#disney pay money for better cgi challenge

[intermundia]

could the anakin deaging cgi be better? yes, absolutely. but i've also decided that he is a force ghost or hallucination or whatever, so he can be a little uncanny valley, as a treat. he almost looks like he's about to morph from his vaguely creepy angelic form into a demonic one, which imho would be great. i don't want ahsoka to be talking to the 'real' anakin in the force, i want her to be confronting some version of him in a vision, generated as a manifestation of dealing with her own issues with her past and having a padawan. i don't want 'actual' anakin to be involved at all, you know? so yes, make him a vaguely unsettling looking dream being, that's fine. just as long as he's not supposed to be real.

[blazehedgehog]

What do you think about Epic's Fortnite war with Apple and Google?

For those who aren’t aware: the other night, Epic launched a new system to pay them directly for Fortnite currency. Normally, what happens is that for every transaction that goes through a digital storefront, a percentage of that goes back to the people who own and operate the storefront. By paying Epic directly, you sidestep that percentage entirely, and to celebrate this, Epic lowered the price of Fortnite’s digital currency, vbucks. Whereas it used to be roughly $10 = 1000 vbucks, it was dropped to $8. This made Apple (and later Google) angry, because they are no longer getting their cut. In response, they removed Fortnite from the iOS and Android app stores, which in turn caused Epic to file a lawsuit with them over unfair practices.

It’s a very complicated situation.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say Apple sucks. They make products that exist more as a status symbol than anything else, and they frequently do incredibly stupid things to their hardware just for the sake of maintaining a sense of “artistic merit.” That’s not to say Apple products are unusable or poorly made, but they are for a very specific type of person, most of which have lots of money to afford them and are very concerned how they project their social class.

So I’d love for someone to take Apple down a peg or two. They deserve it. Google isn’t exactly innocent, either. Consider that Google used to have a message on their company page about how they will “do no evil” with their technology and power which they eventually removed because... well, y’know. They could probably also stand a bit of humbling.

At the same time, the way Epic is going about this grosses me out. They are clearly spinning this in favor of making themselves look like the innocent little guys, and they are shoring up their defenses by doing everything they can to get the consumers on their side.

Obviously, the first is lowering the price of Fortnite currency. That’s already going to engender themselves a lot of favor in their user base, but it didn’t stop there. Anyone who bought anything in Fortnite in the last few weeks -- be it currency or even real-money items -- got an extra bonus 1000 vbucks in their account today. On top of that, Epic gave away a cosmetic in Fortnite for free, and finally added a long requested skin from Save the World to Battle Royale. On top of more than a year of Epic giving away free games every month.

Where this feels incredibly calculated is that Epic also already had a whole CGI trailer ready to strike back at Apple.

All of this -- the price drop, the kickbacks for recent purchases, the free cosmetic, the video -- all of it was a tactical maneuver by Epic. Nothing about this is innocent or a happy accident.

Months likely went in to preparing for this. It's a bid for power. Not from a small indie company, but from Epic Games, a gigantic corporation that's been around since 1991. They made Unreal, Gears of War, they licensed engine technology to hundreds of developers, they've even sold tech to Disney that's been used in stuff like The Mandalorian. They own 20 international subcompanies and have over 1000 employees. They are big and wealthy, and they want more.

Epic wants you to be able to say, “They gave me all this free stuff, they’re on my side!” But are they? Or are they just on the side where they get more of your money? This is the same game they’re playing with Valve -- Epic’s deal is that they think Valve’s 30% cut for selling software on Steam is unfair. They’ve been loud about this. I’d have to look it up to be sure, but I believe Epic’s cut for their game store (EGS) is 17%.

It’s their way of putting the screws on Valve. Tim Sweeny is out there saying they’d release Fortnite on Steam if Valve would only lower their cut to 17%, but he’s saying that in full knowledge that will probably never happen. Corporations do not make these numbers up arbitrarily. Valve likely has operating costs that depend on that 30% from Steam. Tim Sweeny knows this. He’s a billionaire that runs a very large, very successful company.

When he’s out there publicly challenging Valve to lower their cut, he’s actually telling developers to come to EGS because their rates are better, because that will give Epic a more powerful marketplace. Epic is burning tons and tons and tons of money giving things away for free because they want to rattle some cages, drag these guys down to their level, and beat them at their own game. Spend big now to entrench themselves in the long run. It's what Microsoft did with the Xbox (not necessarily give things away for free, but burn endless money to dig in and establish the brand).

I think it’s fair to be uncomfortable about that. Epic is desperately trying to prove to everyone that they’re “the good guys” -- but it’s that “the lady doth protest too much” saying, you know? If you’re too desperate to prove any point, does that indicate genuine sincerity? Or is that desperation proof that there are other motives at play here?

Those motives, if they exist, are something Epic will no doubt try very hard to conceal. From where I sit, I’ll admit, I don’t know if Epic is necessarily doing anything visibly wrong. It would truly be a better world if Valve, Google, and Apple all lowered their rates and paid higher earnings out to small developers.

It's also worth mentioning that even though Epic's cut is only 17%, it's also much more of a walled garden where only the big names get released. For better or worse, 90% of the games being released on Steam are not eligible for release on Epic's store. They COULD open up EGS so more indies could benefit from those improved rates, but that's not part of their plans for the current version of their "good guy" narrative. They want you to focus on what the OTHER guys are doing wrong. It's about pressuring THEM.

It's just... Epic is being so strategic with this, so calculated, so loud about it, that something about it all feels extremely suspicious. There is a slower, more long term game being set up here, I can feel it in my bones, and I don’t like it.

[princess-of-crepes]

So much stuff happened in the 2010s

▪People thought the world would end in 2012

▪The iPad was created

▪Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine were created

▪Musically was created and then TikTok replaced it

▪3D printing became widespread and biomedical 3D printing became available

▪Most of the Twilight movies came out

▪All of The Hobbit movies came out

▪All of The Hunger Games movies came out

▪All of the Divergent books and movies came out

▪Rose gold and millennial pink were all the rage

▪Dying your hair in a variation of ombre is what everyone did

▪Unicorn everything: unicorn cupcakes, unicorn smoothies, unicorn hair

▪Dashcon was a thing

▪Our memes went from pictures with a top and bottom caption to random phrases, noises, and sounds

▪The kids born in 2000 and 2001 became adults

▪Every middle school girl was obsessed with The Selection series

▪Same sex marriage is legalized in Iceland, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Denmark, France, Luxemburg, the United States, Ireland, Colombia, Finland, Malta, Germany, Australia, Austria, Taiwan, and Ecuador

▪We saw the rise in child influencers on social media sites such as Musical.ly and Instagram

▪Reaction videos, where someone reacts to another video while commenting (usually accompanied with a video game in the background) became all the rage in the middle of the decade

▪Tea channels started popping up on YouTube

▪Beauty influencers, from Bethany Mota to Jaclyn Hill, James Charles to Jeffree Star, dominated the YouTube platform

▪All the 12 year olds started playing Minecraft. Then, they started playing Fortnite

▪Contouring and Baking became a thing in makeup. Makeup now emphasized a lot more skill

▪A climate change movement started, especially among younger people. Greta Thunberg was named Person of the Year

▪The Costa Concordia, MV Sewol, Dongfang zhi Xing, MV Neyerere and others sunk at sea

▪William and Kate got married; Harry and Meghan also got married

▪Everyone got a smartphone; flip phones are considered outdated now

▪India got more widespread access to the internet

▪Cornell's acceptance rate dropped from 24.7% to 14.1%. Harvard's dropped from 9.3% to 5.4%. More people are going to university than ever, and gaining access to top universities is harder than ever

▪Uber was invented, and is now widely used

▪Netflix became the big way to watch shows and movies

▪Blockbuster ceased operations; the last Blockbuster operates in Oregon

▪Kim Kardashian married twice; the Kardashians became a household name (Oh, and Kim is studying to be a lawyer and Kylie became the youngest self-made billionaire)

▪It has become more acceptable now than ever to express yourself the way you want, and to identify with the identity you best feel you identify with

▪Lady Gaga wore the meat dress to the VMAs

▪The Mannequin Challenge was big; planking was also a thing this decade, along with the Ice Bucket Challenge and Cinnamon Challenge

▪Pokemon Go made people happy for a month

▪An Earthquake in Haiti killed hundreds of thousands of people and affected millions

▪Greece economic crisis; Greece was bailed by the EU in 2010 and the country is still recovering

