#so far while rewatching i think episode two is my favorite atm

[mostlyfate]

BISHOKU TANTEI AKECHI GORO 美食探偵 明智五郎 (2020) — dir. Sugawara Shintaro

[dangermousie]

Prior to 2010 kdrama rec post

@walkwithheroes84 asked: “What are some dramas (Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and/or Korean) that are older (pre-2010) that you wish more people would watch.”

Ooooh boy, we are gonna be here all day so I am just going to do Korea and save the rest for later. I had to really cull!

A Love to Kill (2005) - I own Japanese DVDs of this, I was so obsessed. A dark, intense melo in which Rain gets a job as a bodyguard to a rising young star played by Shin Minah. His plan is to seduce and wreck her to avenge his dead brother (who he believes killed himself after she heartlessly left him for fame), but he recons without his own impossible feelings for her or the extent of SMA’s internal damage. They remain one of the most impossible, messed-up, intense, doomed OTPs I’ve ever shipped. Stock tissues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJox8iEcFMs

All In (2003) - he is a gangster, she is a nun. Have I gotten your attention yet? This was a huge hit and Lee Byung Hun and Song Hye Kyo are out of this world together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuVDFLOytQI

Beautiful Days (2001-2002) - a super classic, grown up melo about a plucky poor girl and a tortured workaholic and Choi Ji Woo and Lee Byung Hun set the screen on fire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3skKcivjJs

Capital Scandal (2007) - somehow both frothy and deeply emotional, this centers on freedom fighters and playboys and spies in 1930s Seoul. If you don’t love it, you have no heart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN-0tERlaNM

Chuno/Slave Hunters (2009) - possibly my favorite sageuk (it’s a threeway tie atm), this story about an aristocrat turned slave hunter, a general turned slave, and a slave woman turned an aristocrat, all involved with rebellion, court secrets and sheer desperation of their lives is amazing. Beyond amazing. Jang Hyuk, Oh Ji Ho and Lee Da Hae are all on fire and if you ever watch only one sageuk, make it this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vAGdXpN6no

City Hall (2009) - Kim Sun Ah as a small town civil servant and Cha Seung Won as an amoral fixer for a powerful politician sparkle beyond words in the most grown up, smart kdrama romcom I have ever seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLek2pnv8yY

Coffee Prince (2007) - Yoon Eun Hye is a woman dressing as a man, Gong Yoo as a man horrified to discover he likes her while thinking she is a boy. This was a mad hit for a reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKSupXmez5w

Damo (2003) - my first sageuk, this is as good as ever. Ha Ji Won is a police tea servant, a noble lady whose family was executed and she came down in the world; Lee Seo Jin as her noble superior who loves her silently. She infiltrates a conspiracy led by the charismatic, tortured Kim Mim Joon, and epic tragedy follows. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGkglLvjJ9k

Delightful Girl Chunhyang (2005) - back when Hong Sisters were consistently good, this is a modern take on the famous folk tale. Our heroine is a studious poor girl and our hero a ne’er-do-well son of a local prosecutor. There is arranged marriage, true love surviving some insane sacrifice, one of my all time favorite OTPs, and a heroine and hero that grow into people I was obsessed with. Confession time - I wrote fanfic for this drama!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kTGHJZIUvA

East of Eden (2008-2009) - a sprawling multigenerational epic they don’t make much of any more, this has its flaws but the plots and brotherhood and romances and the characters and the revenge are so worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6LBIo16-e8

Emperor of the Sea/Sea God (2004-2005) - a larger than life sageuk epic they don’t make any more. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j53vbAxW3d4

Family’s Honor (2008) - Kdrama does North and South. Our heroine is a widow from an aristocratic family, our hero is a noveau riche ruthless businessman who gets attracted to her. This is so so good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrAMgTKg_As

Fashion 70s (2005) - period drama about a bunch of intense cool peeps, fashion and love. Just watch it. 

https://youtu.be/qly7vkFUv3g

Friend Our Legend (2009) - the most criminally underrated drama on this list, about a group of childhood friends turned gangsters and the tragic fall out.I want a rewatch rn tbh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJQx3tA5cGs

Goong (2005) - a giddily fun take on an alternate universe where an icy modern crown prince and a bubbly commoner have to get married.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAjz-5b4P6A

Green Rose (2005) - this tale of a man (Go Soo) trying to get revenge and get back to his love (Lee Da Hae) is a modern take on Monte Cristo and has one of my fave opening scenes ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epJt6jCIOlU

