Calantha
Gryffindor Alumni
My name is Luck, this is my song, I happened by when you were gone
Posts: 4,493
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Post by Calantha on Oct 18, 2003 16:12:09 GMT -5
Hah, I was at the book store last night and saw The Da Vinci Code and was about to buy it, but then I remembered I had left my money in my pockets in the pants I had at home. Anyways... That isn't the important part. Where was I going? Oh yeah... So, my friend the other day told me the one of the lines in The Little Mermaid was a french curse word (the one that the chef says before he says "What is this?" to Sebastion) Right. And then she told me they also curse in Beauty and the Beast in french. And this really upset me. I don't want my disney movies to have some overwhelming underlying metaphor...I don't want to know that there are french curse words in it, I don't want to know how it relates to the lost religion of Mary Magdalene...I just want to know that everything works out and Ariel is happy and her father is happy and Ariel and Prince Eric have a kid in a very bad sequel.
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Post by Rue on Oct 18, 2003 19:40:28 GMT -5
Well, when you were a kid you didn't know all of that stuff. It was just that everything works out and everyone's happy. Disney puts a ton of subliminal messages in their movies, to the point where it's really scary. Like, in The Lion King, Simba and the girl lion (Nala?) are playing in the dirt, and they make a cloud rise up. If you see it in slow motion, like, frame by frame, then at one point the word "sex" is written in the cloud of dust. Go to a website, one with movie bluppers, and they'll have hundreds of inappropriate things Disney has put into their movies, but only if you do look for them, frame by frame, or in the form of French... kids might not pick up on them, but it's still really wrong. Poor Walt. He must be turning in his grave.
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Post by En on Oct 19, 2003 13:35:36 GMT -5
Yeah, the cook in The Little Mermaid says something really horrible in French... "Zut alors" which roughly translates to "Oh dang." Lumiere says the same phrase in Beauty and the Beast.
There are always going to be one or two juvenile pranksters in the animation department of anything, so I guess we'll never escape annoying stuff like the "sex cloud." But, it's just annoying. Flies at a picnic, not Godzilla in the streets.
But back to Mary Magdalene religion-symbolism -- actually, Walt himself packed esoteric symbols into his animated films, like Snow White. Apples, hearts, mirrors, you name it -- everything in that film is a classic western mythological symbol. So actually, The Little Mermaid is just falling right in line if it's got Magdalene symbols in.
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Post by Rue on Oct 19, 2003 15:00:42 GMT -5
I know they're flies at a picnic, but the whole company is clogged with flies now. And there are some things which are godzillas in the streets. For more info, see: Disney: The Mouse Betrayed by Peter & Rochelle Schweizer. It goes into how almost everything in Disney is now going to the dogs, mainly focusing on the theme parks and how unsafe they're becoming... Crazy stuff.
I don't know much about Mary Magdalene, but it would go right along if it has those symbols in it. And I think that's a part of being a Disney movie in a way- Kids movies aren't just designed for the kids, they also have jokes for adults who are stuck watching the movies with the kids.
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Post by En on Oct 19, 2003 15:56:59 GMT -5
Whoa. Okay, I wouldn't argue that the theme parks are perfectly safe, because there are a lot of people going in and out of there and there are bound to be safety concerns. And since I haven't read the book, I don't know what other evidence they present.
I do tend to be a little skeptical about books about how this or that cultural institution is going to the dogs, because I think it is a peculiar disease of middle age in Western culture to think everything is going to the dogs. Remember that time I typed up something with this guy saying society was falling apart, kids had no respect and the fall of all good morals and ideas was imminent? And it was... Socrates, writing in 480BCE?
Anyway, I don't know if this is what you were saying, but... I don't think that symbols of the religion of the Magdalene are quite as bad as swear words. In fact, I'm happy someone is using them, because I think that's a really beautiful set of symbols and one that gets misunderstood a lot (like the Magdalene herself was).
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Post by Rue on Oct 19, 2003 20:08:00 GMT -5
The evidence is completely scary. Like... Disneyworld owns the county's police department or something, so they're really good at covering stuff up, and they don't do background checks on their employees very often, which is scary, since disneyworld attracts a lot of kids and it's just... I read the book about 2 years ago I think. So things could've changed or whatever, or maybe the evidence they represented wasn't all true, because I never double-checked it, but a lot of people I've talked to have heard the same things, mostly because the guy running Disney right now is awful. I even know someone who's stopped watching Disney movies because she hates the guy so much and doesn't want to show support to him at all.
The thing I was saying about the Mary Magdalene symbols, is that that's okay. Like, if you watch almost any kids movie you'll see things in it which were targeted toward the adults watching it... Mary Magdalene symbols aren't just juvenile humor. They have a point, and a good one, and it would be really neat if The Little Mermaid had the symbols in it. What type of symbols do you mean though? I'm sort of lost on that part.
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Post by En on Oct 22, 2003 6:40:40 GMT -5
I don't much care for the "business & sales" approach to entertaining kids either but I still rent the movies, I just don't buy the products.
Magdalene symbols -- like, five-petalled roses, five-pointed stars, Ariel's red hair (Magdalene was supposed to have been a redhead ), the painting in her cave of human artifacts (none other than The Penitent Magdalene by Georges de la Tour!), fish, etc. Then you have Snow White, in which a young woman eats an apple (which, by the way, has a five-pointed star inside it if you cut it in half through the horizontal) that causes her to "fall" from the "garden" in which she was living in safety....
