Mickey Mouse Monopoly Review:

Walt Disney and his company created what can only be considered as a media empire, with huge amounts of influence on some of the most crucial aspects of modern society, the development of our children and how they perceive the world and its ever growing complexities. The documentary “Mickey Mouse Monopoly” takes a close look at the  Disney phenomenon and what are supposed to be  images of innocence magic and fun, yet seem to bare many great underlying messages on today’s society and how Disney potentially wants children to perceive it. 

The documentary, based on the thoughts of great minds like Dr. Henry Giroux of the Pennsylvania State University deals with how Disney movies tell stories on race, gender and class under the disguise of innocence, that seems to disguise some of the often alarming messages one can take from the movies when seen in a more analytical point of view. 

Walt Disney has long been a corporation that to me, stands solely for the clever entertainment of kids, giving them an entertaining piece of animation, filled with basic life lessons for children on one hand, but also intelligent often humorous undertones for the entertainment of the adults accompanying the children. Yet after watching “Mickey Mouse Monopoly,” I was left with a whole new image of Disney, one in which a sole emphasis on peaceful child entertainment takes a backseat to incredible levels of corporate influence and marketing. Indeed over the last century, the Disney company has established an empire far beyond the regular scopes of media influence. With the purchase of the ABC network and expanding into many other fields of marketing and production. The Disney company has gained unprecedented amounts of leverage and power, that really leaves them in a certain sense “too big to fail.” 

This phenomenon can be seen in Disney’s complex copywriting system and the way they protect the Disney name. This results in many authors having great trouble publishing anything dealing with Disney and its movies. Thus often times, authors are left unable to use the word “Disney” in a title and many times won’t be able to publish certain pictures or other visual material. This often presents writers with great difficulties in properly documenting and analyzing the many aspects of Disney tales and movies and has led to numerous dilemmas in the past. The great power of Disney also shows with how they make a profit through there many projects. While a lot titles like Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and the Lion King turned out to be a huge success for Disney, other movies like Hercules could not solely rely on being a box office hit. This is where Disney shows how entangled it is with other forms of media and production, as they often end up drawing a huge profit from marketing strategies, like including Hercules figures in happy meals, releasing a film based video game, or designing a line of costumes for kids. In this way the Disney Company manages to spin and twist any project to allow it to become profitable to the extent they had envisioned. 

In conclusion we see that just with the few aspects touched on in this blog, Disney moves from being a genuinely peaceful source of family entertainment to a more corporate like phenomenon, where things are often far more capitalistic than one wants to believe.

Fables – Legends in Exile, Part 2: In Class discussion:

Our in class discussion of fables was very interesting, and started with Joseph giving a well interpreted presentation on the subject. We went right into one of the most important topics regarding this comic, one that was also discussed in close detail in our E-Reserves article on Corporealizing fairy tales. The idea of the originally vague fairy tale characters coming to life with detailed personalities and desires, giving them a whole new level of depth and individualism. Fables puts characters like Snow White into a whole new perspective, and especially in her case we are left with a completely new interpretation of the character, once the singing, cheerful beauty in charge of keeping things tidy for the seven dwarfs in only the most un-sexual of ways, we now see her as a very active character, with a definitely present sexuality about her and in charge of Fabletown as deputy mayor. We move away from her innocent fairy tale character and find her adapted to a new complex environment. As a class we argued that these transformations where necessary to allow for a more realistic and detailed flow of events in Fabletown. The original fairy tale characters were used as templates, to set them up with a certain background in the tale, without having to introduce them individually in terms of where they came from originally.

Many times when reading through this volume of fables, this offers a way of recognizing the characters, as Snow White is presented to us as a very pale figure, with strikingly red lips and raven black hair, just the way she was initially portrayed in the tale by the Grimm brothers. Essentially we saw what a commonly known fairytale character would be like if they were placed in this New York City setting, and how their characters would have to differ to deal with the complexities of such a vast environment. This is where we saw the idea of a properly rigid “happily ever after” fade away in the story. Where the original tales left its characters vague and open to interpretation so that one would not get distracted from the clear cut plot and easily recognizable moral of the tale, Fables presents us with a very complex setting, with its characters facing real life financial and personal problems, and making their individual situations much to intricate to resolve in a clean happily ever after way with all good prevailing and all evil being eliminated by the end of the tale.

In Conclusion, Fables is a noteworthy piece of entertainment, specifically aimed at introducing adults to the world of comics, through a relatable and intelligent way of bringing recognizable fairytale characters together in a new setting, and focusing on how each one of them would prevail in a dark society like the one portrayed in Fables.