▪The Space Shuttle program ended; people started entertaining the idea of taking private trips to space

▪Hipster culture, and other cultures such as E-Girl and VSCO girl culture (by the way, VSCO was also created this decade)

▪South Korea and its culture became popular in the west, with K-pop and K-dramas among others

▪Dubstep and trap music rose in popularity

▪Selfies began to become trendy; the duck face annoyed a lot of people

▪Facebook became a playground for older generations as newer generations began to move on to other things

▪Vaping became a popular thing to do. Teen smoking rates had decreased, and then they increased again with the introduction of vaping

▪Superhero movies and movies that use a lot of CGI

▪Speaking of CGI, every movie now wanted to use it. Two dimensional movie forms began to be shafted for CGI movies

▪Live action movies, especially based on Disney's former movies, became all the rage for the studios

▪Speaking of, Disney has been busy increasing its market share; if I remember correctly, the top five highest grossing films of 2019 were made by Disney

▪Disney released another Star Wars trilogy. People had a lot of mixed feelings

▪Clothing began to become more form-fitting, and atheleisure wear became popular

▪Curvy body types began to become very popular in media; at one point, the dad bod was also popular, though for most of the decade the desirable shape for men was muscular and for women curvy

▪There was a point when there were a lot of talks about Mars colonization; around that time, a lot of space movies also came out

▪Animal Crossing New Leaf was released almost 7 years ago

▪Fire Emblem saw a revival with the success of Fire Emblem Awakening

▪Authors began to self-publish a lot more

▪ISIS rose to the public's awareness, and news of European/American teens joining the Caliphate shocked people everywhere. The last major news about ISIS was in 2019, when the US defeated Al-Baghdadi

▪Siri, and other voice assists such as Cortana and Alexa were invented and became widely used. Smart homes were now more popular as well

▪Human like robots, which are getting better and better, became popular in the public's eye

▪Tiny Houses became more popular; effective living and substituting became trendy (i.e. cubic zirconium instead of diamonds)

▪Political provocateurs became popular on YouTube

▪We got both the first clear picture of a black hole and of Pluto

▪Solar panels became used more widely

▪Paying through your phone became a thing. If anyone remembers, paying from your hand was also tried out

▪The rise in mobile gaming

▪The 3ds was released in 2011

▪Bitcoin, and by extension block chain, became much more popular

▪Twitch was launched, and people started earning loads of money through livestream donations

▪Memes' lifespans became much shorter

Obviously there are way, way more things I didn't cover. Keeping that in mind, I'm curious to see what the next decade holds for us

[turning-a-critical-eye]

Turning a Critical Eye on: The Lion King Teaser Trailer

So the teaser trailer for the remake of The Lion King came out, and people are eating it like it's being spoonfed to them. That of course means there's absolutely no risk in me saying... I'm not impressed. In fact, I'm worried. The main reason I'm worried is because every shot in that trailer is just a CGI rendering of the original. And no, beyond this point, I'm not going to complain about how it can't even hide behind the tissue-thin excuse of 'it's live-action, not animated this time around' because it's still animated, just in a computer. No, what worries me about this trailer is just the sheer lack of creativity on display here and the cynical nature of the studio bringing it to us.

Now, that's always going to be a tall order when remaking a classic as iconic as The Lion King. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that when it comes to iconic moments in movies, this could very well be the king, pun intended. Maybe not winner by default, but definitely a strong contender. So that's something director Jon Favreau was always going to be struggling against, and this trailer suggests that he lost that struggle. And before you go off on me saying that it's unfair to judge a movie strictly by its trailer: it is. That having been said, I'm not only judging this movie by its trailer, but by the broader precedent that has been set by the previous Disney remakes. My least favorite movie of 2017 was the Beauty and the Beast remake, not for being the worst movie functionally, but for what it represented and how it got rewarded for that. It doesn't really help that I think a lot of the elements in play don't work and that it screws up on pretty much every level in key areas, ranging from narrative, to theme, cinematography, writing, directing, and especially singing, but because it sticks pretty close to the original, when you strip it down all the way to ground level, it's good enough. That turned out to be enough to draw people in, because it made over a billion dollars. And yeah, that stings. It stings that a childhood classic of mine, a movie so good that and unfinished rough cut got a standing ovation at the New York Film Festival, a movie so good that it was nominated for Best Picture, which was unheard of for animated movies, is reduced to nothing more than basically functional, and then gets rewarded for it.

And that's why this Lion King trailer bugs me too. I am not worried that this movie is going to be bad, far from it. I'm worried that it's going to be basically functional and nothing more. Something that's very important here is the movie landscape it's being released into. You see, back in the mid-'90s when the original came out, we were in the middle of the Disney Renaissance. The origins of that period can be drawn back basically to the death of Walt Disney himself back in 1966, after which the animation department of the studio was really struggling to keep the movies coming, and even worse, keep good movies coming. In 1985, The Black Cauldron bombed so hard at the box office that Disney was seriously considering shutting the whole animation department down permanently. That was until Jeffery Katzenberg took over as studio head, and revitalized the Disney brand by taking it back to its roots, starting in 1989 with The Little Mermaid. These movies took the original concept that made Disney movies great in the first place and ran with them, but in an evolved and modern way. We went back to a fairy tale, a musical that wasn't trying so hard to be hip and trendy, but instead to be timeless, and it worked out. Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, these were great movies, and that brings us to The Lion King.

Finding its roots in Shakespeare's Hamlet more than anything (don't even bother bringing up Kimba the White Lion, that's an old joke that doesn't make sense when you think about it for more than ten seconds), The Lion King was a profound risk for Disney with how dark it was going to be. The other three major hits of the Renaissance had their darker moments, but none were as graphic as this one. The scene I'm referring to is of course the iconic 'Long live the King', where Scar kills Mufasa, and it's in the middle of a brutally intense action scene, and right on screen. It's not like Bambi, where the mother gets killed off-screen, no, this was front and center, killing off a major supporting character right at the end of the first act. That took balls. So did making the hyena army analogous to the goose-stepping Nazis, the scene in the elephant graveyard being quite dark, and the climax being appropriately hell-on-earth-ish.

And being dark is not the only way in which this movie was a big risk. Unlike this new remake, the trailer you got to see when you went to theaters in 1994 was just The Circle of Life, exactly the way it appears in the movie. Just the opening four minutes, that's all that was needed. A lot of people at Disney were nervous about this at the time, because they were worried that the sheer size of that scene couldn't be met by the movie itself, and that it would turn people away. Now, while of course not the entire movie is that big, the most important scenes definitely are, and that's not just in the animation. It's in the characters, the narrative, the way the story is told and the visuals are scored. This was rewarded by the public in droves, making it the highest-grossing 2D-animated movie to this very day, a record that's unlikely to be broken any time soon.

So with that kind of pedigree working against the remake, my concerns start coming into sharp focus. Again, even if they do a shot-by-shot remake, which this trailer is suggesting, it probably won't be bad, but basically functional. If you're expecting this movie to make you feel like a kid again, all wide-eyed and innocent, crying at the moment where Scar killed Mufasa, you will be bitterly disappointed. Nothing can make you feel that way anymore. Not just because you'll be in a 'been there, done that'-attitude, but because so many movies have since tried to capture a shock and awe moment like that. That's the thing about shock and awe, it only works when you're not expecting it.

And that brings us to this remake's reason for existance. With everything I've told you about the original, it's very clear that the creative team wanted to push the boundaries on what movies predominantly aimed at children, particularly Disney movies, could get away with. They wanted to adapt a story that's as well-known by adults as Hamlet, and introduce it to a new audience of children who weren't familiar with it yet. And it does that but filling the movie with colorful characters and catchy songs, but when it comes to the narrative, they didn't really pull any punches.

