Disneyesque Narrative

As well as the fact many things can be considered 'Disneyesque' in a visual sense, we must remember that Disneyesque can also encompass the type of stories that Disney has formed over they years, almost defining what a feature-length animated production was in the publics eye.

As we all know from seeing the films in our youth, a traditional Disney film often has a love story, usually involving a princess, some element of fantasy, lots of humorous side characters-likely animals-, and plenty of showstopping musical numbers that will lend themselves well to Broadway adaptations a few years along the line. Many my age are used to this style that Disney brought about, but many don;t know that this structure wasn't used in earnest until the release of The Little Mermaid, which signaled the beginning of Disney's renaissance period. Almost all of the films released during this time had those same recurring elements, Disney's winning formula, and type of film which most people would likely attribute to being 'Disneyesque'.

Many films attempted to imitate this formula as a way to try and achieve the huge success that Disney had at the time. Many of them also failed for just such reasons. Don Bluth, around the time of the Disney Renaissance period, directed the film Anastasia, under Fox Animation Studios. A film based of Russian folklore, again much like how Disney based much of it's films of classic fairytales or historical stories, it features all the requisites of what Disney films were like at the time, a princess character, a love story involving her, an over-the-top villain, fantasy elements, many comedy side-characters -talking animals no less - and many musical numbers to sum up important events or character motivations. The art style the film used was also almost identical to Disney, resulting in the same problems I detailed in my last post. There is a story unattributed to any source that at a test screening for the film they played it twice, once with the Fox Logo, and once with Disney's. The audience who saw it believing it was a Disney film gave it a much better reception than those who saw it as a fox film. This kind of reaction seems to imply that

Another problem with this film is one Disney is often accused of, when a film based off of a sometimes fairly dark tale is made lighter to appeal to more, oftentimes changing a downbeat ending to a happier one, and removing a lot of violent elements in an effort to be more family friendly. Many accuse these type of stories of coating a story in too much 'saccharine sweetness', removing any impact the original may have had, distorting events, and ultimately providing very different and somewhat naive version of classic tales that many children are growing up associating more with than the originals.

Disneys Impact on the Industry

Like them or not, Disney has had a huge impact on the industry, bringing it forward as a medium several times in it's history. These positive things include:

• The invention of the Multi-plane camera, allowing for far more depth in backgrounds
• Bringing synchronized sound cartoons to the mainstream
• Bringing feature-length animation to the mainstream
• Ensuring that animation remained a popular medium for many year

However, they are often accused by leaders in the Animation Field of stagnating the medium, both artistically, and in terms of the types of narratives told in mainstream movies. I can understand this, as I know firsthand that many movies released in my time have been created to intentionally look 'Disney' and cash in on the success of their Renaissance period, to try and get as large an audience as possible. Its good for the industry in terms of revenue, though a shame that more inventive, outlandish ideas never come to fruition for fear of their profitability and accessibility.

Disney's Visual Style

Disney seems to have a fairly consistent visual style thorugh the majority of its main works, ignoring any earlier films where they weres till refining their image. Their main feature films seem to follow a fairly realistic style, human characters having consistent proportions to human anatomy, with some exaggeration for effect when necessary. This style is evident across a wide range of their feature films. 

In Snow White, seen above, the main characters of Snow White and the Witch have incredibly realistic looks that aren't too alienating to audiences. Only when the Witch transforms herself does her appearance become much more exaggerated and cartoony, to accentuate her grotesqueness, yet still she does not appear too threatening or repulsive. The dwarves characters follow a very different style guide to the main characters, having features like large ears, large red noses, and big cheeks. They seem to have been designed to really embody the varying personalities given to them. Yet, still, they remain very 'safe' in their design, with uniform features such as their large eyes designed to appeal to people, as well as their mouths.

Many Disney features follow this same path, with main characters having very realistic and 'human-like' designs, whereas ancillary characters are more 'cartoony' and designed to appeal mainly for comedy purposes. In the film Beauty and the Beast for example, the character of Belle again has a human design. The Beast is obviously a more stylized character, as he is intended to be more threatening, having a large stature, yet he still seems quite reserved in his design, not being a character designed to be truly 'scary' in  any sense. Opposed to this is the side-characters, consisting of the various inanimate objects the other characters have been transformed into, are obviously much less human, but retain human characteristics that make them easier for an audience to empathize with.

Though it brought the company a lot of financial success, I believe this approach, of contrasting more naturalistic characters against the exaggerated to be disadvantageous, the gulf between designs becoming extremely noticeable at times, pulling the audience out of the film.

Some Disney features have eschewed using the common established look in favour of slightly more radical designs. Disney's Hercules (1997) took a lot inspiration from Greek design and the shapes used in much of the historical imagery of the time the tale was based in. As well as this, their film Atlantis: The Lost Empire had Mike Mignola, most prominently known as the artist of Hellboy, do the character design for much of the film's cast. Both these processes resulted in much more angular and harder looking characters than had been seen before in a Disney Movie, and for the most part seemed to overcome the previous problems of inconsistency in character designs, resulting in, I believe, much stronger visual appeal. However, both these films were less successful at the box office than many other Disney films, in the case of Atlantis quite significantly more so, perhaps resulting in a message being sent to Disney that these kind of stylized designs were not worth pursuing.

Essentially what this boils down to is that for the majority of Disney's films, there is a lot of consistency in the way characters, particularly main ones, are designed. As seen above, it's clear that all of the 'Disney Princesses' have a very similar  set of rules in  terms of their design, some of them even having almost identical facial features. It seems that at some point Disney found a groove for their design that was successful, and obviously continued to work this way for many years, perhaps because of the sense of familiarity it brought both film-makers and audiences.

-All images sourced from Google

According to the first result on Google, the definition of the term 'Disneyesque' is 'resembling or suggestive of the films, television productions, or amusement parks made by Walt Disney or his organization', which I suppose sounds about right.

The first known use of the term was in 1939, I imagine in the comparison of the shorts that Disney made for theatres against those of other companies, during the so-called 'Golden Age of Animation'. It also might have been used to refer to films influenced by the release of Snow White from Disney Animation in 1937, particularly from companies like Fleischer Studios, a competitor of Disney's, but by such an early time it's hard to believe that Disney would have established a strong 'feel' for their feature-length animation, so the term likely wasn't used in that context.

Disney's short cartoons of the 20's, 30's and 40's had a distinct and consistent style, one that was designed to appeal to a wide audience. They often featured Disney's then new stable of characters, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Goofy, Donald Duck and Pluto, as well as one-off shorts featuring other characters, sometimes inspired by short tales or folklore.

Obviously Disney was not the first company to enter the field of cinematic shorts, and there had been many beforehand, but it seems Disney was the first to really refine them to a point where they were much more accessible, and used that as a way to grow into a huge force in Animation.

Disney is often criticized for remaining in this refined style and 'playing it safe' for the most part thorughout their time in the industry, and as many followed Disney in a rush to become as profitable of them, it has been said they have been responsible for making commercial animation very 'generic', following a somewhat standard set of rules that gained them their success, and leading others down that same path., leading many to be criticized as 'Disneyesque' and seen in a poor light when they followed the style created by Disney.

Greetings earthlings, welcome to my blog built specifically for your primitive race. You'll see it has lots of pretty pictures to stimulate your rather basic mind.