Admittedly enough, when going to the movie theater during my Thanksgiving break, I chose Harry Potter over a Disney fairy tale. Even with that mindset, Disney’s latest animated movie “Tangled,” still did extremely well. It beat out Harry Potter this weekend, raking in $21.5 million during its second weekend.
Meet the tiny little Disney Rapunzel!
However, despite this film’s success, it seems this is the end of the “Disney princess movie” trend. Since “Snow White” came out in 1937, Disney has been releasing movies that depict fun, musical, and kid friendly (the stepsisters in “Cinderella” didn’t get their eyes pecked out at the end of the Disney movie 😉 ) spins on classic fairy tales. And let’s be honest, we all grew up with these movies. I still have about a dozen video tapes (gasp!? Videos instead of DVDs?!) with all the Disney movies I grew up with.
But it seems this trend is finally coming to an end after more than 7 decades. According to this article (and many other articles online), the “curtain is closing” on the Disney movies. The chief of the Pixar animation studios Ed Catmull states “Films and genres do run a course. They may come back later because someone has a fresh take on it … but we don’t have any other musicals or fairy tales lined up.” I also recall reading in another article a few weeks ago that studies show that by the age of five, girls no longer care about dressing up like a princess. Some six year old girls were already concerned about being hot, a trend that I definitely notice these days. But that’s a separate issue.
It seems we are entering a new era that has become disillusioned with Disney Fairy Tales. Like everything else in life, Disney and Pixar has to move on to something “new and inventive.” While this is slightly saddening and nostalgic, it was bound to happen. There is sadly not an unlimited supply of fairy tales, so even if they were to make a movie out of every fairy tale known to man (though Pixar recently did trash their ideas of a “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Snow Queen” animated film), they would run dry at some point or the other. Perhaps it’s best to close the curtains now. Someday in the future, when we’re old and gray and we’re watching our grandchildren ignore us, we may see a new line of fairy tale animated films being dished out. Trends float in and out.
As long as Disney World is still fairy-tale centric, I won’t complain.
Nothing wrong with the Disney franchise, except that its primary function is to maintain the expectations of the franchise and keep their market share of wide-eyed youngsters with parents in tow. Disney is really about “culture” about as much as McDonalds is about cuisine.