So what can the Lion King remake offer that the original can't? It's not going to shock us in the same way, there's a perfectly good kid-friendly adaptation of Hamlet already out there, so why make it at all? I'm not going to insult your intelligence by pretending that you don't already know why: to transfer money from your pockets into Disney's pockets. Now, all movies are business ventures that want to make money, but there should be some creative spirit on display. When it's doing nothing but copy-pasting what's already popular, it doesn't challenge us as an audience, it doesn't treat us like people. It treats us like a statistic, that because you're of a certain age, you've got some disposable income to spend on movies and are likely to have children ripe for this movie or are about to, and therefore you are statistically very likely to spend money on this. It's banking on your nostalgia for the original classic, that it's trying to lull you into a false sense of comfort, that if you pay it money, it'll make you feel all child-like and innocent again for a good hour and a half. It's a cynical move on Disney's side, treating you not as a member of the audience with the potential to be introduced to a new and exciting story, but instead as a bank account number that they can try to drain. I firmly believe that we as an audience have both the right and the obligation to ourselves to demand better than that, and that what the movies studios are giving us should be more than basically functional. That we deserve to be both challenged and treated as thinking, feeling people, and not just a wallet full of nostalgia dollars waiting to be extracted.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that's going to happen, and that I'm mostly alone in that actually wanting to see that belief through. Judging by the successes of movies that came before like the remakes of Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book and the reaction to the new trailer for The Lion King, it's going to work again, and so we'll get nothing more than this treatment for the foreseeable future. And that is why I'm worried.

[shanedakotamuir]

On Frozen 2 and Disney’s nostalgia problem

Elsa’s back. | Walt Disney Pictures

Disney used to always be looking forward. These days, it increasingly only looks back.

Nobody was more nostalgic than Marcel Proust.

The French novelist’s six-volume masterwork In Search of Lost Time is narrated by a man who’s remembering his youth, and it explores how strange and unreliable memory can be. Throughout the series, the notion of “involuntary” memory is a recurring theme, but it’s particularly important in the famous “madeleine” scene.

The scene comes early in the first volume, Swann’s Way, when the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea immediately plunges the narrator into a vivid childhood memory. It’s so well-known that it remains a cultural reference point even today, more than a century after Swann’s Way was published: To say that something is your “madeleine” is shorthand for any sensory experience that brings back a flood of childhood memories (even though mounting evidence suggests that Proust’s version may have just been soggy toast).

That sensory experiences can trigger powerful memories, particularly of youth and childhood, was not a particularly earth-shattering insight on Proust’s part — lots of people have had similar episodes. And while not all of his narrator’s recollections are fond, a lot of them seem presented through a haze of affection — the reliability of which, as the narrator us himself, is a little suspect. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” he writes.

Maurice Rougemont/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Marcel Proust famously wrote about madeleines as he explored the ways our memories are triggered.

Proust aptly describes the concept of nostalgia: a sentimental yearning for the past, which Merriam Webster defines, succinctly and evocatively, as “the state of being homesick.” And while we periodically recall certain moments as being worse than they actually were (I think of the 30 Rock episode in which Liz Lemon is shocked to discover that her memories of being bullied in high school are faulty, and she was the one doing the bullying), the past often takes on a rosy hue.

Time, distance, and the occasional dash of willful ignorance are effective modifiers. They’re why societies collectively hallucinate Golden Ages, and why so many people find the idea of making America “great again” appealing. It’s less about conserving the good of the past, and more about rejecting the present.

Nostalgia is not, as a mood, inherently bad. Sometimes, feeling a bit homesick is good. But when that feeling becomes our default posture, our guiding light, it starts to become ... troubling? Inhibiting, maybe? Stifling? If the past was when things were good, why bother to build a new future? Better to just keep reinventing the past.

Which brings us to Disney, and to Frozen 2.

Disney used to be a company that looked forward. These days, it seems more interested in looking back.

Disney now controls the lion’s share of the movie industry. In 2019 so far, five of the six highest-grossing films worldwide have been Disney properties; the sixth (Spider-Man: Far From Home) was a joint endeavor between Sony and Disney-owned Marvel. The company’s reach is staggering: It owns, among scores other entities, Pixar, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and as of earlier this year, the film and TV assets formerly held by 21st Century Fox — in addition to its own extensive and much-beloved back catalog, lots of which is now available to stream via the just-launched Disney+ service.

Disney is in the entertainment business. But what it’s selling isn’t entertainment, exactly — that’s just the vehicle for its real product, and that product has shifted and morphed over time. At one time, a big part of what Disney was selling was a vision of a utopian future, as you know, if you’ve been to Tomorrowland or Epcot at Walt Disney World.

In his speech at the opening day of Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney himself pointed to his vision of the park as a place where nostalgia and forward-looking inspiration could coexist: “Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.”

Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Walt Disney at the Disneyland grand opening in 1955.

But as we come to the end of this banner year for Disney, it’s clear that what the company wants to sell us, going forward, is a seemingly infinite heap of Proustian madeleines. Certainly the warm fuzzies have been one of Disney’s main exports for a long time, but some kind of tipping point was reached in 2019. Now, it seems evident that Disney sees provoking existential homesickness as its main job. Nostalgia is its real product.

Consider Toy Story 4, the fourth film in a series that debuted in November 1995. If you were 8 years old and saw Toy Story in theaters when it opened, you might have brought your own 8-year-old to see the new film earlier this year.

That’s a remarkable stretch of time, and the Toy Story series has stayed remarkably thematically coherent over that time. It’s a set of stories about the passage of time, about how nothing stays the same, about the fact that kids grow up and leave home — that’s why Toy Story 3 left parents bawling when Andy finally grew up and didn’t need his toys anymore. The toys, in a sense, are the parents’ stand-ins. And Toy Story 4, in which some of the toys opt to live a child-free life, feels an awful lot like a movie about being an empty nester, something that could render a parent munching popcorn with their third grader a bit verklempt, thinking about their own now-empty-nester parents who once took them to see Toy Story.

That’s the good kind of nostalgia. And the Toy Story series has successfully refreshed its basic premise over two decades — toys get lost, toys get found — in part through its willingness to surprise viewers, to crack jokes and be a little creepy and think outside the (toy) box with its narratives. So when we find ourselves feeling homesick, in a story about the passage of time, it works.

I think of this approach as generative nostalgia. It’s a way for Disney to use memory, to tap into the audience’s particular madeleines, to bolster the storytelling itself (and make an enormous wad of cash, too). Not every attempt lands, but when movie studios try to tap into nostalgia in order to generate fresh new stories with universal themes, to get creative with the familiar, it’s a good thing for art.

Pixar Animation Studios / Walt Disney Pictures

From Toy Story 4, we got Forky.

If Toy Story 4 was an example of Disney harnessing generative nostalgia, however, its so-called “live-action” remake of The Lion King was just the opposite. The film was never meant to be a standalone movie; its success was always fully dependent on the long-entrenched popularity of the 1994 animated film it recreates, in some cases shot for shot. It’s an entirely unnecessary movie — a way for Disney to test-drive high-end, lifelike CGI and get people to pay for it. And without the imaginative, sometimes visually wild artwork of the original, it falls very flat, with no new perspective on its source material.

Call it derivative nostalgia: For most audiences, The Lion King and Disney’s other live-action remakes (Aladdin was another huge hit this year) are interesting only insofar as they promise to deliver a (slightly) new spin on a beloved classic, without straying too far. We still get “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” but it’s Donald Glover and Beyoncé. A copy of the original with some of the details tweaked. That’s the appeal.

And while derivative nostalgia has its place — we rewatch our favorite movies for a reason, because we like the feelings and memories they provoke — Disney seems intent on adopting it as a modus operandi, judging from the number of remakes the company has announced. It will depend on the built-in audience of people who loved Lady and the Tramp or 101 Dalmatians to pony up for a ticket or subscribe to Disney+ and ensure these projects’ success.

But I’m convinced the urge to use your giant piles of money to endlessly replicate the past can’t be good for a culture. Certainly, human culture is cumulative; we’re always building on what came before. For millennia, storytellers have leaned on the same material, like myths and archetypes, to find new ways to tell stories. But derivative nostalgia stymies the creative impulse, miring us in the same thing over and over again and training audiences to demand the predictable. Vanilla pudding tastes good, but there’s a lot more to food than vanilla pudding.

You can witness the battle for Disney’s soul happening inside Frozen 2

These generative and derivative modes of nostalgia seem to be warring inside inside Frozen 2, which is pleasing and enjoyable even if it’s clearly designed to function as an ATM for Disney, with Frozen’s previously established fanbase acting as the bank account behind the screen. It is, thank God, no Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.

The Frozen films are aimed primarily at little girls and boys, of course — Disney’s long-running core constituency for stories about princesses and talking animals (or snowmen). But, given that the first movie came out six years ago, Frozen 2 is also for older kids. And one of the most notable things about the movie is that it’s also for their parents.

Perhaps following Pixar’s lead, the more traditional Disney Animation studio has caught onto the fact that if you want grown-ups to be happy when they take kids to the movie theater, you’ve got to make something they’ll enjoy, too. So Frozen 2 leans (more noticeably than its predecessor) into jokes the adults will appreciate, and one in particular: While the kids at my screening howled at Olaf’s slapsticky misadventures, the adults were the ones laughing as Princess Anna’s hunky boyfriend Kristoff crooned his very ’80s-sounding power ballad “Lost in the Woods.”