Hello My Teacher (2005) - Gong Yoo is a student in love with Gong Hyo Jin’s teacher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNFoENWvEEk

Hong Gil Dong (2008) - starts out wacky, ends up by making me cry. A wonderful take on Korean Robin Hood and the OTP omg the OTP!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ingEOTBSnt0

IRIS (2009) - in the running for my favorite kdrama of all time, with definitely the most tortured hero, this starts out as a fun routine actioner until our hero’s life details in a horrifying fashion and even his attempts to right the world are doomed in this horrifyingly bleak, intense, romantic drama. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kesXxZOBzQ

Jumong (2006-2007) - the DADDY of all traditional sageuks, with insane ep count (81) and equally insane and deserved ratings. See our hero go from zero to hero and an awesome king.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILBnGNxtwXw

The Kingdom of the Winds (2008-2009) - Song Il Gook’s last sageuk (so far, though I don’t think he’s gonna bother to come back), a story about a cursed prince and his quest for love and throne, this is wonderful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1qfC0yFIf0

Last Scandal (2008) - they dated in high school. Now she is an exhausted ahjumma with a deadbeat husband and he is a huge star. A second chance romance that starts out hilarious but turns profound follows. One of my all time faves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zquHf8-p3ZU

The Legend (2007) - I’ve raved about it elsewhere; it is arguably my favorite sageuk of all time (or maybe even just plain fave kdrama), smart and passionate and hugely epic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=853sc-s2hHE

Lobbyist (2007) - one of the very few actioners I’ve ever liked, and with more whump than you can shake a stick at, Song Il Gook is a tough as nails international arms dealer with an even tougher OTP (JJY) and this is a heaven of plot and love and hurt/comfort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8puRJNmey4

Loveholic (2005) - a student/teacher romance AND a story about a man going to jail to protect the woman he loves all rolled into one. What more could you want?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6nVH75IRCM

Lovers (2006) - if it’s a smart adult love story you want, come right in!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgpe4VkbtNk

Mawang/The Devil/Lucifer (2007) - meet possibly my n1 kdrama of all time. Haunted past, tragedy, revenge, complicated characters and plot. If there is a perfect kdrama, this is it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkn1KYaCjVk

My Girl (2005) - Lee Dong Wook and Lee Da Hae set the screen on fire in a romcom with hidden identities and plot twists. PS it is funny but when the drama starts, I literally bawled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0jpSCN72Wg

One Fine Day (2006) - Sung Yuri and Gong Yoo in a lovely, angsty romance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVeUG5U3oCU

Piano (2001-2002) - this is like who is who before they got to be big stars - Go Soo and Kim Hae Neul are in love but can’t be together because they are stepsiblings, Jo In Sung is a young gangster, tragedy and melo all around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRG_4Uxl4Zo

Que Sera Sera (2007) - Eric and Jung Yumi play the ultimate dysfunctional couple. He uses his good looks to date rich generous women, she is a neighbor who is neither. Their levels of obsession with each other are insane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4XqW14_A7k

Queen Seon Duk (2009) - want a female centric sageuk that is intense and epic and amazing? Look no further!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwIY4poVBNw

Resurrection (2005) - a tight, complex revenge thriller that more people should see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_ZbmVAk8zQ

The Return of Iljimae/Moon River (2009) - Jung Il Woo’s debut, this is arguably my favorite take on Korean Robin Hood ever and except for Someday and Friend Our Legend, the most underrated drama on this list.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjgmHVO3n0

Robber (2008) - Jang Hyuk and Lee Da Hae break my heart and then heal it in this intense story of a man preying on desperate women and a broken widow. Yes, it’s another two messed up people heal each other story. I love those!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDyy3UtUWeM

Romance (2002) - a teacher/student romance, with gorgeous young Kim Jae Won and Kim Ha Neul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LBs1tnc5Js

Sang Do, Let’s Go to School - Gong Hyo Jin is a teacher, Rain is a gigolo taking gigs to support his son; they used to be each other’s first loves. It’s wistful and slice of life and utterly tragic. Written by Lee Kyung Hee of the A Love to Kill and Thank You fame. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRg1q3RULWk

