Why have we decided that Disney is The Best?

Like, look at this.

image

None of those characters are Disney characters, but WB/DC wants you to make the association, if subconsciously.

The Disney aesthetic has swallowed so many things.
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Comments

  • Munch munch, chomp chomp...
    I've always just assumed that narrative has come from how fuckhuge Disney is and having a reasonable number of real knockout films a la Lilo & Stitch (which then gets exaggerated), and the fact that they're pretty much always working on something. Plus being super family-friendly is pretty much the way of being accessible.

    Unless you mean something else.
  • If the Disney aesthetic has swallowed so many things, then the anime aesthetic has probably swallowed even more things.
  • I've learned to tolerate drama...except on the boat
    Lilo & Stitch doesn't adhere to anything resembling their house style (the one Walt devised or the Glen Keane-infused one they've been using since The Little Mermaid), so I don't refer to that one
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    This is not something I decided.
  • I've learned to tolerate drama...except on the boat

    If the Disney aesthetic has swallowed so many things, then the anime aesthetic has probably swallowed even more things.

    the anime aesthetic was derived from the Disney look

    This is not something I decided.

    well I know you didn't
  • edited 2017-06-26 05:15:29
    Munch munch, chomp chomp...
    Have you ever considered posting these things when you are not prone to, or have rid yourself of, the frequent exaggerations, persistent lack of thread focus, consistent undercurrents of inferiority and persecution in favor of a less combative and more detailed or have sublimated them into a more detailed approach, and altogether something actually worth engaging in any capacity.

    And, drat. For crying out loud. That's like calling Tezuka the God of Anime and I'm not even going to get on that.
  • I've learned to tolerate drama...except on the boat
    Looks like another meme I took at face value >_< and I thought GMH was referring to a certain kind of "anime aesthetic" I should have clarified
  • Munch munch, chomp chomp...
    I mean, I'm sure he was being straightforwardly sincere because that's always how he is when he is serious, but that doesn't really change the first bit of my comment for one.
  • edited 2017-06-26 07:34:34
    I've learned to tolerate drama...except on the boat
    I should have thought better about coming off as combative, or any inferiority/persecution complex-related under/overtones, but I thought this thread was pretty focused?
  • edited 2017-06-26 10:14:10
    Anonus said:

    If the Disney aesthetic has swallowed so many things, then the anime aesthetic has probably swallowed even more things.

    the anime aesthetic was derived from the Disney look
    but counting them together is like confusing japanese with chinese

    (fun fact: i was struggling to find a good comparison.  i wanted to cite a parent-child pair where the parent and child were very dissimilar but I couldn't think of one easily, without diving into politics and bringing up Frank Powers from Staten Island.  then i thought of USA vs. UK but that would feel like a biased implication because of how much bigger the USA has gotten, though perhaps it would have been appropriate.  at one point i had a comment about how humans and coelecanth were more closely related than trout.)
  • looks like i have been ninja'd lol
    Anonus said:

    Looks like another meme I took at face value >_< and I thought GMH was referring to a certain kind of "anime aesthetic" I should have clarified

    well, it's true that anime traces its lineage to disney cartoons, but my point was that it is pretty far removed from either the typical classic disney movie style or the modern western animation style that you mentioned (though the latter takes some cues from anime)

    i mean there are a lot of things from the de-emphasis of the nose and mouth/lips (every character in the OP picture has prominently-displayed lips, while in anime, explicitly-drawn lips are rare), the use of limited animation vs. fluid animation (which often has to do with pre-dubbing vs. post-dubbing, i've heard), the emphasis on larger-than-life eyes

    anime is probably closer to The Simpsons than the style you're thinking of, though with more realistic face shape and more expressive eyes
    Anonus said:

    I should have thought better about coming off as combative, or any inferiority/persecution complex-related under/overtones, but I thought this thread was pretty focused?

    i can't speak for anyone else (who might be "tired of" you making these sorts of threads, but i'm not tired of them yet i guess?), but the only thing i find truly objectionable about the OP is the use of "we"

    in this case i would have used "people", or if i wanted to avoid getting dinged by using too broad a brush, "some people"

    because "we" seems to imply that it's you plus people around you, which means people like me, and i certainly don't agree that disney has the best animation style -- though it's certainly not an ugly one i guess.
  • I've learned to tolerate drama...except on the boat
    I was thinking of a feeling that Disney's swallowed things up

    They push this message that Disney Animation is The Best, and marketers (like here) blatantly copy them

    I feel like a lot of Disney's appeal stems from their omnipresence and institutional nostalgia
  • edited 2017-06-26 12:37:52
    I'm inclined to agree that they have a more coherent brand; there's more than institutional nostalgia.  The "omnipresence" comes from the fact that they more directly brand their stuff.  For example:

    For Disney, I can think of Mickey Mouse and his universe (Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Minnie, Daisy, Scrooge McDuck) and their crossovers (e.g. Fantasia, Kingdom Hearts, etc.), and then there's the various famous Disney movies (The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, The Lion King, Mulan, Pocahontas, etc.), and then there's Pirates of the Caribbean I guess.  Also everything Pixar does.

    For their chief rival WB, I can think of...Looney Tunes, Animaniacs, and superhero shows?  And I guess this includes DC Comics but I was actually confused as to who owned Marvel vs. who owned DC and had to look that up in Wikipedia.  Also I guess there's...a bunch of movies.  Like, I can't readily name specifically WB movies off the top of my head, despite having heard of many of them, because they more so seem like "generic" movies than a coherent WB brand.  They're also generally live-action, and not animation, which is probably why they just come off as generic mainstream movies.  (I almost wrote "Indiana Jones and Star Wars and then realized that those two are Lucasfilm properties and now associated with Disney...)

    Maybe some of this has to do with how I was raised.  I did get a good serving of classic Disney movies as a kid, while I didn't get as much of serving of comic book (or western cartoon) superheroes, because I didn't watch as much TV.  (And a good chunk of it was Power Rangers, which is part of Saban's empire, which is neither Disney nor WB, though that franchise was briefly owned by Disney, which explains why a Disney-published kids entertainment magazine featured Power Rangers stuff for a while.)
  • edited 2017-06-26 13:30:08
    I've learned to tolerate drama...except on the boat
    Warner Bros. has always been a big studio producing all things for all people, unlike Disney, which was, for most of its existence, a smaller boutique studio specializing in animation. The corporate behemoth that is today's Walt Disney Company is a fairly recent invention.

    And Warner Bros. is really inept at marketing for all the iconic stuff they own. They didn't really seek most of it out though. They stumbled ass-backwards into the DC properties in 1969 (the year Kinney bought them; Kinney had bought DC two years earlier), and the old M-G-M (Tom and Jerry, Droopy, The Wizard of Oz, et al.) and Hanna-Barbera (Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, et al.) properties when Time Warner swallowed Turner Broadcasting in 1996. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies were initially products of Leon Schlesinger's studio, which WB, counteracting their future behavior, bought outright in 1944.
  • I've learned to tolerate drama...except on the boat
    And yeah, Disney bought Power Rangers in 2001, along with the rest of Fox Family Worldwide (which they bought for the cable channel that is now Freeform). Power Rangers was meant to give Disney a property that appealed to boys, a weakness of theirs in the licensing marketplace, but the fact that they didn't completely control it, along with the flak the property got for its violence, made them skittish about it. They would eventually get an out when they bought Marvel outright in 2009, paving the way for them to dump it back onto Haim Saban.
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