During a recent interview, Josh Gad (who voices Olaf) joked that the song “speaks to all of us that grew up in the ’80s.” And he’s totally right. The voice of Kristoff, Jonathan Groff, says he was surprised when the song was handed to him: “I couldn’t believe that they were going to go there,” he said, calling it “truly shocking” and later saying it has the energy of Michael Bolton. The song is about how much Kristoff needs Anna in his life; in the film, he sings it during a fantasy sequence of finding her, backed by a chorus of singing reindeer. (The official Frozen 2 soundtrack includes a version of the song by Weezer, which kind of says everything.)

As Gad pointed out, it’s definitely a sight gag for the olds in the room — the younger Gen X and older millennial parents who’ve come to see Frozen 2 with their kids, and are now being rewarded with their own extended musical joke. What’s funny about it is that the musical-style “Into the Woods” parodies was already ridiculous by the time most gen-Xers and millennials became adults; what we’re reminded of now is the sheer goofiness that was so prevalent back then, when romantic ballads were sung by guys with bad hair surrounded by unironic kitsch.

Kids born in the 21st century won’t get the joke. But Frozen 2 isn’t exclusively for them; it’s for 20th-century kids, too. In fact, though its action is set just three years after the end of Frozen, it is, like Toy Story, about the passage of time, and what it’s like to grow older. Olaf sings a song about how things don’t make sense to him now, but they will someday; Anna and Olaf reflect on how they hope everything will stay the same, even though — spoiler alert — of course, they won’t.

Walt Disney Pictures

The gang’s all back together in Frozen 2.

So Frozen 2 provokes all kinds of nostalgia. For kids who’ve already spent years dressing up as Anna and Elsa and driving their parents to distraction with “Let It Go,” the new film is a return to the happy land of Arendelle, where they’ve had many adventures. For teenagers who saw the original Frozen when they were 8 or so, but are now in high school, it’s a reminder of how far they’ve come. And for adults, it tugs on decades-old heartstrings — not just the chuckling memory of’ 80s power ballads, which might be the madeleine that reminds some of dancing at prom, but also the Disney princess stories so many of us grew up watching.

Whereas the original Frozen is a bit of an odd film — its plot structure feels a little out-of-sync with Disney’s usual storytelling, and its “true love’s kiss” comes not from a prince but a sister — Frozen 2 is much more conventional. Frozen retained some of the eerie strangeness of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale it was (very) loosely based on; Frozen 2 goes back to the usual adventure-and-return structure that has made so many classic Disney movies a success. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable.

By my lights, Frozen 2 is still a plenty enjoyable film, even if it lacks its predecessor’s subversive spark. But for me, watching generative and derivative nostalgia spar within it prompted a different sense of the familiar: bleakness about the future of mouse-eared entertainment. Disney, whatever its faults, has often been a pioneer in storytelling; now it’s resting firmly on its laurels, too often electing to spin the wheel again rather than try to reinvent it.

Nostalgia has its place. Remembering the feeling of homesickness reminds us where we came from, that we come from somewhere. But too much yearning for the past without a concomitant attempt to live in the present and push toward the future is a dangerous trap for a culture to fall into, both because it risks becoming stagnant in its art and because it may begin to to worship the past as the only place worth living in. Too much yearning for the past makes us incurious about the world. And if, as Proust wrote, the past we remember is not necessarily the one that existed, remaining stubbornly beholden to it can render us altogether incapable of dealing with the present.

The bigger Disney gets, the more it controls what most Americans — and people around the world — will see at the movies and on their TV screens, and thus it bears enormous responsibility for seeing into the future. Looking backward too much, recycling old content and relying on old formulas endlessly, becomes a snake eating its own tail.

As the endless stream of reboots and remakes and sequels and revivals that currently dominates entertainment attests, nostalgia sells. But it is also the thing most easily packaged to sell. Recycling content is the low-hanging fruit. And when Disney leans into the least creative sort of recycled content, live-action remakes — something nobody’s really asking for — it’s signaling how little it’s interested in originality.

Even when those remakes take a risk — for instance, by casting black actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid — it’s worth noting how safe the “risk” really is. Being a creative leader who celebrates inclusivity means daring to build something new, and trusting the artists to draw audiences into a new story. It doesn’t mean casting new faces in old, well-trodden roles with guaranteed built-in audiences because you’re not sure audiences will turn up otherwise. It doesn’t mean defaulting to reviving your past.

Which, ironically, is something Walt Disney was determined to keep his company from doing. As quoted in the 2007 Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons, he pushed for just the opposite: “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

Frozen 2 opens in theaters on November 21.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2OvMLXf

[gracieyvonnehunter]

On Frozen 2 and Disney’s nostalgia problem

Elsa’s back. | Walt Disney Pictures

Disney used to always be looking forward. These days, it increasingly only looks back.

Nobody was more nostalgic than Marcel Proust.

The French novelist’s six-volume masterwork In Search of Lost Time is narrated by a man who’s remembering his youth, and it explores how strange and unreliable memory can be. Throughout the series, the notion of “involuntary” memory is a recurring theme, but it’s particularly important in the famous “madeleine” scene.

The scene comes early in the first volume, Swann’s Way, when the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea immediately plunges the narrator into a vivid childhood memory. It’s so well-known that it remains a cultural reference point even today, more than a century after Swann’s Way was published: To say that something is your “madeleine” is shorthand for any sensory experience that brings back a flood of childhood memories (even though mounting evidence suggests that Proust’s version may have just been soggy toast).

That sensory experiences can trigger powerful memories, particularly of youth and childhood, was not a particularly earth-shattering insight on Proust’s part — lots of people have had similar episodes. And while not all of his narrator’s recollections are fond, a lot of them seem presented through a haze of affection — the reliability of which, as the narrator us himself, is a little suspect. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” he writes.

Maurice Rougemont/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Marcel Proust famously wrote about madeleines as he explored the ways our memories are triggered.

Proust aptly describes the concept of nostalgia: a sentimental yearning for the past, which Merriam Webster defines, succinctly and evocatively, as “the state of being homesick.” And while we periodically recall certain moments as being worse than they actually were (I think of the 30 Rock episode in which Liz Lemon is shocked to discover that her memories of being bullied in high school are faulty, and she was the one doing the bullying), the past often takes on a rosy hue.

Time, distance, and the occasional dash of willful ignorance are effective modifiers. They’re why societies collectively hallucinate Golden Ages, and why so many people find the idea of making America “great again” appealing. It’s less about conserving the good of the past, and more about rejecting the present.

Nostalgia is not, as a mood, inherently bad. Sometimes, feeling a bit homesick is good. But when that feeling becomes our default posture, our guiding light, it starts to become ... troubling? Inhibiting, maybe? Stifling? If the past was when things were good, why bother to build a new future? Better to just keep reinventing the past.

Which brings us to Disney, and to Frozen 2.

Disney used to be a company that looked forward. These days, it seems more interested in looking back.

Disney now controls the lion’s share of the movie industry. In 2019 so far, five of the six highest-grossing films worldwide have been Disney properties; the sixth (Spider-Man: Far From Home) was a joint endeavor between Sony and Disney-owned Marvel. The company’s reach is staggering: It owns, among scores other entities, Pixar, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and as of earlier this year, the film and TV assets formerly held by 21st Century Fox — in addition to its own extensive and much-beloved back catalog, lots of which is now available to stream via the just-launched Disney+ service.

Disney is in the entertainment business. But what it’s selling isn’t entertainment, exactly — that’s just the vehicle for its real product, and that product has shifted and morphed over time. At one time, a big part of what Disney was selling was a vision of a utopian future, as you know, if you’ve been to Tomorrowland or Epcot at Walt Disney World.

In his speech at the opening day of Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney himself pointed to his vision of the park as a place where nostalgia and forward-looking inspiration could coexist: “Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.”

Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Walt Disney at the Disneyland grand opening in 1955.

But as we come to the end of this banner year for Disney, it’s clear that what the company wants to sell us, going forward, is a seemingly infinite heap of Proustian madeleines. Certainly the warm fuzzies have been one of Disney’s main exports for a long time, but some kind of tipping point was reached in 2019. Now, it seems evident that Disney sees provoking existential homesickness as its main job. Nostalgia is its real product.