Save the Last Dance for Me (2004-2005) - I binged 17 episodes of this baby at a go, a record that has not yet been surpassed. Ji Sung is a rich man who is in an accident and gets amnesia, being cared for and falling for Eugene. However when he recovers his memory and forgets his amnesia time - he will end up meeting her again and falling for her all over again (hilariously, his RL wife Lee Bo Young plays the psycho secondary girl in this.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekfBrvJil8c

Say You Love Me (2004) - a much better attempt at Dangerous Liasons than the wretched Tempted. Kim Rae Won and Yoon So Yi, naive and tragic young lovers, come across a pair of jaded sophisticates; the female half of whom is intrigued by the fresh faced KRW and envious of uncomplicated young love and asks her partner to take YSI away from KRW for kicks. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niL2WJ_oAIU

Seoul 1945 (2006) - from WW2 to the Korean war, this is intense and smart and pulls no punches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYsotv2rFQI

Shining Inheritance/Brilliant Legacy (2009) - Han Hyo Joo is a young woman tormented by her family; Lee Seung Gi is a spoiled rich boy who needs to grow up. I was obsessed with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_sWhVZA3DY

Snow Queen (2006-2007) - Hyun Bin and Sung Yuri do a tragic romance melo right. He is a poor, smart kid, she is a brittle rich girl with a terminal illness. It hurts so good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEkAbJLYVpk

Someday (2006) - a sheltered cartoonist suffering from a writer’s block meets a sort-of small time private detective. They are both haunted by their pasts but find hope and healing with each other. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLVijs891dw

Spring Day (2005) - a very solid melo where Jo In Sung ends up stealing the girl from the original leading man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps7l27OBnVQ

Spring Waltz (2006) - the last and, imo, best of the seasons dramas, possibly in my all time top 10 kdramas, it follows a haunted young pianist and his OTP and their shared tragic past and hope for the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IGO0DST8dk

Swallow the Sun (2009) - Ji Sung as the haunted mercenary wanting revenge on his father, Sung Yuri as his tough, common-sense girlfriend, one of my fave secondary OTPs (mercenary x stripper) etc etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C51efR5Iq5I

Thank You (2007) - Gong Hyo Jin is an island woman living with the stigma and agony of having an HIV positive child. Jang Hyuk is a surgeon haunted by the death of his girlfriend. Two lost souls find and heal each other in one of my all time favorites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVk1TjvZZOw

Time Between Dog and Wolf (2007) - Lee Jun Ki is tortured a lot on his path to revenge and love. I loooove this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v24-57tLFH4

Tree of Heaven (2006) - only ten eps but bring your tissues for this tender and tragic and gorgeous love story between Park Shin Hye and Lee Wan, stepsiblings for a brief time; they reconnect when she’s a cleaner and he’s a gangster. I was sooooo obsessed with it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnAZlXZjFcw

What Happened in Bali (2005) - Ha Ji Won, Jo In Sung and So Ji Sub are a trio of desperately damaged people entangled with each other in what is probably still the darkest melo I have seen out of Korea. Money grubbing poor woman played by HJW, high-strung, abused rich son played by JIS, or a cold, ambitious man on the rise SJS - pick any of them, there is enough damage to level a city.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKHcYvK5qZM

Will It Snow for Christmas (2009) - a melodrama with Go Soo and Han Ye Seul by Lee Kyung Hee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvQ14gtCqvw

Worlds Within/The World That They Live In (2008) - the last candidate for my n1 kdrama of all time. By Noh Hee Kyung, with seemingly mundane lives of TV station personnel. But every character is someone you feel you know and Hyun Bin and Song Hye Kyo are both real and unreal as the OTP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBHrjZ8T6a4

Congrats if you made it to the end!

[three--rings]

clowderofcloudies

replied to your post  

“Hey, y’all, so, I need something to watch.  I’ve got that shifty,...”

                       I'm a little obsessed with the good place and mystic pop up bar. They both have solid themes that can be heavy but with a lot of levity in between. (Trigger warning for mpub) Good omens is also fantastic! If you want to go the animated route, the dragon prince is wonderful!                    I loved The Good Place (and am HEAVILY campaigning to try to force Mr. Rings to watch it atm).  I also love Good Omens.  I see The Dragon Prince is popular and I watched the first season and I think one ep of the second and then got distracted.

peachnewt replied to your post  

“Hey, y’all, so, I need something to watch.  I’ve got that shifty,...”

