We’ve Lost The Magic Of Old Disney Films

It’s 7pm on a school night. You’ve just had a nice, hot meal that mum’s made. It’s pouring outside. An old Disney movie plays soothingly on the television, its soundtrack hums hauntingly, the graphics painstakingly hand-drawn one by one. The television is old and grainy, probably small and boxy, but was, at the time, the peak of technology. The CD whirls tirelessly in the player.
 
Somewhere in the background of the film is a Victorian-style cottage-type house with flowers crowding the porch, or maybe a castle with towering terraces. A young couple walks a poodle in passing; a little girl gets lost in Wonderland. Maybe a prince kisses a princess. Your tired eyes take in talking animals and ferocious beasts, kind godmothers and evil stepmothers. Girls with hearts of stone and dogs who display more friendship than the people at school. They hover and flutter in exhaustion. The scent of your house grazes past leisurely. It’s warm and comforting. The sofa digs into your elbow, your head drops at an angle, but you’re too tired to care. The washing machine runs in the distance, brief murmurs come from elsewhere in the house.
 
Someone’s tucking you in. The sheets are cold initially but quickly pillow around you and settle gracefully. A nightlight glows in the distance, and the wind howls outside. The stars outside your window giggle and gush at each other over your sleeping form. They sing you a little lullaby and watch over you till the sun greets you in the morning.
 
This magic is gone.
 
A harsh, insulting light shines over an oversaturated cartoon character. It pops up right in your face. Its expressions shift grotesquely. Its colours are neon, and just a shade away from matching each other at any time. It smiles. You can count its teeth. The screen pans left to right, whirls around, and drops from top to bottom. It’s overcrowded with too many characters, too many faces. A lyric screams at you through the screen. Yes, it’s in tune; yes, it’s controlled; yes, it’s the best of the best. But it’s too loud, too much, too scathing. The voices don’t blend. They don’t soothe. They beg you through the screen, “Look at me!” “NO! Look at me!” “No, I’m the main character, look at me!”
 
The problems are too big, too complex, too abstract. Definitely not unimportant, but too serious. Nothing like the simple problems and simpler solutions that comforted you growing up. Almost like they’ve forgotten it’s a cartoon for kids. They almost always talk about topics that haven’t been researched. It always seems to piss everyone off. They refuse to create storylines behind new cultures. They refuse to create cartoons without making them problematically political. They seem to be unable to create a story without making the main character’s ethnicity a problem, even though Tiana was the prettiest princess of them all, and no one complained about her beautiful brown skin.
 
They star a person of colour, but get all the details about that culture wrong. Maybe they replace one ethnicity with another, but it causes more dissonance than comfort. The little ethnic girls watching see themselves as replacements for previously white characters, not as conquerors of their own stories, while the others watch the identity of a previously loved princess change. Was it bad? No, but it might have been strange. They refuse to create new stories with more characters. NO! They will stick to old stories, but they will corrupt them. They will steal the life out of them, suck the charm out of them. Crank their Netflix lighting to the nines and oversaturate the screen. They will overstimulate and stress little children out.
 
The storylines are the same. They’ve copied and pasted each other, changed a background here, a character there, but it will almost always be about the same thing. They’ve created formulas, not ideas. They say there’s only a finite amount of plots, but there’s almost always an infinite amount of stories to be told. Stories that can be buffed and polished to fit a child’s mind, teach them about courage and empathy, friendship and tenacity. Stories that will lift children up and tell them they’re princes and princesses no matter what. Stories that, this time, will be more vigilant of their nuances. Stories that will no longer have racist undertones and Western superiority. Stories that can bring about the same magic in little girls without throwing others aside.
 
Stories for all.

• disney
• entertainment
• films
• movies
• nostalgia