everyone that he's not a real prince. Except he IS a real prince; he wished to BE a prince not just look like one. So what's if Jasmine found out he was a street rat; he's a real prince now so the law applies to him.
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Or, to put it more bluntly, Genie bamboozled Aladdin. He'd wished to be a prince, he should've become a real prince of a real place, somehow, not an instagram influencer. Retcon his lineage, make a sultan adopt him, just magic up a city-state, whatever. Instead, after the Prince Ali song ends (where did all those people go?), the only thing he's got to show for his wish is his fancy outfit.

Which is how we arrive at the (terrible) denouement. Jafar didn't do anything to de-prince Aladdin, he just turned his clothes into rags with sorcery. Most of Jafar's sorceries (Jasmine's slave outfit, Sultan's clown outfit, toy Abu, unravelled Carpet, kitten Rajah) and his first wish ("to rule from on high as Sultan" - stealing Sultan's clothes, moving the palace, and possibly interior decoration with the red color scheme and the serpent throne) were automatically reverted after his defeat. The wishing mechanics are really skitzo in the movie. Like, cmon, Jafar didn't specify he wished to rule Agrabah; Genie could've bamboozled him too and put him on top of Mt Everest in a sequined bathrobe.

And while we're at that, if Aladdin actually needed to make a "make me a prince again" wish for whatever reason and still keep his promise of personally freeing Genie, he could've lent the lamp to Jasmine.

But I love everything else. I love the pacing, that there's always an immediate threat, I love the songs, that they're properly spaced, the character designs which don't look ridiculously campy, the politics, that there's no abstract "travel" and no D&Desque en-route encounters and no goddamn vegan propaganda (arbitrarily sapient talking animals). Most of all I love that Aladdin wins the final confrontation by his wits (and that intelligence isn't demonized. Sultan may be senile, but Jafar isn't terribly bright.)

Salubrious said:
2) The main plot of the movie revolves around the fact that Jasmine can only marry a real prince, and then at the end her father was just like "never mind, I'm Sultan so I'm changing it." So why didn't he do that before?
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Because Sultan and Jasmine never knew it was an issue. From their point if view, the problem was Sultan wanted to marry her off (to a prince; which would be good given Jafar's current influence and his fear of Jasmine's future husband), and Jasmine didn't want to marry anyone. The crux here is Jasmine's fairytalesque isolation (which I let slide as standing in for "loner kid"). When Jasmine falls in love with Aladdin, before they can even begin discussing their predicament, he's first disappeared by Jafar and thought dead by Jasmine, then shows up as Prince Ali. If Jasmine went back to the palace with Aladdin and introduced him as her commoner boyfriend, Sultan could've changed the law there and then.
 
ExceptionallyExceptional said:
And the whole "Anastasia escaped!" plot was a reflection of the hopes of the people at the time, that Anastasia and her family somehow made it to safety. We now know that she didn't, but that wasn't discovered until 1991, only 6 years before the movie's release.
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Even in 1991, we had found most of the royal family's remains, but the body of Anastasia would not be properly identified until the late 2000's, as I recall. There were also many people in the 20th Century claiming to be the Grand Duchess, most notably Anna Anderson, and there was even a movie in the 1950's inspired by Anna Anderson, which Don Bluth cites as a major inspiration for the 1997 movie.

When you really think about it, Bluth's Anastasia is less about the actual Grand Duchess Anastasia or the tragedy of the Bolshevik Revolution and instead it's more of a Disney-style adaptation of the story of Anna Anderson.
 
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Safir said:
And while we're at that, if Aladdin actually needed to make a "make me a prince again" wish for whatever reason and still keep his promise of personally freeing Genie, he could've lent the lamp to Jasmine.
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You know, I never even thought of that. Jasmine (and for that matter Sultan) could have gotten three wishes and then Aladdin frees the Genie. As far as we see, Genie and Jasmine are already on good terms at the end.
 
Tour of Italy said:
Decent movie tho. I like the funny bat.
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Said bat also got a spin off movie for some reason.