                       My escapes usually have subtitles: The Romance of Tiger and Rose - that one c-drama that sounds overhyped but is genuintly funny.   On YT Thunderbolt Fantasy - wuxia involving magical swords, people who evil laugh while holding a severed head, and a lot of cool fight scenes. And it's done with Tiawanese Puppets. On Crunchyroll Overly Sarcastic Productions reading half of Guards! Guards! on YT                   

Interesting, interesting.  And you have interested me by mentioning a Watch book...

hhpharaoh replied to your post  

“Hey, y’all, so, I need something to watch.  I’ve got that shifty,...”

                       The Repair Shop on Netflex. It's about repairing old things. Very soothing. GCB--Old, and only 14 episodes bc they canceled it. I appreciate it for the snark. Found on the ABC website and/or app (for free). I just started watching Black Girl in a Big Dress on YT. My friend finished it and said it's great. Black girl historical costumer, breaks the 4th wall. Very funny.    

I ADORED The Repair Shop.  Very British Bake-off in tone. I wish there was more gentle craft-based shows like those.  I’ve never heard of GCB.   But oh!  Black Girl in a Big Dress sounds PERFECT for my interests.

possibleplatypus replied to your post  

“Hey, y’all, so, I need something to watch.  I’ve got that shifty,...”

                       Have you tried The Old Guard? Or The Dragon Prince if you like cartoons                    

I have watched The Old Guard twice so far.  If only there were like 50 episodes of a show for it.  See above re: Dragon Prince.  I might have to go back to that.

penguinsandyetmorepenguins replied to your post  

“Hey, y’all, so, I need something to watch.  I’ve got that shifty,...”

                       the babysitters club on Netflix, esp if you liked any of the books as a kid              

I was Obsessed with TBC as a kid.  I just don’t know if I’d really get into  a show of it now.

leahlisabeth replied to your post  

“Hey, y’all, so, I need something to watch.  I’ve got that shifty,...”

                       Trollhunters! Also the new season of Lucifer was just added to Netflix. Also Farscape is on prime and it's my favorite sci fi show ever.                    

  Me googling Trollhunters: What the hell IS that?  Guillermo del Toro?  And I got tired of Lucifer mid-S4...IDK.

fiberbrix replied to your post  

“Hey, y’all, so, I need something to watch.  I’ve got that shifty,...”

                       If you like comedy I enjoyed Derry Girls                    

I ADORE Derry Girls.  I keep waiting for a new season.  In fact, I should probably rewatch it because it’s SO funny.

And I got two anon asks with suggestions, pardon me for just replying here.  The first was for Killjoys.  I watched the first season of that show when it first started airing and just haven’t been able to catch back up with it, mostly do to it not being available to easily stream.  I need to just fire up the VPN and DL it all.  But that will be a mutual watch with Mr. Rings.  He loves that show. 

The second ask suggested  The Great.  I heard somewhat mixed reviews of that from my friends, but I’ll keep it in mind.

[arcadianmoonshadowjedi]

TTS-Cass Character Analysis (My Personal Opinion) Part 1

There has been something I have been thinking a lot for quite a while. I’ve been thinking a lot about how views about Cassandra in the fandom are very polarizing, which I found to be super interesting that there are so many different interpretations about this one specific character.

I personally do not have a crush on her lol (my one only is my boy Eugene!!) nor do I romantically ship Cassunzel, Cassarian, or her with Eugene. But at the same Cass is a character that actually grew to not only be my favorite series exclusive character, but also has become my joint favorite character alongside Eugene and Rapunzel in the whole entire show (And believe me, I never saw that coming when I started the show because I was only interested in New Dream haha)! I found the amount of complexity that we see in her in S1, S2, and S3(to an extent) to be really interesting and enjoyable. It made her a very cool and well rounded character that I became so invested in her story, mostly in S1 and 2. But I wanted to reflect more on how I felt about this character throughout the show.

When I was first introduced to her in the show, I wasn’t really quite sure how I was going to feel about her like a part of me was like: Yeah! Rapunzel is finally getting a gal pal! Something we hardly see a Disney Princess getting! I enjoyed her in the Wind In My Hair scenes, her telling Rapunzel about the black rocks, and the scene where they tried several ways to cut her hair lol! On the other hand, I was completely mad at her whenever she interrupted New Dream scenes or when she pressured Rapunzel to keep a big secret which was negatively affecting her relationship with Eugene, but overall, it was more of a “Honey, I’m mad at you but I’m enjoying this kind of mad” lmao. 

