There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

There Goes the Neighborhood

My only comment is that the opening illustration seems to have more in common with the Bratz franchise than the fey. As someone who writes in this field, all I can say is that I now have another flattened part of my forehead from banging it against my computer screen while shouting, "No, no, no, no, no!"

Disney's Fairies, corrupting another generation of youth.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about this travesty later, after I can process it. The horror, the inhumanity.

First Edit Brian Froud is spinning in his grave, and he's not dead yet.

Second Edit John Lasseter, how could you do this to us? Not, "how could you do fairies," but how could you do Disney Fairies? ::crying into my hands::

Third Edit Okay, I can't be the only male of my generation that has as a part of his memories one of the first "sexual awareness" concepts was seeing Tinkerbells panties on "The Wonderful World of Disney." And just in case you think I'm way off base, you should read Old Man Disney's instructions to his animators when they were drawing Beethoven's Sixth Symphony (the Pastoral) for Fantasia. He explictely directed them to not draw nipples or other sexually provocative images for the characters. They still snuck some stuff in.

So that's why I find the Bratz like quality to the drawing disturbing. Also, the majority of those fairies are awfully curvey. Now, granted, I'm all in favor of breaking the "Twiggy" fetish most fashion magazines have and go back for a more full-bodied perception of femanine sexuality, but I don't like that this is targeted to an audience younger than 14. There's a whole bunch more here (like how the Bratz work pyschologically and the postures of the fairies on the Disney site and the prevelance of sex in real fairy tales, especially in the modern versions), but that would need another post.

9 comments:

Camille Alexa said...

Okay, I can't be the only male of my generation that has as a part of his memories one of the first "sexual awareness" concepts was seeing Tinkerbells panties on "The Wonderful World of Disney."

Steve, you need to be publishing essays like this in genre mags. You're on fire, man.

Steve Buchheit said...

Camille, I deleted and rewrote that several times while the brain was fighting like Kirk and that guy that was switching universes (and they fought in frotn of the horsehead nebula, I think they blew their special effects money for the season on that episode) over if I was sharing too much info.

Unknown said...

Mine was Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi. That gold bikini still haunts my dreams...

Steve Buchheit said...

Kanrei, oh yeah, Princess Leia in the gold bikini, a Frank Frazetta live-action painting that was. I think for all of us of an age, that image is there in the subconsciousness. But I was in my late teens when Return of the Jedi came out.

Camille Alexa said...

...over if I was sharing too much info.

I always feel like that about poetry.

ThatGreenyFlower said...

What a GREAT post!! You are soooo right--these are tiny little winged sexpots, selling sexiness to children. It makes me want to vomit.

At the bottom right part of the opening screen, there's a quiz. The question is, "Do you want to be a fairy?" Answer one shows one of the little flying floozies striking an ingenuous pose. That answer, of course, was, "yes." Answer two shows some sort of green roly-poly hedgehog kind of thing. That answer was, "I'm happy being me."

Obviously if you're happy being you, you clearly have some unresolved green poky issues, and no one will ever love you. Freak. Go on, pick the hedgehog.

I have been building to this for some time, but today it is official: I hate Disney Studios.

Todd Wheeler said...

Wait folks, you need to be reasonable. Every 4 - 12 year old girl in the world already has every imaginable item with a "Princess" logo. Sales are dropping. Poor Disney Inc. needs a new branding opportunity.

If anything we should be incensed that a mulit-billion dollar entertainment tsunami put a movie trailer of such crappy quality online. Hasn't Steve Jobs taken over all of Disney yet?

Well, we can only hope that they will totally break with all dusty, irrelevant tradition and change one very important thing:

Let Tinkerbell Talk!

Votes on which celebrity will do the voice?

Steve Buchheit said...

Greeny, oh, I didn't see that one (about the "do you like yourself" thing). Thanks for letting us know. I, personally, think that stinks.

Todd, well I heard that John Lasseter (formerly of Pixar) say the project in late visualization stages, and then took the project apart and had it redone (which delayed the release of the film by a year). I haven't been following his Jobness since I sold my Apple stock (at 45, boohoo, but I used my profit to buy my little car, weeee!). I'm guessing that once embraced into the bossom of Disney, the boy from accounting (wasn't he supposed to quit, did he?) sucked his soul away like Jobs was a little gelfling and drank it for dinner to comment his plate of intern kidney pie. (Did I ever mention I interviewed to be a Disney intern? Still bitter.)

Steve Buchheit said...

"John Lasseter saw the project..."

I canz write good. Sigh. Is it still Monday?