All tagged disney

Onward Review (Film, 2020)

Onward opens with a montage of historical high fantasy epics in the town. Flash forward to the present, and the town is still populated with high fantasy creatures. They just live like us in modern society. Ian, a shy elf, is celebrating his sixteenth birthday. He wants to be like his dad, who sadly passed away before he was born, but nothing seems to go his way. His mom surprises him with a gift from his dad, a wizard staff, intended to be given to him and his brother Barley when he turned 16. Their father wrote a spell to allow his sons to bring him back to life for one day. Sadly, the spell fails, and only the bottom half of their father is brought back.

Thoughts on the Dumbo Remake Trailer

Consider Dumbo my problematic favorite. It’s, sadly, not hard to think of times that the Walt Disney Company produced incredibly racist content in its feature and short films. There’s Sunflower, the black centaur and handmaid to the white and blonde centaur in Fantasia, drawn with exaggerated Jim Crow caricature features and literally erased from the Disney Vaults for all future re-releases of the film. Then you have Peter Pan and the infamous song “What Makes the Red Man Red?,” indulging in horrible stereotypes about American Indians and First Nations people in similarly racist caricature. Songs of the South had Uncle Remus as the happy slave singing and dancing for the enjoyment of free white children (the film is largely unavailable in America, and Disney has defended the film as not racist because it is set in the 1870s when Uncle Remus was most likely a sharecropper and not a slave; yes, an eye-roll is appropriate here). Disney also tripled down on the Siamese cat as racist Asian caricature conceit in Lady and the Tramp, The Aristocats, and Disney’s Rescue Rangers (not a film, but modern enough that Disney should have known better). This isn’t even getting into the racist WWII propaganda films that every animation studio produced to aid the war effort. It’s a slippery slope from “Der Fuhrer’s Face” to “Commando Duck.”