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The more I think about it, there had to have been major interference from non-creatives on this project for it to come out the way it did. The early story and character concepts - Asha and her family living as fugitives, both the king and queen being wicked, Star as a humanoid shapeshifter, etc...

This is an interesting point - how comedies so rarely get to theaters now that animated features have become the default alternative. It goes a long way to explain Illumination's consistent success, one reason Wonka did well (it is very much a comedy), and perhaps why the last few Pixar movies...

I imagine it's hard to justify keeping a new character in meet and greets, much less character meals, if there's a very likely chance that the diners won't recognize them. While people will just pass up a meet and greet in the parks if they're not interested, a character performer is stuck in...

Disney absolutely went into this thinking it was a guaranteed hit; just look at all the shelfwarming merchandise! I tracked the promotional progress of the film over '23, and they were screening highlights of the first 35 minutes to exhibitors and on the animation festival circuit (in...

It might be that Disney in most of the promotional material was positioning this movie as the culmination of their first 100 years as a studio, "A story a century in the making" and all that, and how it was a love letter to the fans and "the tradition", and just didn't deliver on their promises...

Well, the Trolls series is a known quantity at this point - though given virtually everyone saw the second movie on streaming due to the pandemic, that the third movie did so well theatrically is honestly impressive - and Migration was helped by being the last family title of the holiday season...

The problem is it doesn't go into detail as to why the movie underperformed, why there wasn't positive word of mouth to give it the legs Elemental had in a much thinner timespan for movies in general (remember, there were no big studio wide releases the first two weeks of December). I think the...

The early reception isn't surprising. I've not seen them myself, but the Planet of the Apes reboot series has been this quiet, second-tier success story since Dawn of... : They've never been as talked up or as high-grossing as stuff like the MCU was in its prime, partially because they seem to...

Yes, but as written just about everybody else screws up their English too and it's not presented as jokes ("eloquent dancers" instead of the likely-intended "elegant", the "little fun allegory" that isn't, lots of near and slant rhymes, etc.).

The years after Moana and Encanto were released, there were lots of cosplayers doing characters from those at the conventions I attended in Chicagoland, and some are still doing so to this day. Heck, I remember that less than two months after the Beauty and the Beast remake opened, there were...

Either it was unintentional (weren't the songs written in a hurry? Because that would explain a lot) or it's an intentional joke that doesn't land (about how stupid Bambi is). Actually, a lot of the comedy boils down to: "Hey, this character's stupid/a flake" (re: Asha's "awkwardness", Safi's...

Yeah, it's easier to forgive the artistic license in "blue corn moon" than it is stuff like "throw caution to every warning sign" or "Watch out world, here I are" (which might have been intended as a joke, especially given how stupid "Bambi" seems to be, but doesn't come off as one). Or how the...

At the same time, it was years before minority characters were consistently voiced by minority performers; virtually all of the Aladdin voice cast was Caucasian, for instance. They did work a little harder with Pocahontas and Mulan but even then they resorted to white actors as singing voices...

I do get the sense that La Nouba was far more popular at its height than Drawn to Life is now. Cirque hadn't overextended itself when La Nouba was new (there were only a handful of tours and two other "resident" shows, both in Las Vegas, in 1998), so there was more novelty, and the two times I...

This is true. That said, I'm thinking - especially as most of these recent films (and Pixar's) were financial disappointments at best, barring Encanto - that we're not going to see any more minority leads after Moana 2 and (maybe?) Elio at least for a few years. After all, the only films WDFAS...

I should have been clearer - I meant there was that Disney was using having a handful of token minority characters in this movie (and others like Frozen II) in secondary parts as a way the company can be "diverse" without making movies that center those minorities in their narratives. Though it...

Given how interesting and more coherent the original plotline, character concepts, and animatics were, I think there was top-down meddling from executives that got in the way of the actual creatives on Wish, deliberately watering things down in hopes of being all things to all people. It would...

Given how a lot of viewers weren't impressed by Wish's animation, I'm doubtful they're going to try that approach again, especially for a sequel to a film that was so heavily sold on being "classic" 2D. I also doubt that if Tiana becomes a movie, it will be a theatrical film; they'll probably...

Remember - they cut Sabino singing "A Wish Worth Making" after he gets his wish back, but kept "The Happy Chicken Song". That says a lot about the weird priorities the filmmakers had with this movie. The scene where he gets it back, as is, seems like a brief formality rather than the climax of...

That applies to Elemental, granted, but not to Wish. (Or Strange World before that.) There just seems to be horrible waste going on with Disney film budgets in general these days.