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Can't say whether it's actually good or not, but I remember liking it as a kid. It involves Baba Yaga, a figure based on Slavic folklore.

But yeah, always liked the little dude's voice for some reason.
 
MysticMisty said:
Because Don Bluth really likes this particular character and wanted to give him a starring role. This is the only spinoff/sequel to one of his movies that he was personally involved in.
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It was nice Bluth got to work on something that was a follow-up to a previous film at all, given how many of his pervious films got sequel'd without his help.
 
Steamboat_Bill said:
They evidently chucked out all the Rasputin bits and decided to use actual history... and I'm not sure whether that makes it better or worse.
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I've seen the touring production, and I still can't tell if injecting actual history worked. Like, yeah, Party officials menacingly wave their guns around, but it felt, well, cartoonish.

It didn't help that the guy playing Gleb, the stage musical's chief invention, gave one of the worst performances I've ever seen.
 
 
ExceptionallyExceptional said:
These things make dismal stories by modern sensibilities, so we change them to suite our liking.
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Yeah, and Disney does a pretty good job of it. They just make movies for kids using the pastiche of works of art. I think Bambi was about the closest they came to a true adaptation.

Kids don't really have much cultural literacy. Neither do adults these days.

The Little Mermaid is about Dutch Calvinism. Mulan is about a subversion of gender roles regarding Chinese filial piety. Hunchback of Notre Dame is probably more a creation of Victor Hugo's depression more than anything else. Obviously all that shit is dark as hell when you really get into it.

Here's a lion voiced by Beyonce.
 
Steamboat_Bill said:
Please explain.
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I don't really know how to explain this succinctly, but I'll try.

Andersen was writing at a time when neo-Calvinism was first fomenting in the Netherlands. The first neo-Calvinists essentially thought that redemption should be open to all life. This goes against the traditional Calvinist view of splitting redemption between the elect (who are redeemed) and the reprobate (who are not), and then goes even further to say that this extends to all life regardless of whether or not they have a rational soul (because this was some gross Thomas Aquinas Catholic shit.)

So then enter The Little Mermaid. Why does she visit the sea witch to become a human? Is it because she wants to get married to the prince? No, fuck that, she wants an immortal soul. Marriage is just the requirement laid out before her. And also her voice gets taken away and the prince marries someone else, the rest of the mermaids cut off their hair to buy her some more time before she dies, etc. But in the end, she becomes one of the daughters of air who are given the chance to gain an immortal soul in heaven as long as they accomplish enough good deeds on earth.

The salvation of non-human creatures was, uh, a more interesting topic back then. They didn't have Youtube, you see.
 
eternal dog mongler said:
I don't really know how to explain this succinctly, but I'll try.

Andersen was writing at a time when neo-Calvinism was first fomenting in the Netherlands. The first neo-Calvinists essentially thought that redemption should be open to all life. This goes against the traditional Calvinist view of splitting redemption between the elect (who are redeemed) and the reprobate (who are not), and then goes even further to say that this extends to all life regardless of whether or not they have a rational soul (because this was some gross Thomas Aquinas Catholic shit.)

So then enter The Little Mermaid. Why does she visit the sea witch to become a human? Is it because she wants to get married to the prince? No, fuck that, she wants an immortal soul. Marriage is just the requirement laid out before her. And also her voice gets taken away and the prince marries someone else, the rest of the mermaids cut off their hair to buy her some more time before she dies, etc. But in the end, she becomes one of the daughters of air who are given the chance to gain an immortal soul in heaven as long as they accomplish enough good deeds on earth.

The salvation of non-human creatures was, uh, a more interesting topic back then. They didn't have Youtube, you see.
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But Andersen was Danish.
 
GenociderSyo said:
The original story she had no soul nor did any of the merfolk and becoming human and winning the prince's love would gain her one.

It's a pretty interesting fable if you have never read the original:

Hans Christian Andersen: The Little Mermaid

hca.gilead.org.il hca.gilead.org.il
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I have, but what that has to do with Dutch Calvinism - considering the dominant brand of Christianity in Denmark has always been Lutheranism - is new to me.
 
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