Michelle Talks About Disney

With Disney remaking all its classic  animated   movies into live-action, come critics and praises from the fans of the original movies, and I am one of those people. I breathe Disney classic. Okay, that’s a bit exaggerating, but I grew up watching the originals and my 25 year old self still watch them before I go to sleep, sing the songs and pretty much still possess the same passion and love as when I was a little girl. So obviously when in 2019 Disney released the remake of the 1994 The Lion King, I was more than excited to see it. I have seen some disappointed Disney remakes before, but I did have a high hope for this one because the original Lion King was and still is one of the best animated movies ever created on planet earth and I was curious how will the filmmaker translate it into a live-action movie. So I went to the cinema to see the remake of the 1994 The Lion King. While enjoying my popcorn, I sat and watched the whole movie. I enjoyed it. It was okay. It was nice. Th

It is undeniable that Disney has contributed in how I perceived true love when I was a kid. It was always about a charming guy or in most cases, a prince, came, married the girl and they lived happily ever after. For decades that was how Disney portrayed true love to children. Even in the movie The Lion King , Simba who is technically a prince finds Nala, his childhood sweetheart as his true love, and they are lions! The “romantic true love” is pretty much inseparable from most of the Disney’s classics.   It has always been like that until Frozen was released in 2013. The story tricks us into thinking that Anna has to find a guy as her true love. And that’s pretty much what happens to Anna. She is so desperate for love from a guy which leads her to fall prey on prince Hans, the bad guy in the movie pretending to be a rich prince. But that’s not the point of the story. I was personally shocked when the movie revealed that Anna’s true love is her sister, Elsa. The idea of romantic tru

After 70 years of building its empire through hand-drawn 2D animations, Disney has finally fully dived into 3D animation. 2019 marked the end of decade since the release of Princess and the Frogs , which was Disney’s last full-length hand-drawn animated movie. As the technology evolves, so does the market. The late 80s to early-mid-90s is called Disney Renaissance for a reason. It was the period where Disney produced quality and beautifully made 2D animated movies and formed unforgettable memories to the generation at that time, including myself, through some of their masterpiece including The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Aladdin and Pocahontas . However, the success was sustained mostly in the late 90s and early 2000s before 3D animations started taking over the market.   The shift to 3D animations was even earlier than we thought. Even during the Renaissance period of their hand drawn animated movies, Disney collaborated with Pixar Animation Studio and released Toy Story in 1995.

There is only one person who inspires me with his passion towards the world of animated movies, and that is Glen Keane. This guy was my childhood hero and until this day he still is my inspiration. Glen Keane was Walt Disney’s character designer and animator who created many great characters including Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas and Tarzan.   My passion for art and animated movies grew because I watched his characters in my favorite movies, even before I knew who Glen Keane was. I used to watch all these beautiful princesses and picked up my pencil and started drawing them. Then at around the age of 12, when I started to use internet, I found out about Glen Keane. Since then I am officially a fan.   In one of his talks, while explaining about creativity he said “you gotta think like a child. Kids play make believe . When kids play as fairies, they don’t pretend to be fairies. They believe they are fairies.” Animators and creative people should hang on to such spirits.

We are all familiar with Disney version of The Little Mermaid, Rapunzel, and Snow White . They are all have been “Disneyfied” to meet the standards of family movies, so you and your children can watch it in your living room. But what you may not know is that these movies are the adaptation of old fairy tales, written hundreds of years ago. And the original stories might be a little bit different than what we know today. The Little Mermaid   We all know about Disney version of this story: Ariel, a beautiful young mermaid who falls in love with human and trades her voice with legs so she can walk. She finally meets the prince and they live happily ever after. The original story doesn’t end quite happily. The little mermaid which has no name falls in love with a human. She goes to a sea witch to ask for a pair of legs. But the deal that’s given by sea witch is that she has to give up her voice, and whenever she takes a step, it will feel like she’s walking on a dagger. But of course,