Take Me There to Disneyland

Ohhh! Oh, what terrible, terrible news... 💔

Rest in power, sweet King. May the Force be with you, and know that thanks to you, we shall always remember who we are.

It wasn't a real threat, it was just some jerk who reblogged the recent post I wrote about Trump with an old-fashioned "kill yourself" response. (First one I've ever received on this site since I joined, amazingly.) Two other people reblogged that reblog as well, so yay, two more blocked accounts to add to my collection. :3

Thank you, sweetie. But I'm comforted by the thought that these sorts of trolls only say things like that because they've only learned how to use words to provoke a negative reaction from other people, rather than actually to express the unhappy, unpleasant feelings that have twisted them up inside in a healthy way.

My top two are Inside Out and Coco! Disgust and Hector are my respective favorites from each; I love the stories, themes, characters, and music in both; and I don't cry at movies easily, but those two movies in particular hit me really hard.

I'm also very fond of Turning Red, Wall-E, Luca, Toy Story 1-3, Elemental, and Finding Nemo/Dory!

It does feel like the culture of the Mediterranean/Spain-esque setting for Rosas was really not taken advantage of, either in the look of the film or in its music. It's a critique I likewise have for Raya and the Last Dragon and (to a lesser extent) Brave, that the film really didn't have to be set where it was, since the story wasn't tied to any traditional folklore, environments, history, or even cultural values from the region it was set in. And considering that we've seen Disney embrace the culture of a region in their films' stories well in the past with projects like Lilo and Stitch, Coco, Encanto, and even Moana, that does seem like a real missed opportunity.

I would frankly love to see a Disney animated film set in Constantinople/Istanbul, though! There's so much beauty in Turkey and the rest of the Middle-East, both in its stories and its architecture, and I'd love to see some real representation for those cultures in Disney's animated work, especially including cast and crew from the culture they choose to depict. Even India I feel has been tragically passed over by Disney -- the closest the company's really gotten was the Disney/Pixar short Sanjay's Super Team (which was awesome) and half-assing some Bollywood influences in their live-action Aladdin remake that's still supposedly set in Arabia (which, I'm sorry, is kind of pathetic). And then yeah, it'd be cool to really feature Spain as a location for a Disney film too.

TL;DR...maybe.

I admit, I do really like human!Star and Magnifico/Amaya being a villainous couple as concepts -- but I don't think adding those ideas alone would've fixed Wish's shortcomings. Because I strongly believe the main reason so much of the Wish fandom has latched onto the idea of a romance for Asha in particular comes down to people feeling more for their mental AU concepts of Asha and Star than for Asha and the rest of her canon cast in the real finished product. There are no relationships in Wish -- ones featuring Asha or otherwise -- that I feel really prompt much investment or emotion in the audience.

When my mum and I went to go see Wish, we came out of the theater feeling oddly blase about the whole story. My mum even -- upon me asking her about her thoughts on this topic before I sat down to write this -- admitted that although she "wanted to see evil defeated," and all that, she honestly just hadn't cared about any of the characters that much. She wanted Magnifico to lose because it was justice for Magnifico to lose -- not because she was actively rooting for Asha, her friends, or Rosas overall. She wanted good to triumph and evil to fail, but none of the characters and their relationships had made her that invested in seeing how that came about. And considering that every single character in every story ever written is largely shaped by the relationships they have with other characters, that means that Wish's primary failing is not a lack of romance, either for its main lead or its villains --

It's a lack of love.

Any kind of sincere, selfless, development-inducing, chemistry-fueled love. Not necessarily romantic love -- Disney's Revival work has actually shown just how diverse love can be through films like Zootopia, Encanto, and Frozen -- but real love between the characters, built on the back of history and camaraderie and meaningful screen time. Love that adds layers to their personality, fuels their choices and actions, and ultimately helps them bloom into better, more complete people. Instead I would argue that the only "love" in Wish is with ideas from past Disney projects -- that's why there are more Easter eggs and overt meta references to other projects in this movie than there are scenes that actively stir your emotions. You know -- the way Mulan does when she decides to steal her father's armor, or Marlin does when he gingerly picks up Nemo's cracked egg in his flippers and cradles it, or Cinderella's stepsisters do when they rip apart the dress the mice made for Cinderella, or Pinocchio does when he watches in horror as Lampwick turns into a donkey, or Tarzan does when he comforts Kala after he comes out dressed in his biological father's old clothes and she starts to cry.

The reason a lot of fans love these two ideas -- villain!Magnifico/Amaya and human!Star/Asha -- so much is because these two relationships, even just in concept art, prompted more emotion out of them than any relationship in the entire finished film.

Perhaps if that same level of emotion was brought out in these relationships in a real movie, that would've helped, but only if the rest of the film had also been trimmed down and edited so as to help tell a story with those two elements. Slim down the overstuffed cast. Have Asha's family actually have a point, or cut them. Give Asha and Magnifico some sort of real history and/or compare-contrast dynamic. Develop Star as a character. Give both Star and Asha character arcs. Make the music more essential to telling the story.

