I mean, don’t get me wrong: Netflix is just as shit as Disney, as corporations go; but there’s just something about Wish–seemingly so safe and soulless and focus-grouped with its generic, Rapunzel-faced, Disney Princess™ heroine and its paint-by-numbers plot and its Whedonesque, hang-a-lampshade-on-it humour, and its bland, inoffensive, Lin Manuel Miranda-pastiche musical numbers–losing a nomination to fucking Nimona, which is about as anarchic as mainstream entertainment media can be, featuring a protagonist who is about as far from being a Disney Princess as anyone can be, and which we all saw evolving organically in real time from someone’s sketch on Tumblr. One of them feels like extruded film product; the other one feels like art.
The irony of this being that the Nimona film was originally a Disney project, being originally produced by Blue Sky Studios until Disney shut it down in 2021. Like…Disney doesn’t know what’s *actually* good any more
Tangled kind of marked the point where Disney started acting self-aware of the whole Disney Princess™ trope and by the time Frozen hit, they were acting self-aware and embarrassed by it. At that point it’s like they started knee-capping themselves out of their own sense of cringe.
Their movies were already focus-group tested to hell and back and with being a corporation who mainly profits off of nostalgia for their older works, they’re increasingly unwilling to take any risks by exploring new directions in both storytelling and animation.
And being unwilling to take risks + succumbing to cringe leads to just rehashing the same shit over and over again while not standing behind it. It’s weak. It’s boring. How I am supposed enjoy a story if it acts embarrassed of its own self.
Yes, it is kind of ironic that Disney, a company whose entire corporate brand was originally built on earnestly presented children’s fantasy, is now associated with self-referential, immersion-breaking bathos and a refusal to take its own subject matter seriously.