Disney Will Eat Itself

Mirror, mirror on the wall/ Who needs media training most of all?

So, it looks like Disney's Snow White remake will be the anticipated box office disaster. I'm going to stay neutral on the whole wokeness debate, except 'may they never know peace' is a totally cringe thing to say, whatever side you're on. More interesting to me, as a shameless Disney fan, is their manic obsession with remaking all their old IP in the first place.

By choice, I've only seen one of these rehashes. Last year's Little Mermaid added half an hour to the original's running time and subtracted at least two-thirds of the fun. The songs don't land like they should, the visuals are murky and muted and the whole thing exists in that uncanny-ish valley of modern photorealistic animation that delivers on a technical level yet leaves you emotionally cold. I remember exactly one of the new songs, which was written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and doesn't bear any stylistic resemblance to the beloved OG tunes. (By the way, if Under The fucking Sea isn't making the audience want to party in the aisles, what are we even doing here?)

The expanded script makes room for some nods to social justice themes - when our new Ariel of Colour is cast ashore by Ursula's spell, the humans surmise that her muteness must be some kind of slavery-induced PTSD. These feel completely clunky and confusing in the film's Bridgerton-style world where black people seem to be present in all strata of society. You can go the colourblind casting route or you can tackle racism as a theme - you certainly can't do both.

These remakes may not be explicitly woke, but thanks to the particular time they were made and the entertainment industry's leftward skew, the actors often end up dropping spicy social justice-flavoured nuggets on the interview treadmill. These could be seen as an attempt to imbue these movies with some kind of noble meaning; more likely, the stars are trying to convince us that the whole endeavour isn't just a low-risk licence to print vast quantities of cash.

They're only deluding themselves. Disney the corporate entity isn't especially woke. Ill-fated former CEO Bob Chapek didn't get much right - highlights of his tenure included an underling, when quizzed about reduced portion sizes for theme park snacks, joking that it wouldn't hurt for some of their customers to lose a few pounds. But when Florida governor and former surefire presidential frontrunner Ron DeSantis attempted to curb the teaching of LGBT+ ideology in schools (the so-called 'Don't Say Gay' Bill), Chapek tried to stay out of the fray, correctly sensing a humungus bear trap. Naturally, Disney's rainbow activist staff groups lost their shit and forced him to alter his position, giving Governor Ron the pretext to launch his desired culture war which included trying to remove Disney World's landowning privileges.

Like any corporate, Disney is all about the $$$. As we can see when so many companies are rolling back their DEI programmes now T***p has regained power, commitments to causes that don't directly generate profit tend to be tissue-thin. With the Snow White PR debacles costing them a shit-ton of money, perhaps Disney might start wondering whether these soulless, creatively-bankrupt remakes are really worth the dents to their brand reputation on all sides of the political spectrum.

The all-conquering OG Moana (let's gloss over Moana 2
and any remakes, shall we?)

The particular irony about all this is that in recent years Disney's animation studios have been making original content that both ticks many progressive boxes and absolutely delivers the quality. Moana is a kick-ass Polynesian quasi-princess who bravely embarks on quests to save her people. The songs are superb, the visuals vibrant, the humour zingy. Encanto, a magical realist Colombian fable about a family who fled from violence, has been an incredible word-of-mouth smash, again with a killer Lin-Manuel Miranda soundtrack. Both movies are rooted in underrepresented cultures but they never hector audiences with political plot points. Instead, the messaging of tolerance and diversity worms its way into the subconscious.

Frozen and Tangled feature ballsy heroines with actual agency and personalities compared to the essentially useless princesses of yore like Aurora and - yes - Snow White. Even the less successful likes of Wish and Raya and the Last Dragon have showcased different cross-sections of humanity. Even further back, there's Mulan and the horribly underrated Princess and the Frog. You could argue that Disney are merely reflecting the world we live in rather than spearheading change, but so what? Disney treats these cultures with respect, but never over-the-top earnestness - one of the company's key strengths (you should see the amount of research that goes into new park attractions). Disney would be well advised to keep exploring brave new worlds with its trademark verve and charm, rather than resurrecting its creaky old IPs in a world where they no longer make a lick of sense.