Fables – Legends in Exile, Part 1:

Fables presents us with a comic book unlike anything before, when I first got my envelope from the unc bookstore and pulled this book out from it, I thought it was sent to me by accident. Indeed the idea of something looking so comical to be used as academic material seemed a little strange to me, and although I knew I was still missing the book, and remembered the title to be Fables, I had to double-check the syllabus just to make sure it was the right thing. The idea of a comic book to me has always been a bit of an alternative in entertainment, something that strongly appeals to a certain group of people, but is generally disregarded by most as a major form of entertainment. But who are these people that read comics, and why is it the ultimate form of entertainment for some, while it leaves other people uninterested and rejecting its values.

To understand this, we have to look at what a comic essentially is; traditionally, we commonly find two kinds of people, ones who like to read, and ones who like to watch movies. While these two kinds of personality have become more and more intertwined, and many people accept and use both forms of media more equally today, it used to be a bit more split up traditionally. So a comic book then seems to mix both of these together. It follows the concept of a book, with clear pages and binding, yet it also relies on images to convey the scene the text is currently dealing with. One could argue then that the reader gets the best of both then, with a quality comic presenting the reader with a thoughtful piece of text along with an intelligent and often artistic representation of material. But is this what the reader wants?

Many people argue that to read gives one the chance to utilize their imagination, to read a passage and use one’s own mind and experience to form the adequate picture the book is trying to portray. Yet many people have accepted movies and TV as a more common form of entertainment and storytelling, as one doesn’t need to sit down and read for hours and hours under a reading lamp, but can simply hit a button and let the information flow into the mind through sound and visual stymulus. Someone who reads comics then would have to be somewhere in-between, willing to read a plot but also interested to see how this plot would look visually the way the author intended it. It follows more the idea of a script, and many movies utilize comic like plots to first draft individual movie scenes, especially when dealing with fantasy based movies, or ones that rely heavily on portraying certain aspects visually. So are comics then mostly read by people that think in a director sort of way? The audience for comic books is interesting, and it would be fun to see what kinds of personalities one would find in searching for the ultimate fan and supporter of comic based entertainment.

Gender Shaping and Fairy tales:

For our research based presentation I chose to go with the topic choice of how gender is shaped in young children through the fairy tales they are exposed too. I found this topic particularly interesting as I see it as something very dynamic, and influential. In my mind, ever since the successful Disney interpretations of Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella, which for the first time presented children with relatable characters in often mesmerizing and magical outfits, that, for those who were familiar with the original tales put protagonists like Belle, Snow White and Cinderella into a depicted form that often leaves little girls dreaming of being a princess dressed in beautiful outfits like those we see in Disney Films. While movies like Cinderella have been around since the 1950s, a major change in the industries related to the designing, producing and marketing have flourished over the last 20 years, exploiting yet another consumer niche through the magic of globalization, exports, and rapid development processes we have established in today’s society. 

It’s evident that children make up a good part of today’s consumers, and it’s not hard to see why; on one hand children are generally exposed to very similar forms of media as they grow up, watching Disney movies, and possibly being read some of the fairy tales we have deemed as acceptable over the years. On the other hand most parents today are very concerned with their child’s well being and happiness, and although most parents don’t want their kids to end up spoiled, when compared to standards of forty years ago, most children would probably appear to be. This is largely due to the fact that society has grown so materialistic, which doesn’t just say something about our changing habits and values, but is largely due to our advancements in production techniques and ever growing globalization. It used to be a tedious and costly process to create a dress that would look as fancy as that worn Disney’s Cinderella, nowadays however it has become an intelligent, cost effective process, that has evolved from great powers like the textile industry. Synthetic fabrics like nylon, polyester and spandex are to thank here. These fabrics have become immensely cheap and easy to manufacture all over the world. And with today’s impressive import-export systems these dresses can be manufactured for close to nothing in certain countries like Egypt, where I was personally able to observe this at a wal-mart sewing plant. Along with the latest technologies in computer aided design, a dress could go from concept to production in no time, and with minimal development costs. 

We can observe these changes in any clothing store today, shirts with detailed print designs and several different types of fabric can be purchased for five dollars or less at times, something that would simply have been impossible through sheer production costs just ten years ago. So we really have expanded in both ways, and it’s hard to say who is more responsible for this growth in gender shaping today, on one hand we as consumers seem much more willing to give our children whatever they desire, on the other hand it has become much easier faster and cheaper to manufacture and develop all these toys and clothes for children, giving parents a whole new array of products to choose from.

