Disney thoughts:
You can’t make blanket statements about the quality, ethos, or artistry of Disney-owned media, because the Disney company has existed for a literal century, buys up everything they can get their hands on, employs 195,000 people as of 2022 according to Wikipedia, and spans the entire globe.
“Disney” doesn’t make things, they just own them, and they buy the rights to more and more media every single day. There are countless people with genuine talent and heart making the media that Disney slaps their label on, and adopting the black-and-white mentality of “Disney = bad, therefore all Disney media = bad” is incredibly reductive and unfair to all the artists that Disney exploits.
Yes, the corporate Disney overlords censor the artists and water down the art, but doesn’t that mean we should be supporting the artists even more, and showing them that we see them, their art, their passion even despite the corporation’s meddling? There are so, so many artists working for Disney who are active right now on Twitter, talking in depth about the horrors of the company, but begging people to please still support their art, because Disney didn’t make the art and the art still deserves to be seen. There are countless artists in a position of, “make it with Disney money or don’t ever get to make it at all, because making art is fucking expensive.”
Should we throw up our hands and say, sorry, Dana Terrace, you’ve made a delightfully charming show about a queer Latina witch girl, but it’s got the Disney label on it, so fuck you? Fuck Howard Ashman while we’re at it, he poured his queer experience into The Little Mermaid, but we can’t talk about that because Disney Bad. Domee Shi directed a heart-filled movie about a Chinese-Canadian girl coming into her own and navigating generational trauma? Eh, it’s Disney, so obviously it’s not authentic, so fuck Turning Red, and fuck Encanto while we’re at it! Yeah, representation matters, but Disney Bad!!!
Disney the company is evil. Disney–owned media is case-by-case. Chapek isn’t sitting in his office pushing the “make movie” button. For every shitty cash-grab nostalgia-bait remake they churn out, they’re still a company that owns half the world and employs countless artists trying like hell to tell genuine stories. You’re not obligated to engage with them, you’re not required to like them, but the bullshit take of “Disney bad, therefore everything Disney slaps its name on is just as evil” is the most asinine thing I have ever heard.
That’s not even getting into their other media divisions, like book publishing or video games. They have their fingers in every single media pie that exists, and you can’t solve industry-wide problems with “Disney bad, never engage with anything that has their name on it.”
Some fucking nuance, people, I beg you.
If a very rich man buys a poor man’s artwork, puts it in a frame worth more than the poor man’s house and tells the world it belongs to him now, does that then render the artwork worthless?
