I loved BATB's prologue the most alongside Hunchback and Tarzan. I always loved how the opening of Pocahontas starts out from a historical piece of artwork at a museum though. I still need to get around to watching Dinosaur especially since I recently saw someone make a list of their favorite Disney films on Deviantart and I was a fan of all his/her top 10 except for Dinosaur which was surprisingly on the list.DisneyFan09 wrote: Thanks. And yes, I agree that the 90's had some very well-done openings. My favorites are the ones from The Rescuers Down Under, The Lion King, Hunchback and Tarzan. And the title credits from Pocahontas are well done, despite that I've never been crazy about Virginia Company itself. Even the opening from Dinosaur is excellent, no matter what could be said about that movie.
I think Donkey works for the style of comedy in Shrek so he never came off as overbearing to me. He wouldn't be a good fit in a Disney film though.Agreed. Though Donkey could be too much at times, he was still more endearing and likable than Mushu.
I think the problem with Mushu is that he would immediately take Chinese viewers out of the movie since that's exactly what happened with the animated film.Well, I've never been gaga for Mushu, so I don't mind. But to be fair, I wouldn't mind if he was a part of the movie either.
I've always been fascinated with mermaids so that was the main appeal of Peter Pan for me. I was very disappointed in the 2003 live-action film which I specifically watched to see the mermaids but they end up appearing onscreen for only five seconds lol. Some people speculate that Ariel's mother, Athena, came from Neverland or after she "died" from the pirate ship, she was whisked away to Neverland. You know how I feel about these theories though lol. I didn't know people wanted the Neverland mermaids to have their own franchise. Disney tried with Ariel's sisters around the time of the Platinum Edition but the merch didn't take off (and I don't blame people for not buying the stuff because the merchandise was terrible).Haha, it's tempting to compare the mermaids in Peter Pan to those in The Little Mermaid, due to the shallow fact of them all being mermaids! Yet there are a couple of them that resembles Ariel. I remember seeing Mermaid prior to Peter Pan in my childhood, though, yet I know there's been some pleas about making the mermaids from Pan their own franchise, despite that we've seen another property in Pixie Hollows (*cough, Tinker Bell, cough*).
Speaking of which, I dislike the mermaids from Pan, mostly due to how mean they are to Wendy. She's yearning to see them and they're mean to her, yet never apologizes for it. And they never reappears again to make up for it.
Yeah, I hate the mermaids in Neverland too (not design wise but personality wise). They're really terrible and unfriendly and in fact, this is one of the rare examples where they were nicer in the book. They had issues there too but they weren't as overtly malicious as in the Disney film which is strange since Disney usually sanitizes their characters. I honestly never cared for any of the Neverland characters" Tink, the mermaids, the Indians, the Pirates, and even the Lost Boys were flat and one-dimensional to me. The mermaids and Tink are incredibly unlikable characters although I do like how Disney didn't try and redeem the mermaids later on.
Have you seen ScarJo's latest comments about how she should be allowed to play any role, even if it's a tree lol? Clearly she feels attacked for being cast in Ghost of a Shell. It's interesting how when Emma Stone got backlash for playing a Hawaiian role in Aloha, she apologized and even said sorry about taking the role at the Golden Globes or the Oscars (I don't remember which ceremony it was).Well, to be fair, I've never considered her to be a beau, despite that I know there are many who does that.
From the trailers and all the leaked material of Frozen 2, it definitely looks like Elsa will be front and center although Anna will also be as pivotal. I'm glad Anna isn't being sidelined in favor of the more popular sister. Yes, I'd say Elsa has become as iconic as Tinker Bell and Maleficent for better or for worse.I was tired of Let it Go, mainly because of mere overexposure of Frozen. But I was never gaga for Frozen, anyways. As for Elsa, I'll hope that she'll get a more pivotal role in the sequel, due to her sheer popularity. Regardless of Frozen coming of the heels of it's Revival predecessors, I read some claims that people looked forward to Elsa due to her being iconic in her own right in the same vain as Tinker Bell or Maleficent. Which is fair enough.
I only saw the Iron Giant for the first time a few months ago so I can see the parallels with Big Hero 6 now. I quite enjoyed the film actually and the re-release featured a nice allusion to Tomorrowland which Brad Bird got with Disney's permission.Which makes Hiro and Baymax's relationship even more resonant, due to him being a creation of his late brother. I thought their dynamic was touching and investable. I know several people have compared Big Hero 6 to The Iron Giant, which is after all fair.