Consider Toy Story 4, the fourth film in a series that debuted in November 1995. If you were 8 years old and saw Toy Story in theaters when it opened, you might have brought your own 8-year-old to see the new film earlier this year.

That’s a remarkable stretch of time, and the Toy Story series has stayed remarkably thematically coherent over that time. It’s a set of stories about the passage of time, about how nothing stays the same, about the fact that kids grow up and leave home — that’s why Toy Story 3 left parents bawling when Andy finally grew up and didn’t need his toys anymore. The toys, in a sense, are the parents’ stand-ins. And Toy Story 4, in which some of the toys opt to live a child-free life, feels an awful lot like a movie about being an empty nester, something that could render a parent munching popcorn with their third grader a bit verklempt, thinking about their own now-empty-nester parents who once took them to see Toy Story.

That’s the good kind of nostalgia. And the Toy Story series has successfully refreshed its basic premise over two decades — toys get lost, toys get found — in part through its willingness to surprise viewers, to crack jokes and be a little creepy and think outside the (toy) box with its narratives. So when we find ourselves feeling homesick, in a story about the passage of time, it works.

I think of this approach as generative nostalgia. It’s a way for Disney to use memory, to tap into the audience’s particular madeleines, to bolster the storytelling itself (and make an enormous wad of cash, too). Not every attempt lands, but when movie studios try to tap into nostalgia in order to generate fresh new stories with universal themes, to get creative with the familiar, it’s a good thing for art.

Pixar Animation Studios / Walt Disney Pictures

From Toy Story 4, we got Forky.

If Toy Story 4 was an example of Disney harnessing generative nostalgia, however, its so-called “live-action” remake of The Lion King was just the opposite. The film was never meant to be a standalone movie; its success was always fully dependent on the long-entrenched popularity of the 1994 animated film it recreates, in some cases shot for shot. It’s an entirely unnecessary movie — a way for Disney to test-drive high-end, lifelike CGI and get people to pay for it. And without the imaginative, sometimes visually wild artwork of the original, it falls very flat, with no new perspective on its source material.

Call it derivative nostalgia: For most audiences, The Lion King and Disney’s other live-action remakes (Aladdin was another huge hit this year) are interesting only insofar as they promise to deliver a (slightly) new spin on a beloved classic, without straying too far. We still get “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” but it’s Donald Glover and Beyoncé. A copy of the original with some of the details tweaked. That’s the appeal.

And while derivative nostalgia has its place — we rewatch our favorite movies for a reason, because we like the feelings and memories they provoke — Disney seems intent on adopting it as a modus operandi, judging from the number of remakes the company has announced. It will depend on the built-in audience of people who loved Lady and the Tramp or 101 Dalmatians to pony up for a ticket or subscribe to Disney+ and ensure these projects’ success.

But I’m convinced the urge to use your giant piles of money to endlessly replicate the past can’t be good for a culture. Certainly, human culture is cumulative; we’re always building on what came before. For millennia, storytellers have leaned on the same material, like myths and archetypes, to find new ways to tell stories. But derivative nostalgia stymies the creative impulse, miring us in the same thing over and over again and training audiences to demand the predictable. Vanilla pudding tastes good, but there’s a lot more to food than vanilla pudding.

You can witness the battle for Disney’s soul happening inside Frozen 2

These generative and derivative modes of nostalgia seem to be warring inside inside Frozen 2, which is pleasing and enjoyable even if it’s clearly designed to function as an ATM for Disney, with Frozen’s previously established fanbase acting as the bank account behind the screen. It is, thank God, no Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.

The Frozen films are aimed primarily at little girls and boys, of course — Disney’s long-running core constituency for stories about princesses and talking animals (or snowmen). But, given that the first movie came out six years ago, Frozen 2 is also for older kids. And one of the most notable things about the movie is that it’s also for their parents.

Perhaps following Pixar’s lead, the more traditional Disney Animation studio has caught onto the fact that if you want grown-ups to be happy when they take kids to the movie theater, you’ve got to make something they’ll enjoy, too. So Frozen 2 leans (more noticeably than its predecessor) into jokes the adults will appreciate, and one in particular: While the kids at my screening howled at Olaf’s slapsticky misadventures, the adults were the ones laughing as Princess Anna’s hunky boyfriend Kristoff crooned his very ’80s-sounding power ballad “Lost in the Woods.”

During a recent interview, Josh Gad (who voices Olaf) joked that the song “speaks to all of us that grew up in the ’80s.” And he’s totally right. The voice of Kristoff, Jonathan Groff, says he was surprised when the song was handed to him: “I couldn’t believe that they were going to go there,” he said, calling it “truly shocking” and later saying it has the energy of Michael Bolton. The song is about how much Kristoff needs Anna in his life; in the film, he sings it during a fantasy sequence of finding her, backed by a chorus of singing reindeer. (The official Frozen 2 soundtrack includes a version of the song by Weezer, which kind of says everything.)

As Gad pointed out, it’s definitely a sight gag for the olds in the room — the younger Gen X and older millennial parents who’ve come to see Frozen 2 with their kids, and are now being rewarded with their own extended musical joke. What’s funny about it is that the musical-style “Into the Woods” parodies was already ridiculous by the time most gen-Xers and millennials became adults; what we’re reminded of now is the sheer goofiness that was so prevalent back then, when romantic ballads were sung by guys with bad hair surrounded by unironic kitsch.

Kids born in the 21st century won’t get the joke. But Frozen 2 isn’t exclusively for them; it’s for 20th-century kids, too. In fact, though its action is set just three years after the end of Frozen, it is, like Toy Story, about the passage of time, and what it’s like to grow older. Olaf sings a song about how things don’t make sense to him now, but they will someday; Anna and Olaf reflect on how they hope everything will stay the same, even though — spoiler alert — of course, they won’t.

Walt Disney Pictures

The gang’s all back together in Frozen 2.

So Frozen 2 provokes all kinds of nostalgia. For kids who’ve already spent years dressing up as Anna and Elsa and driving their parents to distraction with “Let It Go,” the new film is a return to the happy land of Arendelle, where they’ve had many adventures. For teenagers who saw the original Frozen when they were 8 or so, but are now in high school, it’s a reminder of how far they’ve come. And for adults, it tugs on decades-old heartstrings — not just the chuckling memory of’ 80s power ballads, which might be the madeleine that reminds some of dancing at prom, but also the Disney princess stories so many of us grew up watching.

Whereas the original Frozen is a bit of an odd film — its plot structure feels a little out-of-sync with Disney’s usual storytelling, and its “true love’s kiss” comes not from a prince but a sister — Frozen 2 is much more conventional. Frozen retained some of the eerie strangeness of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale it was (very) loosely based on; Frozen 2 goes back to the usual adventure-and-return structure that has made so many classic Disney movies a success. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable.

By my lights, Frozen 2 is still a plenty enjoyable film, even if it lacks its predecessor’s subversive spark. But for me, watching generative and derivative nostalgia spar within it prompted a different sense of the familiar: bleakness about the future of mouse-eared entertainment. Disney, whatever its faults, has often been a pioneer in storytelling; now it’s resting firmly on its laurels, too often electing to spin the wheel again rather than try to reinvent it.

Nostalgia has its place. Remembering the feeling of homesickness reminds us where we came from, that we come from somewhere. But too much yearning for the past without a concomitant attempt to live in the present and push toward the future is a dangerous trap for a culture to fall into, both because it risks becoming stagnant in its art and because it may begin to to worship the past as the only place worth living in. Too much yearning for the past makes us incurious about the world. And if, as Proust wrote, the past we remember is not necessarily the one that existed, remaining stubbornly beholden to it can render us altogether incapable of dealing with the present.

The bigger Disney gets, the more it controls what most Americans — and people around the world — will see at the movies and on their TV screens, and thus it bears enormous responsibility for seeing into the future. Looking backward too much, recycling old content and relying on old formulas endlessly, becomes a snake eating its own tail.

As the endless stream of reboots and remakes and sequels and revivals that currently dominates entertainment attests, nostalgia sells. But it is also the thing most easily packaged to sell. Recycling content is the low-hanging fruit. And when Disney leans into the least creative sort of recycled content, live-action remakes — something nobody’s really asking for — it’s signaling how little it’s interested in originality.

