Poor Disney. The studio tries to do good by finally producing an animated movie featuring a black princess (The Princess and the Frog, out Christmas 2009) and it’s still called out for being racist. Since this past weekend’s debut of the teaser trailer for the film, a return to traditional 2-D animation (can the new computer-assisted techniques still qualify these films as “hand-drawn” or “cel” animation?) after a five-year drought, blogs such as Vulture and Defamer have noted possibly offensive stereotypes in the movie.
Well, what do you want? A return to traditional Disney films or racism-free films? As displayed in the montage featured as today’s clip of the day, most of our beloved Disney classics unfortunately have their share of racist portrayals. And let’s not forget some of the more contemporary Disney films, like Aladdin, which can be seen in this other YouTube clip as also being racist. So, perhaps Disney’s return to tradition is about more than just 2-D animation style. I’m not saying it’s a good thing. I’m just not all that shocked by it.
Today marks the final day of the Moving Image Institute (see my previous coverage here and here), and though I’ve been taking copious notes, I’ve been too busy actually participating to do much writing. I hope to get caught up posting takeaways by the end of this week. In the meantime, I’m going to throw out three random quotes from my notes from the past four days. Take a look at the list of speakers here, and see if you can guess who said what.
1) “There are certain people who only exist to show up on websites in order to tell you what an idiot you are.”
2) “I don’t see it as a queer movie, other than that a sodomite made it.”
3) “I’m a great Dumbo enthusiast. I think it’s the greatest animated film I’ve ever seen. I like elephants.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Today marks the final day of the Moving Image Institute (see my previous coverage here and here), and though I’ve been taking copious notes, I’ve been too busy actually participating to do much writing. I hope to get caught up posting takeaways by the end of this week. In the meantime, I’m going to throw out three random quotes from my notes from the past four days. Take a look at the list of speakers here, and see if you can guess who said what.