I wasn’t entirely mad at her for insulting or picking on Eugene because I know my boy is strong and can stand up for himself, like he calls her names too! I personally don’t think she was mean to Eugene for fun, but it was more like she was very distrustful of him because he was the wanted thief that her father was hunting down and the fact that she thinks he’s “too laidback” or “self-centered” or a “freeloader in the castle” lol. (Just to make things clear, I’m the kind of person who can absolutely love a character, but still call out their individual flaws and actions, which are qualities that makes them more realistic and human, and makes me adore them even more). I for one enjoy Eugene and Cass’s sibling rivalry dynamic (My favorite friendship and platonic ship in the whole show haha!) I found it so hilarious and enjoyable how those two are throwing insults back and forth and annoy each other lol. I think I started liking Cass more than I did before in Rapunzel’s enemy and definitely Fitzherbert P.I. when she was actually rooting for Eugene against her dad!

Then of course, I was spoiled about Moonsandra!! Until this day, I hated getting this spoiler when I was still watching the show (I started about a year ago) and still in S1! I still wish I was surprised by it at the end of S2! Of course it didn’t help that the first episode I watched after that was none other than Challenge of the Brave! I was trying to keep in mind that this spoiler was going to happen much later and that I should enjoy the episode I’m currently watching but I felt so conflicted this entire episode I could hardly enjoy it lmao! I will get back to my thoughts on this episode later because it took me so long to re-watch it. 

Thank goodness Cassandra v. Eugene was the next episode because it helped ease the conflict I had about her more lol!! I found it hilarious how she and Eugene were locked in the cell and forced to work together but we see them bonding more! Overall, I liked seeing Cassandra’s arc for the rest of S1 and I liked seeing her grow a lot more. I felt like we got to see her be more compassionate, especially in Queen for a Day where she was willing to hug Rapunzel when Eugene and the guys were going to save her parents or when Rapunzel thought Pascal died. I loved seeing this side of Cassandra so much and has shown how much she grown since we first saw her! I also loved seeing her be a trio with Rapunzel and Eugene in a lot of latter S1 episodes where we see them working together more! I loved seeing Cass start to loosen up and not only be nicer and a better friend to Rapunzel but also seeing her start to get along with Eugene more while still maintaining their comical banter! I also liked seeing her and Eugene working together to help or save Rapunzel like in Painter’s Block and The Alchemist Returns. 

At the same time, I loved seeing more of her goals, like wanting to become a guard or proving herself to her dad. I loved that we also get some insight into her insecurity, which I felt like we got more of in Secret of the Sundrop, Under Raps, Great Expotations, and yes even Challenge of the Brave. The two latter episodes weren’t really episodes I liked or enjoyed, even when I rewatch them but at the same time, I felt like they do give clearer insight into her insecurity and COTB definitely does show a lot of what lead her to become Moonsandra. Cass is someone who wants to feel like she is noticed, appreciated, she wants to feel like she matters. While in that episode, Cass had done extremely shitty things and took it way too far, which I do not think is ever going to be acceptable like ever, I didn’t entirely see this episode as one sided conflict.

Now I know that people might disagree with what I’m about to say and I totally accept that. I decided to re-watch this episode a lot later while S3 was airing so I could get more insight into the whole Moonsandra turn. I felt like this episode showed so much of her insecurity and how she felt being looked down at as “Rapunzel’s Handmaiden”. This goes into that Cass wanted to be seen for who she is and for her combat skills, which is something that means so much to her. While I do love Rapunzel so so much (She’s the number 1 character I relate to and see myself in) I did feel like she was in the wrong as well, maybe not as much as Cass but still. Even though Cass didn’t talk about how much this meant to her, Rapunzel did notice signs of Cassandra being nervous and even told Eugene. Even throughout the challenge, there were several instances where Rapunzel could tell that Cass was bothered, but still continued anyway. I just felt that in this episode Rapunzel did act in a way that was inconsiderate and selfish (somewhat similar to Goodbye and Goodwill, but that played out differently), but at the same time, I don’t entirely blame her. She was locked in a tower for her first 18 years with no human interaction except with a horrible, abusive “parent” that never loved her. Of course she is going to lack a lot of social skills and knowledge about how friendships work, but over the course of the series she goes through many things that teach her more and I absolutely loved seeing her grow in this.