Without a lot of additional changes on top of those two concepts being used, I think the ideas of a hero and villain couple would've only just made the list of ideas that were only half-baked in the final product longer. After all, if Star was Asha's love interest, you'd still really have to have good writing and a lot of chemistry between the two characters in order to sell your audience on a love story between them. Not saying it can't be done -- Tangled and Elemental both did it quite well -- but just throwing the two characters together as is (namely, rather underdeveloped) and making them romantic partners by itself isn't enough. Honestly, I think a platonic or even familial-esque relationship between Star and Asha could've been just as powerful, if that love between them really came through. Just look at the bonds between characters like Judy and Nick from Zootopia or Miguel and Hector in Coco. Even keeping Star as less explicitly human could've been fine, if the relationship between them and Asha was strong enough. Stitch and Lilo's relationship is rock-solid in Lilo and Stitch, and Stitch isn't even remotely human. Even Soul did something kind of interesting with Joe Gardner and his relationship with 22 by giving them something of a mentor-student bond. Maybe a quasi-"young parent/child" relationship between Asha and Star could've even been interesting, if it was written well!

I do think both ideas had great potential in giving Wish more of an identity that could help set it apart from its predecessors -- I mean, we've never had a human character have a romance with a supernatural being or a villainous couple in a Disney animated film before -- but including them wouldn't have fixed Wish by itself.

I must be honest, I actually have never read the Percy Jackson books, though I have friends who are familiar with it and I've heard lots of positive stuff about it. (I've also listened to some of the musical soundtrack and I liked what I heard!)

I sadly was introduced to Percy Jackson by the awful film adaptation of it from 2010, and at the time, I misguidedly assumed that the Lightning Thief film was a relatively decent adaptation, since Chris Columbus (who had worked on the first two Harry Potter films, which are rather faithful to their respective books) had directed it. I was therefore a little underwhelmed by the story line, but had assumed that the things that made my Greek mythology nerd self irritated (like the film's interpretation of Hades and Persephone and Grover having to "earn his horns" a la Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life) were simply liberties the author had taken while adapting some ideas from ancient Greek myths for his fictional universe -- you know, like how Disney decided to make Hades a sassy, used-car-salesman-esque bad guy and Zeus and Hera Hercules's loving parents in their movie. And well, even if I didn't personally like those liberties taken, they are what they are, right? The author must've just used the Greek myths as a jump-off point to tell their own story, right? *snorts*

Yeah, no, as it turned out, those things I didn't care for weren't liberties the original author took, while telling his story -- instead they were changes the filmmakers made to the author's story that actually flew in the face of what the author intended. As I soon found out online from Percy Jackson fans, for some bizarre reason, Chris Columbus did NOT decide to respect Rick Riordan's vision in the same way he did Jo Rowling's, and Riordan in fact was actually incredibly clever in adapting the ancient Greeks' myths for the modern era. And yeah, that really sucks! I mean, from what I gather, the original Lightning Thief book is something of an homage to Homer's Odyssey, which is actually one of my favorite books of all time! That's friggin' awesome!

Now that Percy Jackson has come to Disney+ and its fanbase overall seems to be much more approving of what's been released so far, I'm really looking forward to watching it, so I can get a better look at what so many people have such fondness for. And if I have time, maybe I'll finally knuckle down and read the books too! If nothing else, I've heard lots of very nice things about Rick Riordan and the personal feelings that went into the world and cast of characters he created, and I'm glad he's been given more say in how they're now being adapted for a new generation. 💛

To be fair, the situations these three characters were in are very different in a few key ways that don't have to do with gender. Ariel chose to give up her family and entire life under the sea (supposedly for Eric, but really also because she loved the human world like nothing else), while Aladdin had nothing to lose family-wise or otherwise by pursuing Jasmine romantically and Hercules -- by staying with Meg -- also ended up being able to stay with the family who'd raised him (Alcmene and Amphitrion) and his mentor Phil, all of whom he would've had to leave behind and eventually watch from afar and die if he'd become a god. The decision Herc made also had to do with the culmination of his character arc, deciding "where he belonged" wasn't necessarily where everyone was strong like him, but where the person he loved was. Even Aladdin had to learn through pursuing Jasmine to accept himself as he was. In contrast, Ariel has no real character arc, despite being a flawed character -- instead the arc is done mainly by her father Triton, in having to learn to let his daughter go. And of course by this point, Ariel hadn't even spoken to Eric or had any kind of real conversation with him, while Aladdin and Jasmine had had a real heart-to-heart (even if yeah, they still only knew each other for less a day) and Hercules and Meg had had a whole movie to bond.

But all this aside -- yes, Ariel is far from the only person to sacrifice a lot for love. I mean, Phillip didn't seem the least bit daunted when his father insinuated that he'd be giving up "the throne, the kingdom" for "some nobody" (A.K.A. Briar Rose/Aurora), after he'd only known her for less than a day. Milo sacrifices his whole life in England to stay in Atlantis and rule beside Kida, not just for her, but also out of love for her world and culture (kind of like Ariel, how about that!). Jane Porter ended up deciding to not return to England (originally not with her father) to stay in the jungle with Tarzan. Oh yeah, and originally Tarzan was set to potentially sacrifice ever seeing his home, adopted family and friends again in order to be with Jane! And the framing of Ariel already not feeling fully herself as a mermaid and being so enamored with the human world way before meeting Eric, as well as Triton having traumatized her by destroying all of her treasures less than an hour earlier, are often completely ignored. And yes, I would suspect sexism, specifically toward teenage girls -- as well as a very shallow, cynical reading of The Little Mermaid's overall story -- could be to blame for that.

LMAO, and here I was imagining a parody of Under the Sea. 😂