Even when those remakes take a risk — for instance, by casting black actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid — it’s worth noting how safe the “risk” really is. Being a creative leader who celebrates inclusivity means daring to build something new, and trusting the artists to draw audiences into a new story. It doesn’t mean casting new faces in old, well-trodden roles with guaranteed built-in audiences because you’re not sure audiences will turn up otherwise. It doesn’t mean defaulting to reviving your past.

Which, ironically, is something Walt Disney was determined to keep his company from doing. As quoted in the 2007 Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons, he pushed for just the opposite: “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

Frozen 2 opens in theaters on November 21.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2OvMLXf

[timalexanderdollery]

On Frozen 2 and Disney’s nostalgia problem

Elsa’s back. | Walt Disney Pictures

Disney used to always be looking forward. These days, it increasingly only looks back.

Nobody was more nostalgic than Marcel Proust.

The French novelist’s six-volume masterwork In Search of Lost Time is narrated by a man who’s remembering his youth, and it explores how strange and unreliable memory can be. Throughout the series, the notion of “involuntary” memory is a recurring theme, but it’s particularly important in the famous “madeleine” scene.

The scene comes early in the first volume, Swann’s Way, when the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea immediately plunges the narrator into a vivid childhood memory. It’s so well-known that it remains a cultural reference point even today, more than a century after Swann’s Way was published: To say that something is your “madeleine” is shorthand for any sensory experience that brings back a flood of childhood memories (even though mounting evidence suggests that Proust’s version may have just been soggy toast).

That sensory experiences can trigger powerful memories, particularly of youth and childhood, was not a particularly earth-shattering insight on Proust’s part — lots of people have had similar episodes. And while not all of his narrator’s recollections are fond, a lot of them seem presented through a haze of affection — the reliability of which, as the narrator us himself, is a little suspect. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” he writes.

Maurice Rougemont/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Marcel Proust famously wrote about madeleines as he explored the ways our memories are triggered.

Proust aptly describes the concept of nostalgia: a sentimental yearning for the past, which Merriam Webster defines, succinctly and evocatively, as “the state of being homesick.” And while we periodically recall certain moments as being worse than they actually were (I think of the 30 Rock episode in which Liz Lemon is shocked to discover that her memories of being bullied in high school are faulty, and she was the one doing the bullying), the past often takes on a rosy hue.

Time, distance, and the occasional dash of willful ignorance are effective modifiers. They’re why societies collectively hallucinate Golden Ages, and why so many people find the idea of making America “great again” appealing. It’s less about conserving the good of the past, and more about rejecting the present.

Nostalgia is not, as a mood, inherently bad. Sometimes, feeling a bit homesick is good. But when that feeling becomes our default posture, our guiding light, it starts to become ... troubling? Inhibiting, maybe? Stifling? If the past was when things were good, why bother to build a new future? Better to just keep reinventing the past.

Which brings us to Disney, and to Frozen 2.

Disney used to be a company that looked forward. These days, it seems more interested in looking back.

Disney now controls the lion’s share of the movie industry. In 2019 so far, five of the six highest-grossing films worldwide have been Disney properties; the sixth (Spider-Man: Far From Home) was a joint endeavor between Sony and Disney-owned Marvel. The company’s reach is staggering: It owns, among scores other entities, Pixar, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and as of earlier this year, the film and TV assets formerly held by 21st Century Fox — in addition to its own extensive and much-beloved back catalog, lots of which is now available to stream via the just-launched Disney+ service.

Disney is in the entertainment business. But what it’s selling isn’t entertainment, exactly — that’s just the vehicle for its real product, and that product has shifted and morphed over time. At one time, a big part of what Disney was selling was a vision of a utopian future, as you know, if you’ve been to Tomorrowland or Epcot at Walt Disney World.

In his speech at the opening day of Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney himself pointed to his vision of the park as a place where nostalgia and forward-looking inspiration could coexist: “Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.”

Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Walt Disney at the Disneyland grand opening in 1955.

But as we come to the end of this banner year for Disney, it’s clear that what the company wants to sell us, going forward, is a seemingly infinite heap of Proustian madeleines. Certainly the warm fuzzies have been one of Disney’s main exports for a long time, but some kind of tipping point was reached in 2019. Now, it seems evident that Disney sees provoking existential homesickness as its main job. Nostalgia is its real product.

Consider Toy Story 4, the fourth film in a series that debuted in November 1995. If you were 8 years old and saw Toy Story in theaters when it opened, you might have brought your own 8-year-old to see the new film earlier this year.

That’s a remarkable stretch of time, and the Toy Story series has stayed remarkably thematically coherent over that time. It’s a set of stories about the passage of time, about how nothing stays the same, about the fact that kids grow up and leave home — that’s why Toy Story 3 left parents bawling when Andy finally grew up and didn’t need his toys anymore. The toys, in a sense, are the parents’ stand-ins. And Toy Story 4, in which some of the toys opt to live a child-free life, feels an awful lot like a movie about being an empty nester, something that could render a parent munching popcorn with their third grader a bit verklempt, thinking about their own now-empty-nester parents who once took them to see Toy Story.

That’s the good kind of nostalgia. And the Toy Story series has successfully refreshed its basic premise over two decades — toys get lost, toys get found — in part through its willingness to surprise viewers, to crack jokes and be a little creepy and think outside the (toy) box with its narratives. So when we find ourselves feeling homesick, in a story about the passage of time, it works.

I think of this approach as generative nostalgia. It’s a way for Disney to use memory, to tap into the audience’s particular madeleines, to bolster the storytelling itself (and make an enormous wad of cash, too). Not every attempt lands, but when movie studios try to tap into nostalgia in order to generate fresh new stories with universal themes, to get creative with the familiar, it’s a good thing for art.

Pixar Animation Studios / Walt Disney Pictures

From Toy Story 4, we got Forky.

If Toy Story 4 was an example of Disney harnessing generative nostalgia, however, its so-called “live-action” remake of The Lion King was just the opposite. The film was never meant to be a standalone movie; its success was always fully dependent on the long-entrenched popularity of the 1994 animated film it recreates, in some cases shot for shot. It’s an entirely unnecessary movie — a way for Disney to test-drive high-end, lifelike CGI and get people to pay for it. And without the imaginative, sometimes visually wild artwork of the original, it falls very flat, with no new perspective on its source material.

Call it derivative nostalgia: For most audiences, The Lion King and Disney’s other live-action remakes (Aladdin was another huge hit this year) are interesting only insofar as they promise to deliver a (slightly) new spin on a beloved classic, without straying too far. We still get “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” but it’s Donald Glover and Beyoncé. A copy of the original with some of the details tweaked. That’s the appeal.

And while derivative nostalgia has its place — we rewatch our favorite movies for a reason, because we like the feelings and memories they provoke — Disney seems intent on adopting it as a modus operandi, judging from the number of remakes the company has announced. It will depend on the built-in audience of people who loved Lady and the Tramp or 101 Dalmatians to pony up for a ticket or subscribe to Disney+ and ensure these projects’ success.

But I’m convinced the urge to use your giant piles of money to endlessly replicate the past can’t be good for a culture. Certainly, human culture is cumulative; we’re always building on what came before. For millennia, storytellers have leaned on the same material, like myths and archetypes, to find new ways to tell stories. But derivative nostalgia stymies the creative impulse, miring us in the same thing over and over again and training audiences to demand the predictable. Vanilla pudding tastes good, but there’s a lot more to food than vanilla pudding.

You can witness the battle for Disney’s soul happening inside Frozen 2

These generative and derivative modes of nostalgia seem to be warring inside inside Frozen 2, which is pleasing and enjoyable even if it’s clearly designed to function as an ATM for Disney, with Frozen’s previously established fanbase acting as the bank account behind the screen. It is, thank God, no Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.

The Frozen films are aimed primarily at little girls and boys, of course — Disney’s long-running core constituency for stories about princesses and talking animals (or snowmen). But, given that the first movie came out six years ago, Frozen 2 is also for older kids. And one of the most notable things about the movie is that it’s also for their parents.

Perhaps following Pixar’s lead, the more traditional Disney Animation studio has caught onto the fact that if you want grown-ups to be happy when they take kids to the movie theater, you’ve got to make something they’ll enjoy, too. So Frozen 2 leans (more noticeably than its predecessor) into jokes the adults will appreciate, and one in particular: While the kids at my screening howled at Olaf’s slapsticky misadventures, the adults were the ones laughing as Princess Anna’s hunky boyfriend Kristoff crooned his very ’80s-sounding power ballad “Lost in the Woods.”

