Disney's Divinity wrote:
Fflewduur wrote:
Yeah, I never said that.
Really? Because that's where this whole "off-topic" thing you kept going began.
Quote:
Why does your opinion matter more than those of the people who actually make motion pictures?
Why do you need to evade the point?
Everything in that page you posted discusses the film as an artistic failure, and did Neal Gabler speak to Walt personally because there is no quote there. The film still made more than its colossal budget, which was a colossal intake. Nothing about its intake was a "failure," more the idea of pouring money a higher degree of animation than normal (even for those days) that was unnecessary was a failure.
What I said was that being a princess film is no guarantee of success. And I'm not evading the point. The general consensus, stated over and over again by authors who have done the research, is that the studio saw the film as neither artistically nor financially successful in its time. Period.
Interestingly, there are sources that say the film only grossed $5.3M on its initial run, which is at odds with the other quoted $7.1M figure and would put the film *well* under recouping its production costs; there are also sources that put the film’s budget at $4M, and Walt is quoted at the film’s premiere as saying to Milt Kahl “Well, Milt, so *that’s* what I spent $4 million for?”
But the actual numbers are irrelevant. What you see as a “colossal intake” was actually a poor enough return that Walt told Eric Larson “I don’t think we can continue [with feature-length animation]; it’s just too expensive.” After Sleeping Beauty, Walt all but turned his back on feature animation. More than 400 artists were laid off from the animation studio, including folks who’d worked for Walt for thirty years—one of them, an inker named Dick Anthony, shot himself after getting pink-slipped. Is that what the aftermath of a *success* looks like?
It's not like this is a new or unusual circumstance--Disney history is littered with films that fared poorly but *endured*; it's a tentpole of the studio's historical narrative. Insisting on one's right to a personal opinion doesn't change the facts any more than saying the sky is yellow.
jazzflower92 wrote:
My take is just because an actor says something doesn't mean it will come true.
Truth.
The unique thing about Frozen is its central conflict, which is more about Elsa’s struggle to accept herself—I don’t think that’s been done in a Disney film before. There are three dimensions of dramatic conflict: man against the world, man against man, and man against self (again, you’ll forgive the potentially unintentional sexist language; that’s just the shorthand in which the concept is typically taught). The core is Elsa’s internal struggle, and it manifests in ways that affect her familial relationships, the way her subjects perceive her, and pretty much the basic survival of her kingdom. That’s pretty rich stuff. It’s hard to see a high-stakes way that can be duplicated in a follow-up.
Redemption usually makes for a good story. But Hans? He’s really not even a hugely important part of the narrative: he doesn’t drive the plot or the main turning events of the story, and his villainy doesn’t play a major role until near the story’s end. And he’s *cold* (you’ll pardon the expression). Keeping his agenda hidden, going so far as to attempt murder to achieve his objective—it’s a real uphill battle to generate enough empathy that an audience would *want* him to be redeemed.
The conflict could somehow revolve around another falling-out between the sisters. That would be high-stakes…but it’s also been dealt with and resolved once already. Or it could involve Elsa’s losing her powers somehow in a context that places everyone at peril, but there’s a real danger that could only seem contrived.
Basically we’ve got to trust that the creatives know these characters better than we do, and that they can come up with a compelling story that’s not going to seem like an artificial extension of the original film. Maybe it’ll happen.
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