Back to Cass, while I do think that this was more of two-sided issue that could’ve been prevented by better communications on both sides, I’m in no way excusing what Cass did. However, what I did admire is that when they did talk and Raps apologized, and although Cass should have apologized and said she was wrong out loud, at the end, Cass at least came to realize that she was wrong and has owned up to her mistake, maybe not completely or in the most traditional way, but when she saved Raps from Wreck Marauder, raised Rapunzel’s arm up to declare her champion, and actually hugged her, that was her way of apologizing. Now I know that not everyone will agree with my interpretation of this episode but it’s just how I saw it and I tried to see it from the points of view of both characters and be unbiased as much as possible.

I personally don’t think of Cass as a horrible person or toxic friend, at least in S1 till the mid/end of S2 because on a more personal note I have dealt with so many toxic friendships in real life. In those toxic friendships, one major issue that has lead me to cut ties or create distance is that when the toxic friend hurt/used me (Which I really don’t wish to go into detail on atm), they NEVER and I mean NEVER admitted their actions were wrong or ever even bothered to see it, even when I called them out on it. I refuse to see Cass as a toxic or horrible person because even when she does something wrong, she’ll admit it, she’ll own up to her actions and accept the consequences, and eventually she actually started apologizing.

I know this post is super long but I really wanted to express my thoughts on Cass and still want to go over her arc in S2 (my personal favorite!!) and S3 (which might actually might be super painful! I would say I had overall mixed-negative feelings on that lol) But this concludes most of my thoughts on S1 Cass I wanted to reflect on!

[him-e]

GoT Preferences

I was tagged by @goodqueenalys, thank you! <3

Do you watch the episodes when they air? Only when I can, because it’s 3 am here when they air. Otherwise I watch them on Monday morning. How often do you rewatch it? Do you rewatch it from season one? I rewatch the older seasons whenever they do a rerun on the tv. I rarely do “planned” rewatchings. Do you rewatch the previous episode before the next one airs? nah. Also because I’ve likely seen it already twice during the week. Do you eat anything while watching? if so, what do you eat? Sometimes. I either gorge on chocolate spread and other junk food, or I drink. A lot. One character that everyone seems to like that you don’t care much for: uhm... none that I can think of, tbh. (this is not a diplomatic answer, I like all the characters, especially the “popular” ones) Your 3 favorite pairings: Jon x Sansa, Jaime x Brienne, and hopefully, if the show remembers it’s a thing, Arya x Gendry. Favorite scene: the Jon/Sansa reunion scene (season 6), the bearpit scene (season 3), the daznak pit scene (season 5) One character you wish got more appreciation: Theon. Fanfic or nah? fanfic yay of course, but I’m not reading a lot of got fanfic atm. Favorite quote: “Your name will disappear. Your house will disappear. All memory of you will disappear”, softly but menacingly whispered by Sophie Turner takes the cake as far as show-only quotes go for me. Do you avoid spoilers? Nope, I’m a spoiler hoe. Favorite house words: Hear me roar. One character you’d bring back from the dead: I’d bring back two---Ned and Tywin, so they can see how their respective legacies are doing. But also because I love Sean Bean and Charles Dance. One character you’d kill, or kill sooner than they were killed: mhhhhhh... Walder Frey. Or Ramsay. Direwolves or dragons? Both! Which was more satisfying: Ramsay dying or Joffrey dying? Ramsay dying. I know it’s controversial, but I genuinely appreciate what they did with Sansa’s post season 5 arc, and it was beautifully woven with her relationship with Jon and how they both sink to the bloodiest, darkest parts of themselves to claim their legacy, home and right to live back. Plus, since this is a show meme, I think the show deserves to get some love for its boldest decisions, and Sansa executing Ramsay is certainly one of those. It’s one of those extremely rare cases where I’m not sure anything George comes up with for Ramsay’s death will live up to the show version. Wildlings or the dothraki? Wildlings, but I have a soft spot for this one. Favorite Lannister?: Jaime. Favorite stark? All of them, but my favorite-favorite is probably Sansa. Would you rather be able to be resurrected anytime, but gain scars and all like Beric, or become a faceless man? Faceless man. I mean can you imagine? Would you rather have the rebellion tv show or the conquest tv show? Robert’s Rebellion for the politics and the younger versions of beloved characters, the conquest for MOAR DRAGONS.

Tagging: whoever wants to do it!

[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.

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

[corneliusreignallen]

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