During a recent interview, Josh Gad (who voices Olaf) joked that the song “speaks to all of us that grew up in the ’80s.” And he’s totally right. The voice of Kristoff, Jonathan Groff, says he was surprised when the song was handed to him: “I couldn’t believe that they were going to go there,” he said, calling it “truly shocking” and later saying it has the energy of Michael Bolton. The song is about how much Kristoff needs Anna in his life; in the film, he sings it during a fantasy sequence of finding her, backed by a chorus of singing reindeer. (The official Frozen 2 soundtrack includes a version of the song by Weezer, which kind of says everything.)

As Gad pointed out, it’s definitely a sight gag for the olds in the room — the younger Gen X and older millennial parents who’ve come to see Frozen 2 with their kids, and are now being rewarded with their own extended musical joke. What’s funny about it is that the musical-style “Into the Woods” parodies was already ridiculous by the time most gen-Xers and millennials became adults; what we’re reminded of now is the sheer goofiness that was so prevalent back then, when romantic ballads were sung by guys with bad hair surrounded by unironic kitsch.

Kids born in the 21st century won’t get the joke. But Frozen 2 isn’t exclusively for them; it’s for 20th-century kids, too. In fact, though its action is set just three years after the end of Frozen, it is, like Toy Story, about the passage of time, and what it’s like to grow older. Olaf sings a song about how things don’t make sense to him now, but they will someday; Anna and Olaf reflect on how they hope everything will stay the same, even though — spoiler alert — of course, they won’t.

Walt Disney Pictures

The gang’s all back together in Frozen 2.

So Frozen 2 provokes all kinds of nostalgia. For kids who’ve already spent years dressing up as Anna and Elsa and driving their parents to distraction with “Let It Go,” the new film is a return to the happy land of Arendelle, where they’ve had many adventures. For teenagers who saw the original Frozen when they were 8 or so, but are now in high school, it’s a reminder of how far they’ve come. And for adults, it tugs on decades-old heartstrings — not just the chuckling memory of’ 80s power ballads, which might be the madeleine that reminds some of dancing at prom, but also the Disney princess stories so many of us grew up watching.

Whereas the original Frozen is a bit of an odd film — its plot structure feels a little out-of-sync with Disney’s usual storytelling, and its “true love’s kiss” comes not from a prince but a sister — Frozen 2 is much more conventional. Frozen retained some of the eerie strangeness of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale it was (very) loosely based on; Frozen 2 goes back to the usual adventure-and-return structure that has made so many classic Disney movies a success. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable.

By my lights, Frozen 2 is still a plenty enjoyable film, even if it lacks its predecessor’s subversive spark. But for me, watching generative and derivative nostalgia spar within it prompted a different sense of the familiar: bleakness about the future of mouse-eared entertainment. Disney, whatever its faults, has often been a pioneer in storytelling; now it’s resting firmly on its laurels, too often electing to spin the wheel again rather than try to reinvent it.

Nostalgia has its place. Remembering the feeling of homesickness reminds us where we came from, that we come from somewhere. But too much yearning for the past without a concomitant attempt to live in the present and push toward the future is a dangerous trap for a culture to fall into, both because it risks becoming stagnant in its art and because it may begin to to worship the past as the only place worth living in. Too much yearning for the past makes us incurious about the world. And if, as Proust wrote, the past we remember is not necessarily the one that existed, remaining stubbornly beholden to it can render us altogether incapable of dealing with the present.

The bigger Disney gets, the more it controls what most Americans — and people around the world — will see at the movies and on their TV screens, and thus it bears enormous responsibility for seeing into the future. Looking backward too much, recycling old content and relying on old formulas endlessly, becomes a snake eating its own tail.

As the endless stream of reboots and remakes and sequels and revivals that currently dominates entertainment attests, nostalgia sells. But it is also the thing most easily packaged to sell. Recycling content is the low-hanging fruit. And when Disney leans into the least creative sort of recycled content, live-action remakes — something nobody’s really asking for — it’s signaling how little it’s interested in originality.

Even when those remakes take a risk — for instance, by casting black actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid — it’s worth noting how safe the “risk” really is. Being a creative leader who celebrates inclusivity means daring to build something new, and trusting the artists to draw audiences into a new story. It doesn’t mean casting new faces in old, well-trodden roles with guaranteed built-in audiences because you’re not sure audiences will turn up otherwise. It doesn’t mean defaulting to reviving your past.

Which, ironically, is something Walt Disney was determined to keep his company from doing. As quoted in the 2007 Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons, he pushed for just the opposite: “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

Frozen 2 opens in theaters on November 21.

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On Frozen 2 and Disney’s nostalgia problem

Elsa’s back. | Walt Disney Pictures

Disney used to always be looking forward. These days, it increasingly only looks back.

Nobody was more nostalgic than Marcel Proust.

The French novelist’s six-volume masterwork In Search of Lost Time is narrated by a man who’s remembering his youth, and it explores how strange and unreliable memory can be. Throughout the series, the notion of “involuntary” memory is a recurring theme, but it’s particularly important in the famous “madeleine” scene.

The scene comes early in the first volume, Swann’s Way, when the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea immediately plunges the narrator into a vivid childhood memory. It’s so well-known that it remains a cultural reference point even today, more than a century after Swann’s Way was published: To say that something is your “madeleine” is shorthand for any sensory experience that brings back a flood of childhood memories (even though mounting evidence suggests that Proust’s version may have just been soggy toast).

That sensory experiences can trigger powerful memories, particularly of youth and childhood, was not a particularly earth-shattering insight on Proust’s part — lots of people have had similar episodes. And while not all of his narrator’s recollections are fond, a lot of them seem presented through a haze of affection — the reliability of which, as the narrator us himself, is a little suspect. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” he writes.

Maurice Rougemont/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Marcel Proust famously wrote about madeleines as he explored the ways our memories are triggered.

Proust aptly describes the concept of nostalgia: a sentimental yearning for the past, which Merriam Webster defines, succinctly and evocatively, as “the state of being homesick.” And while we periodically recall certain moments as being worse than they actually were (I think of the 30 Rock episode in which Liz Lemon is shocked to discover that her memories of being bullied in high school are faulty, and she was the one doing the bullying), the past often takes on a rosy hue.

Time, distance, and the occasional dash of willful ignorance are effective modifiers. They’re why societies collectively hallucinate Golden Ages, and why so many people find the idea of making America “great again” appealing. It’s less about conserving the good of the past, and more about rejecting the present.

Nostalgia is not, as a mood, inherently bad. Sometimes, feeling a bit homesick is good. But when that feeling becomes our default posture, our guiding light, it starts to become ... troubling? Inhibiting, maybe? Stifling? If the past was when things were good, why bother to build a new future? Better to just keep reinventing the past.

Which brings us to Disney, and to Frozen 2.

Disney used to be a company that looked forward. These days, it seems more interested in looking back.

Disney now controls the lion’s share of the movie industry. In 2019 so far, five of the six highest-grossing films worldwide have been Disney properties; the sixth (Spider-Man: Far From Home) was a joint endeavor between Sony and Disney-owned Marvel. The company’s reach is staggering: It owns, among scores other entities, Pixar, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and as of earlier this year, the film and TV assets formerly held by 21st Century Fox — in addition to its own extensive and much-beloved back catalog, lots of which is now available to stream via the just-launched Disney+ service.

Disney is in the entertainment business. But what it’s selling isn’t entertainment, exactly — that’s just the vehicle for its real product, and that product has shifted and morphed over time. At one time, a big part of what Disney was selling was a vision of a utopian future, as you know, if you’ve been to Tomorrowland or Epcot at Walt Disney World.

In his speech at the opening day of Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney himself pointed to his vision of the park as a place where nostalgia and forward-looking inspiration could coexist: “Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.”

Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Walt Disney at the Disneyland grand opening in 1955.

But as we come to the end of this banner year for Disney, it’s clear that what the company wants to sell us, going forward, is a seemingly infinite heap of Proustian madeleines. Certainly the warm fuzzies have been one of Disney’s main exports for a long time, but some kind of tipping point was reached in 2019. Now, it seems evident that Disney sees provoking existential homesickness as its main job. Nostalgia is its real product.

Consider Toy Story 4, the fourth film in a series that debuted in November 1995. If you were 8 years old and saw Toy Story in theaters when it opened, you might have brought your own 8-year-old to see the new film earlier this year.

