Films and Feelings

       Once Upon a Time ...when The Professor was a teaching assistant for his film program’s introductory class, he had to plan and execute a lesson on film directing. The idea was to show them clips from two separate versions of the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy-tale and compare and contrast the directorial visions. When he told them neither of the films were Disney, one of his students blurted out something along the lines of “Wait, there are Beauty and the Beast movies that aren’t Disney?”       So ... Beauty and the Beast is hardly the only fairy-tale to experience this. The Disney retelling of any fairy-tale tends to supplant any pre-existing version of the story. We’re casually aware that fairy-tales came from “long ago” but give little thought to how these stories may have been shaped by telling and retelling across generations—this is just how the stories are , we think. The public is largely unaware, for example, that Grimm’s Snow Wh...

The Walt Disney Company as a whole seems to be in constant danger of being overtaken by its own cannibalistic tendency--cashing in on the successes of their past hits at the expense of creating the kinds of stories that merited these reimaginings to begin with. Pixar, coming fresh off a decade marked by a deluge of sequels, is certainly susceptible to this pattern as well. Though movies like Inside Out and Coco have helped breathe necessary life into the studio, audiences invested in the creative lifeblood of the studio should take note when an opportunity comes for either Disney or Pixar animation to flex their creative muscles. This year we'll have three such opportunities between the two studios. [EDIT: Okay, maybe not. Thanks, Corona.] The first of these, ONWARD directed by Dan Scanlon, opens this weekend and paints a hopeful picture of a future where Pixar allows empathetic and novel storytelling to guide its output. The film imagines a world where fantasy creatur...