Oral Presentations Day 2

Today's class gave the remaining students a chance to present, and that included me. I was very surprised to see that most people chose to present a comparison of Little Red Riding Hood. I thought that I would be one of the only ones, if not the only one to present on this topic but never the less it was another interesting set of presentations.

Although most of our presentations focused on a similar topic, I found Josephs presentation particularly well presented and researched, and to me it stood out as one of the best so far. His analogies on the importance of the color red with respect to the tale was interesting, and it was great to see how he interpreted the color through his research, and how it represented so many contrasting things, like love or the devil. He made me see that the tale really is two sided, making notions on the importance of advice and listening to ones elders, as well as certain rebellious acts like Little Red Riding hood disobeying her mother in straying of the path. I feel like he had a good point in mentioning that this respect for the elderly and the wisdom associated with age is something that has remained relatively unchanged throughout history, something that is quite rare when one looks at the drastic differences in today's world and that of the sixteenth century.

Overall I felt that our group presentations went very well, and although I was not happy with my own presentation, as a class I think we did very well, certainly better than any other class I can compare too.

Oral Presentations Day 1

Our class today consisted of seven oral presentations, we started with a presentation by Gwyn, who compared Cinderella and Donkeyskin in terms of appropriatness for children. Her topic was well presented and I agree with her that donkeyskin seems generally inappropriate for children, the notions on incest, along with the general absense of magic and great amounts of trickery would leave children unentertained and with a wrong moral.
The soundtrack analysis on Beauty and the Beast was my favorite presentations, it was very well researched and displayed a great knowledge of how the music attributed so beautyfully to the story and ultimately led to receiving an acadamy award. The individual clips of music were very intersting, and i was intrigued by the explanations of each motif. Like the enchantment motif and the use of a fluid woodwind sound, or the low brass notes of the beast motif. My favorite part was the west wing, as it used no dialogue and was all instrumental. I've always been a fan of transmitting emotion simply through sound, in the past this was only possible using orchestras or complex instrumental arrangments, but electronics have led us to great lengths in being able to generate this type of content from our own personal computers. electronic music really has revolutionized this idea and user generated instrumental music has allowed us to convey emotions through many new styles of music, like house or electro.
We also had two presentations on Snow White, which were also well researched and led me to agree that the grimm version of the tale seems most suited for kids, as it portrays a more clear moral and is generally less violent.
I have to say that most of the presentations were very well thought out and executed, and I'm hoping that mine will go as smoothly as the first seven we saw.

Otogibanashi - Folktales of Japan

I've recently been doing a bit of research on Japanese Folktales for another class of mine, and after a presentation on the concept by a few of my classmates in my Japanese Society class, it became strikingly clear to me that the Japanese have a very familiar folktale structure to the one we as westerners are used to. Many of the tales ive explored are remarkably similar in their moral and virtue, some so similar they directly relate to tales we have analyzed in class.

In Japan, folktales are referred to as Otogibanashi. These tales have received strong influence from Japanese Shinto and Buddhist beliefs and often deal with supernatural beings like kami's, the many gods the japanese have interpreted from nature throughout past centuries. The Japanese also distinguish between 3 basic types of folktales, with the Namidabanashi tales dealing with sadness, Obakebanashi tales focusing on ghosts and Ongaeshibanashi tales dealing with repaying kindness. The tales always tell a story based on distinct factors of visual and emotional beauty, and there are many more categories to be found in Japanese folktales, but these three do represent some of the most common tales found today.

A tale that i certainly found similar to our version of Bluebeard was the tale of Uguisu no Sato which translates to something like "a bush warbler and the house". It tells the tale of a woodcutter that stumbles upon a beautiful house in a hidden grove. Inside he found a beautiful woman that is busy and wants the woodcutter to take care of her home while she goes out. She instructs him to never look in any of the reception rooms during her absence but as in our tale, curiosity overcomes the woodcutter and he dares to look in the other rooms, where he finds many riches and beautiful furniture following a theme of the four seasons, along with three eggs which he accidentally breaks . At this point the woman returns, complains about the mans insincerity and transforms her self into a bush warbler. She then flies off singing "i miss my children," at which point the woodcutter suddenly finds himself in a field with the house and everything valuable gone.