That’s a remarkable stretch of time, and the Toy Story series has stayed remarkably thematically coherent over that time. It’s a set of stories about the passage of time, about how nothing stays the same, about the fact that kids grow up and leave home — that’s why Toy Story 3 left parents bawling when Andy finally grew up and didn’t need his toys anymore. The toys, in a sense, are the parents’ stand-ins. And Toy Story 4, in which some of the toys opt to live a child-free life, feels an awful lot like a movie about being an empty nester, something that could render a parent munching popcorn with their third grader a bit verklempt, thinking about their own now-empty-nester parents who once took them to see Toy Story.

That’s the good kind of nostalgia. And the Toy Story series has successfully refreshed its basic premise over two decades — toys get lost, toys get found — in part through its willingness to surprise viewers, to crack jokes and be a little creepy and think outside the (toy) box with its narratives. So when we find ourselves feeling homesick, in a story about the passage of time, it works.

I think of this approach as generative nostalgia. It’s a way for Disney to use memory, to tap into the audience’s particular madeleines, to bolster the storytelling itself (and make an enormous wad of cash, too). Not every attempt lands, but when movie studios try to tap into nostalgia in order to generate fresh new stories with universal themes, to get creative with the familiar, it’s a good thing for art.

Pixar Animation Studios / Walt Disney Pictures

From Toy Story 4, we got Forky.

If Toy Story 4 was an example of Disney harnessing generative nostalgia, however, its so-called “live-action” remake of The Lion King was just the opposite. The film was never meant to be a standalone movie; its success was always fully dependent on the long-entrenched popularity of the 1994 animated film it recreates, in some cases shot for shot. It’s an entirely unnecessary movie — a way for Disney to test-drive high-end, lifelike CGI and get people to pay for it. And without the imaginative, sometimes visually wild artwork of the original, it falls very flat, with no new perspective on its source material.

Call it derivative nostalgia: For most audiences, The Lion King and Disney’s other live-action remakes (Aladdin was another huge hit this year) are interesting only insofar as they promise to deliver a (slightly) new spin on a beloved classic, without straying too far. We still get “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” but it’s Donald Glover and Beyoncé. A copy of the original with some of the details tweaked. That’s the appeal.

And while derivative nostalgia has its place — we rewatch our favorite movies for a reason, because we like the feelings and memories they provoke — Disney seems intent on adopting it as a modus operandi, judging from the number of remakes the company has announced. It will depend on the built-in audience of people who loved Lady and the Tramp or 101 Dalmatians to pony up for a ticket or subscribe to Disney+ and ensure these projects’ success.

But I’m convinced the urge to use your giant piles of money to endlessly replicate the past can’t be good for a culture. Certainly, human culture is cumulative; we’re always building on what came before. For millennia, storytellers have leaned on the same material, like myths and archetypes, to find new ways to tell stories. But derivative nostalgia stymies the creative impulse, miring us in the same thing over and over again and training audiences to demand the predictable. Vanilla pudding tastes good, but there’s a lot more to food than vanilla pudding.

You can witness the battle for Disney’s soul happening inside Frozen 2

These generative and derivative modes of nostalgia seem to be warring inside inside Frozen 2, which is pleasing and enjoyable even if it’s clearly designed to function as an ATM for Disney, with Frozen’s previously established fanbase acting as the bank account behind the screen. It is, thank God, no Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.

The Frozen films are aimed primarily at little girls and boys, of course — Disney’s long-running core constituency for stories about princesses and talking animals (or snowmen). But, given that the first movie came out six years ago, Frozen 2 is also for older kids. And one of the most notable things about the movie is that it’s also for their parents.

Perhaps following Pixar’s lead, the more traditional Disney Animation studio has caught onto the fact that if you want grown-ups to be happy when they take kids to the movie theater, you’ve got to make something they’ll enjoy, too. So Frozen 2 leans (more noticeably than its predecessor) into jokes the adults will appreciate, and one in particular: While the kids at my screening howled at Olaf’s slapsticky misadventures, the adults were the ones laughing as Princess Anna’s hunky boyfriend Kristoff crooned his very ’80s-sounding power ballad “Lost in the Woods.”

During a recent interview, Josh Gad (who voices Olaf) joked that the song “speaks to all of us that grew up in the ’80s.” And he’s totally right. The voice of Kristoff, Jonathan Groff, says he was surprised when the song was handed to him: “I couldn’t believe that they were going to go there,” he said, calling it “truly shocking” and later saying it has the energy of Michael Bolton. The song is about how much Kristoff needs Anna in his life; in the film, he sings it during a fantasy sequence of finding her, backed by a chorus of singing reindeer. (The official Frozen 2 soundtrack includes a version of the song by Weezer, which kind of says everything.)

As Gad pointed out, it’s definitely a sight gag for the olds in the room — the younger Gen X and older millennial parents who’ve come to see Frozen 2 with their kids, and are now being rewarded with their own extended musical joke. What’s funny about it is that the musical-style “Into the Woods” parodies was already ridiculous by the time most gen-Xers and millennials became adults; what we’re reminded of now is the sheer goofiness that was so prevalent back then, when romantic ballads were sung by guys with bad hair surrounded by unironic kitsch.

Kids born in the 21st century won’t get the joke. But Frozen 2 isn’t exclusively for them; it’s for 20th-century kids, too. In fact, though its action is set just three years after the end of Frozen, it is, like Toy Story, about the passage of time, and what it’s like to grow older. Olaf sings a song about how things don’t make sense to him now, but they will someday; Anna and Olaf reflect on how they hope everything will stay the same, even though — spoiler alert — of course, they won’t.

Walt Disney Pictures

The gang’s all back together in Frozen 2.

So Frozen 2 provokes all kinds of nostalgia. For kids who’ve already spent years dressing up as Anna and Elsa and driving their parents to distraction with “Let It Go,” the new film is a return to the happy land of Arendelle, where they’ve had many adventures. For teenagers who saw the original Frozen when they were 8 or so, but are now in high school, it’s a reminder of how far they’ve come. And for adults, it tugs on decades-old heartstrings — not just the chuckling memory of’ 80s power ballads, which might be the madeleine that reminds some of dancing at prom, but also the Disney princess stories so many of us grew up watching.

Whereas the original Frozen is a bit of an odd film — its plot structure feels a little out-of-sync with Disney’s usual storytelling, and its “true love’s kiss” comes not from a prince but a sister — Frozen 2 is much more conventional. Frozen retained some of the eerie strangeness of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale it was (very) loosely based on; Frozen 2 goes back to the usual adventure-and-return structure that has made so many classic Disney movies a success. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable.

By my lights, Frozen 2 is still a plenty enjoyable film, even if it lacks its predecessor’s subversive spark. But for me, watching generative and derivative nostalgia spar within it prompted a different sense of the familiar: bleakness about the future of mouse-eared entertainment. Disney, whatever its faults, has often been a pioneer in storytelling; now it’s resting firmly on its laurels, too often electing to spin the wheel again rather than try to reinvent it.

Nostalgia has its place. Remembering the feeling of homesickness reminds us where we came from, that we come from somewhere. But too much yearning for the past without a concomitant attempt to live in the present and push toward the future is a dangerous trap for a culture to fall into, both because it risks becoming stagnant in its art and because it may begin to to worship the past as the only place worth living in. Too much yearning for the past makes us incurious about the world. And if, as Proust wrote, the past we remember is not necessarily the one that existed, remaining stubbornly beholden to it can render us altogether incapable of dealing with the present.

The bigger Disney gets, the more it controls what most Americans — and people around the world — will see at the movies and on their TV screens, and thus it bears enormous responsibility for seeing into the future. Looking backward too much, recycling old content and relying on old formulas endlessly, becomes a snake eating its own tail.

As the endless stream of reboots and remakes and sequels and revivals that currently dominates entertainment attests, nostalgia sells. But it is also the thing most easily packaged to sell. Recycling content is the low-hanging fruit. And when Disney leans into the least creative sort of recycled content, live-action remakes — something nobody’s really asking for — it’s signaling how little it’s interested in originality.

Even when those remakes take a risk — for instance, by casting black actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid — it’s worth noting how safe the “risk” really is. Being a creative leader who celebrates inclusivity means daring to build something new, and trusting the artists to draw audiences into a new story. It doesn’t mean casting new faces in old, well-trodden roles with guaranteed built-in audiences because you’re not sure audiences will turn up otherwise. It doesn’t mean defaulting to reviving your past.

Which, ironically, is something Walt Disney was determined to keep his company from doing. As quoted in the 2007 Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons, he pushed for just the opposite: “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

Frozen 2 opens in theaters on November 21.

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