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Post by Nie on Nov 28, 2003 4:40:51 GMT -5
*tries to think of other symols in other Disney movies*
Hmmm....I can't think of any at the moment, but I really liked the message that Mulan sent out to young girls about girls being just as capable as boys. Before then alot of the Disney movies still had very stereotypical female characters. Like, Ariel was disobedient to her father, but what teenage girl isn't at one point? And then Snowhite and Sleeping Beauty...
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Post by En on Nov 28, 2003 19:15:06 GMT -5
You know what was really annoying about that? Because getting married should take guts. Why do girls keep falling into marriage like southern belles falling into swoons? It's a buttload of work even for people who are really trying to get along... of course if they are both trying, the work is evidently worthwhile, but how often does that happen?
I never did watch Mulan. By then I was so sick of watching little kids begging their parents for Aladdin toothbrushes and bedsheets while *&%)& Michael %&^)$%&^ Eisner got richer and the poor got poorer... Anyway, maybe I'll watch it since so many cool people seem to have liked it
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Post by Nie on Nov 28, 2003 19:33:37 GMT -5
Oooo! I think you would really like it, En. Mulan cross dresses in a nation where the penalty for girls cross dressing is death. And to add humour, she's encouraged by a tiny red dragon who was demoted by her ancestors houndreds of years ago because he got one of their family members beheaded. ;D
OK, I'll stop now before I give too much away. But I really think you'll like Mulan, She's your kind of girl.
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Post by KoNeko on Nov 29, 2003 0:11:40 GMT -5
*grins* Ahhh, I've never seen Mulan either, but I do know the Chinese poem on which the story is based, and from what I've heard of the plot, that's pretty much it, except for the midget dragon and the whole falling-in-love-with-one's-general thing. I think that's just typical Disney coming through there though.
En, qui est Michael Esner? His name is familiar...
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Post by En on Nov 29, 2003 12:08:07 GMT -5
Eisner = president of Disney Corp. who thought it would be cool to turn it into a big profit machine... by doing pretty much exactly what Walt didn't want.
Okay, well, except for the love story bit, it does sound very cool ;D I'll probably rent it pretty soon, since the rental place owes me one for renting me a dodgy copy of Matrix
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Post by Will on Nov 29, 2003 19:02:28 GMT -5
-peeks in-
Mulan! That was a great movie, to me at least. There's the whole trying-to-be-the-perfect-daughter thing in the movie that I have to deal with at home. My eye got all watery after the “Reflection” song. You also get to hear a tad bit of Mandarin Chinese, which is the language I can sort of speak... The love story isn't too big of a deal. That's not one of the big points of the movie since most of the time Mulan goes dressed like a man and calls herself Ping... Anyway, I'll stop jabbering now.
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Post by En on Dec 1, 2003 11:30:02 GMT -5
Okay, I watched it. Willow, I liked the child-trying-to-meet-expectations idea too, from both Mulan's point of view and the young captain's -- both of them feel they are under pressure to prove themselves. Which is why the four points of the film that got me most were when the captain kneels to his dead father's sword, when Mulan looks into the helmet and talks about feeling worthless, when the Emperor tells the captain that he did well, and when Mulan's father throws the sword and emblem aside and just hugs his daughter.
The spitting bit, when Ping first meets the captain, cracked me up no end. And I really appreciated a lot of the cross-dressing humour -- both Ping's efforts to do the guy thing and s/his fellow soldiers' efforts to do the concubine thing (heh).
I would like to read the poem on which the story was based. Anyone know of a good translation?
One more thing I really liked: the clever juxtaposition of the "Girl Worth Fighting For" song -- and Ping finding the little doll. Because when you think about it, knowing that little girl was lost forever was a big part of what motivated Ping later. That child, symbolised by the doll, was the girl Ping could fight for. Do you think people caught this? I hope so....
HOWEVER. Things that really, really, really annoyed me: 1. War movie with no dead people. I know, it's supposed to be for kids, but guys, war ain't pretty. And I think that not including some sign of death cheapens a lot of what Ping accomplishes, by undermining the fear s/he had to be feeling. I'm not saying I want there to be gruesome remains on the screen -- just that it really didn't work for me that there were so few signs of people in that burned village. Like, even if the men had just surveyed a lot of mysteriously-shaped ash-covered lumps and, when the captain said "Search for survivors," if they replied something like "I don't think they left any"....
Another thing that really ticks me off about recent Disney films in general: anachronistic phrases. Mushu was particularly guilty of it, but it just... really undermined the dignity of a lot of scenes. Yeah, I know you have to keep the kids laughing, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't let them experience important adult feelings like accomplishment, surprise, fear, and internal conflict. They need to see that stuff too. And dudes, if they want to call the film a "classic," they're gonna have to lay off the phrases that won't mean squat to the generation after next.
Yeah, basically, my problem is still with the sanitising process. I respect that kids don't need to be exposed to a lot of adult things. But I don't respect the idea that they should see a story of this importance and not be allowed to see that there are bigger emotions at stake. It's like baby talk. If you want your kid to grow up with no grasp of the idea that language has beauty, nuance and power, go right ahead and use it all the time.
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Post by KoNeko on Dec 1, 2003 11:41:13 GMT -5
Here, En, I found a translation of the original Ballad of Mulan... the translation is a bit rough in some bits (because of what I said before about using sounds and meanings in Chinese), but I think you'll get the main gist of it.
utd500.utdallas.edu/~hairston/mulan.html
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