Disney Series
Those who have known me for any length of time know that I am a lover of (almost) all things Disney. Now that they own Marvel and Star Wars, it would be nigh on impossible for me to separate myself from them forever. We watch and rewatch Disney movies in this house as background noise. We are saturated in the music and the stories, playing make-believe in the worlds that have been created. As such, these stories play an outsized role in shaping who my daughter is becoming.
As you may be aware, Encanto came out late last year and finally appeared on Disney+ on Christmas Eve. The first watching left my daughter and me both in tears, and we have watched it individually or as a family probably more than once a day since then. We have had numerous discussions about what we love in the music and story, pointing out details of visual foreshadowing and little funny Easter Egg type things we find anew with each watching, and having deep discussions about how rich and powerful the character and storytelling changes is Disney are. Today, my hubby reposted someone’s Facebook post that took the position that Mariano was the most important character in Encanto, not for Encanto’s story, but for “Disney.” I thought there was a lot of wisdom there, but I thought that there were many other pieces of Encanto that needed recognition for much the same reason. After quickly dropping a few in the comments, I went on to breakfast and started to think of some major changes that had shown up in Raya and the Last Dragon. And thus, this new idea was born. This is my discussion of many of the positive changes in Disney storytelling that have come “in my time.” The dividing line for these changes could be any number of places and there is arguable support for any of them. For my purposes, I have decided to make the division pre- and post-The Little Mermaid for three reasons:
1) Disney had very much fallen out of the blockbuster animation business until The Little Mermaid resurrected it from the dead.
2) Beauty and the Beast was the first Disney animated movie I saw in the theater, and since The Little Mermaid is the movie right before it, this is the Disney “I grew up with.”
3) Disney films were only available on VHS “back in my day” and “came out of the vault” once every ten years, so I was an adult before I had seen most of Disney’s early animation films, but I had been exposed to their art and story in book form for as long as I can remember. Thus, those stories still had a significant impact on my childhood in terms of princess worship and dreams, but not in the same way that the animated movies did.
Chances are that I will not manage to say everything about a particular movie in one post, and I am not planning on doing these in any particular order. I will try to tag them for search purposes, however. So, if you’re interested, I would love to have you come along on my journey through changes in Disney storytelling.