Yeah, I always thought it was weird that Kristoff never mentions that he witnessed Elsa's family visting the trolls. There's a lot of stuff in the film which needed to be ironed out imo. I completely agree that Bastion was the far superior design compared to Kristoff. Keane did an amazing job with his Rapunzel designs and it's a pity he stepped down as director.What's remarkable is that he's tied in the opening to Anna and Elsa, yet he never even mentions it again later on in the movie. And yes, it's easy to label Kristoff as successor of Bastion in the original Rapunzel, but at least Bastion looked superior. In fact, all of the Glen Keane sketches looked good for Tangled.
As Long as There's a Moon featured Esmeralda and Phoebus getting married which I always felt was a super odd reaction since they should all be running away with Frollo coming soon. That's another reason I prefer In a Place of Miracles because story-wise, it flows better. However, to address your point that a wedding would have been too traditional for this film, it technically does get interrupted by Frollo so that itself is a subversion. After all, most weddings in Disney films happen at the end of the films and they're your traditional happy endings so what occurs in As Long as There's a Moon is quite unique for Disney.After listening to the commentaries to the deleted songs on the Laserdisc, I think really the story needed a moment to celebrate the wedding after all the heavy drama. While I think that both As Long As There's a Moon and In a Place of Miracles are fine enough, without being the best songs from the picture, I think both have their cues that would've benefited from being animated. At least In a Place of Miracles had it's own resonance, since Quasi does acknowledge their friendship and sees himself as handsome.
And at least As Long As There's a Moon had Quasi almost bringing their hands together, which would've made the ending more resonant. Yet I felt an actual wedding between Esmeralda and Phoebus would be too traditional, since a wedding is a Disney stock trope and Disney were trying to break away from that.
I hated the cartoony designs of The Good Dinosaur. They really didn't feel like they belonged to a Pixar film at all and I agree that aspects of the story were so bizarre like the hallucinogenic berries. The Lion King's most emotional scene being copied here totally didn't work since all it did was make audiences want to watch The Lion King instead. That's the worst thing a movie can do which is to reference a far superior movie which makes viewers wish they were watching that instead lol. I think The Good Dinosaur never got as much complaints as Cars 2 and Brave mainly because it was the least watched Pixar film.True, but let's hope that Onward is going to be better than The Good Dinosaur, which was a bizarre mess to begin with. I don't know if we've discussed that movie before, but it was just bizarre from beginning to end. Everything to it's jarringly cartoony character designs that didn't mesh with the realistic backgrounds at all, to the mismatch of the premise and to uinteresting characters and pale story, makes the movie utterly bizarre. Yet the naysayers never whined so much about that movie as they did with Cars 2 and Brave.
I haven't seen Brother Bear in years so I honestly don't remember most of it. I think it was on Netflix some time back but I never had an interest even then to watch it. Home on the Range I would rewatch just to laugh at how terrible it is but Brother Bear isn't even bad enough to want to make fun of.Well, those callbacks are pretty overt and obvious and to be fair, Brother Bear was greenlit after The Lion King's success, so the connection is similar to something more than one. But Brother Bear is a mashup of Pocahontas and Bambi as well, taking obvious cues from both of them.
I love the Princess formula! I'm just not a fan of how it's been subverted and made fun of in the Revival films with the supposed new "princess" films like Tangled, Frozen, Moana, alongside Brave, Maleficent and the live-action BATB. The comment in Moana was so badly shoehorned and threw me out of the film. At least in the live-action BATB, the remark made by Emma Watson still made sense story-wise, even if her delivery couldn't have more possibly shown her disgust. If I'm correct, the makers of Brave flat out said that the character and the film was created to make an anti-princess film or something along the lines of that. The only major subversion though was Merida not marrying anyone at the end since there was no central romance in the film but it was hardly groundbreaking otherwise.Really? Okay. I thought you liked the Princess formula.
To be honest, the Princess comment in Moana hardly made any sense, since Moana wasn't technically a Princess after all. It was too meta. And all the rants about how un-Princessy (yeah, I know it's not an actual word, but nonetheless) Merida was, there was nothing truly innovative about her characterization that broke from the Princess trope. Besides, her conflict was as traditional as it would be: She had to rebel against suitors, anyways.
I wish we got more information about that version of Gigantic. If nothing else, it was nice to see a Disney film that doesn't just focus on two characters but instead an ensemble cast, just to prove that Disney can make films that aren't buddy comedies.Yeah, I meant about the four friends. That would've been a nice quadrangle.