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Isle or Auradon? -King Beast Disney’s Descendants 1

image from Heroes and Villains Fandom

Throughout Disney stories heroes and villains have been really clear cut and easy to identify but is that also the case for the film Descendants? King Beast is as you all know the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, but he is also the first King of Auradon. Lauded as a hero by all of his kingdom he is someone who always strives to do good and condemns evil. But do his actions reflect that?

In the beginning of the movie we see his son Ben issue a royal proclamation that the kids of the heroes’ villains should be given a chance to live in Auradon with the rest of the heroes, but right away we see King Beast disagree with it. The issue he says is that they are the children of their greatest enemies and are guilty of “unspeakable crimes”. What crimes did the children commit? They were simply born to the wrong family and in his eyes are guilty purely by association. He left the children of the Isle of the Lost all alone with their villain parents, forget the fact of what those parents would do to their kids, and never once thought to check that they were alright with their situation.

Even without these facts did Beast even deserve to live in Auradon himself, because if we go by the original Disney story then that sings a different tune. In the original story Beast kidnaps Belle’s father Maurice, holds him prisoner without any food or water (that we could see), and then instead of letting him go takes Belle herself as a prisoner for eternity. Despite the fact that Belle and Beast did get married that does not change the fact that he still kept two innocent people prisoner without consent.

So I will leave you with this question, did Beast truly deserve to live in Auradon or should he have lived in the Isle of the Lost with the rest of the villains?

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Repressed Emotions and Depression -Pixar’s Riley Inside Out

image from Pop Culture Wonders 

Is it really healthy for someone to suppress their emotions in the long term? Riley is the “main character” from the Pixar film Inside Out, she is always depicted to be a happy girl who rarely if ever feels sad. Although as we can see all throughout the movie, it is not necessarily that she doesn’t feel any kind of sadness it is more like she has been purposefully repressing it in order to keep her parents happy. Riley is someone who cares deeply for her family and will do anything she can in order to keep them happy even going so far as to try to never feel any kind of sadness if she can help it. This proves to be incredibly dangerous for her as we see her fall into a state of depression. First losing Joy and Sadness with only Anger, Fear, and Disgust driving her and then going increasingly numb to her surroundings. Throughout the movie you can see her losing her “islands”, also known as core parts of her personality due to her repressed emotions. This eventually leads her to attempt to run away from home after stealing her mom’s credit card in order to go back to Minnesota. At the end of the day what Riley had needed in order for her to truly heal was to let her parent’s know that she wasn’t able to be the happy girl they wanted her to be in that moment, and that is what let her parents know that she needed help. All of these events led her to finally developing her first mixed memory (bittersweet)when she was finally comforted by her parents.

Do you think it was dangerous for Riley to suppress her emotions? Would running away from home have solved anything? Comment below with your answers!

Stay tuned for our next post!

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Useless or Misunderstood? -Pixar’s Sadness Inside Out

image from Pixar Fandom Sadness

Is a character truly useless or are they simply misunderstood? Throughout the film Inside Out you can see how Sadness puts herself down as having no purpose in helping her human Riley, even the other emotions themselves tell her she’s useless and has no purpose. This film easily shows how the other emotions, as a result Riley herself, repress Sadness and don’t let her do her job. Throughout the movie you see her constantly touching some of Riley’s old memories as well as a core memory and as a result they became permanently sad. While the other emotions criticized Sadness and told her that she had messed up, I took it another way. I had believed that the reason that Sadness had kept on touching the old memories was because she couldn’t help herself and it had been what Riley had needed at the time. Riley had moved to a completely new and unknown place and she kept on repressing her emotions, primarily Sadness, at some point she was going to explode in a big way. All of those memories that Sadness kept touching were old memories and they were memories that she would never be able to relive again with the same people that she had loved. Of course Sadness was going to keep touching them because to Riley those memories weren’t happy anymore.

Sadness’s self doubt keeps on rearing its head and comes to a breaking point when Joy nearly leaves her behind to essentially die because she believed Sadness had no purpose. Joy nearly didn’t get to Sadness in time to be able to save Riley but when she did at the end of the day it was only Sadness who could save her.

Something else that was also rather interesting was the fact that Riley’s mom had Sadness as her chief emotion. It would be easy to assume that the mom is a very sad person but at the end of the day our emotions aren’t simple. An emotion that most people see as one thing can easily be something else. For example what I believe the mom’s chief emotion go be is not Sadness but rather Empathy because at the end of the day you need sadness in order to understand the feelings of other people and empathize with them.

So what do you think, is Sadness truly useless or is she misunderstood?

Tune in next time!

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Hero or Villain? -Pixar’s Joy from Inside Out

image from Pixar Fandom Joy

Joy from Inside Out is quite a complex character when you look through her actions all throughout her movie. Is she a hero or a villain? The answer to this question is easily neither. Sometimes it is easy to distinguish between one or the other but in this case Joy is quite easily classified as more of an anti-hero. Throughout the movie you can see her trying her best to keep her human Riley as happy as possible through a difficult move from her hometown of Minnesota to San Francisco. Despite the fact that Riley had to leave her friends, her hockey team, and all of her precious memories behind, Joy still attempted to strong arm the other emotions and have Riley feel permanently happy even going as far as suppressing Sadness which was the emotion that Riley needed to be able to heal. She unintentionally banishes herself and Sadness from the emotions headquarters because she did not want Riley to feel any kind of Sadness in her life. She meets a new friend in Bing Bong who helps her and Sadness get back to headquarters and who helps her understand that not everything in life is going to be joyful and that sometimes you need Sadness in order to feel joy.

Before she can learn this though, she makes the horrible decision to try and leave Sadness behind so she herself can go back to headquarters alone and “save” Riley. It is because of this that she finds an earlier memory that while joyful at the time had started out sad. It was then she realized that while the memory itself had begun sad, it changed because people had realized that Riley had needed help and then they came to comfort her. After finally realizing that what Riley needed in that moment was to feel sad about all that she lost when she left Minnesota, she went on to find Sadness so that they both could return to headquarters and Sadness could fix Riley.

At the end of the day the only thing that Joy truly wanted was to protect her human from pain and to keep her healthy and happy but she went about it the absolute wrong way. For this film Joy’s actions also perfectly showed how damaging toxic positivity could be to a person and how much her actions had truly hurt Riley.

Thanks for reading and let me know your thoughts on the bottom! Tune in next time!

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Welcome Everyone!

Welcome to FilmTail Character Reviews, where we will be exploring all the different characters in some of my favorite films and television shows! We will be looking at what makes each character tick and how their actions throughout their films and shows change over time. We will also be looking at what kind of consequences all these amazing characters will have on their loved ones or on the plot of their stories themselves!

So if you are a television or a film enthusiast then this is the place for you! So come and join, give your own thoughts, have rousing debates, but most importantly have fun discussing some of your most favorite characters. So be sure to subscribe and come and join our look into the world of film and television!