I was stunned at how similar this tale was and although its hard to determine when exactly this tale found its origins, it still seemed as though Japanese folktales are remarkably similar to the ones we have in our society. Although these similarities are very clear, it seems that the Japanese have a much larger emphasis on portraying natural beauty and their concepts of "wabi sabi" or basically the concept of finding beauty in the imperfections of nature. This seems to make the tales I've read more peaceful in their nature, although they can often be just as graphic as our tales from Perrault and the Grimm Brothers.

Beauty and the Beast - Critics Discussion

Our critics discussion really turned out interesting today as our e-reserve articles turned out to be quite political as well. The discussion questions led us from analyzing the plot of the story to examining these aspects more broadly with regards to past as well as present media and politics.

Our first discussion question dealt with Belle and how her being an outsider left her more predisposed to accept Beast. The class seemed to generally agree with this idea and I my self thought so too. The tale was set around a small french village were being different was bad and although belle was most beloved by her neighbors and village for her beauty and unjudgmental innocence, she herself was isolated and without a true companion besides father. This in my mind definetly left her predisposed to eventually accept the beast for who he truly is inside.

Gaston was the topic of my last blog and he was also a main focus in the discussion questions. We talked about his role in the story and how he potentially aids in delivering Disney's message on external versus internal beauty. I found that Gaston was well utlized as a character and the idea of having him portray a contrast to the Beast seemed to work too. As i found out from researching his character, he was specifically redesigned to reflect less of a classical macho and instead was supposed to look charming and handsome to make his evil personality particularly shocking. This concept should be perceivable to children although they might not be fully aware of this, if at all.

The last discussion question we dealt with had to do with expectations of men and how these might have changed over the past two decades. As a class we seemed to feel that much more emphasis is places on a deep sense of character, and being not just a great strong man but also having a sensitive and compassionate  side that others can identify with and potentially exemplify such behavior. This trend seems to appear in many aspects of society, even with respect to the newly elected predisent of the United States, a man that is arguable more of a family oriented and sensitive individual, very educated in all aspects of his leadership and also notably the first president of african descent. But its not just in the political world that we can observe this, popular movies are no longer focused around a great big, perfectly chizled white male protagonist. Instead we have seen great characters like Denzel Washinton emerge to be characters that as we mentioned in class truly make a movie and not the other way around. I feel as though society has grown bored of the stereotypical white male characters and we are all craving for new creative ideas to emerge out of the huge pool of media that has evolved over the last few decades.

In conclusion,  although our class has shrunk to only fifteen remaining students, our discussions are still strong and the Beaty and the Beast critics class was no exceptions. We analyzed the questions well and ended up drawing quite valuable information on how society seems to have changed and indeed is changing ever so fast into a world were race, gender and origin no longer effect judgement, and we are free to experiance the full palette of talent that our world as a whole has to offer. This phenomenon in my mind is long overdue and has sadly been greatly restricted in the past. People of all origins have been oppressed through overpowerful religions and corrupt political policy and it has crippled our society with rediculous stereotypes and great amounts of indefensible bias. I will finish my blog with a particularly hideous picture of Germany's potential next Foreign Minister, a man who is openly gay, married to his partner and wears lots of pink ties. None of these things however have kept him from having a successful political career based on his actual skill and experience, without being rendered completely irrelevant and uncompetitive because of his sexual preferences. I think this shows a step in the right direction and exemplifies a future that is hopefully free from such bias, and relies on actual skill, knowledge and experience instead.

Beauty and the Beast - Gaston in Detail

The articles chosen for our critics class on Beauty and the Beast included an article entitled Yep Gaston's Gay and although this is an interesting topic on its own, it got me interested in why Disney choose to add this character to the story in the first place.

After doing a bit of research on the character, it seems that Disney added Gaston to the film in order to give the tale a sense of danger and to present an even greater contrast to the tales theme on inner versus outer beauty. The supervising animator responsible for initial drawings of Gaston portrayed him as an arrogant man, heavily built and having a mustache. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was in charge of Disney's motion picture division at the time insisted that Gaston had to appear more serious to add an element of "don't judge a book by its cover."

The idea of adding to the tales already sharp sense of inner beauty vs outer beauty through a character like Gaston was a smart move in my opinion. It gives the tale a character that is truly opposite to the Beast, very handsome to look at, but evil inside. The revisions made to Gaston to properly suit the tale shows that the creators really wanted to make a statement with this character, and thus made him more appealing to a modern audience, effectively giving him a soap opera charm rather than portraying him as an old fashioned Paramour.

This once again shows that Disney is not afraid to add many layers of new characters to the original tale they are revamping. They really seem to have mastered this art and are able to more effectively make a point on theme and moral by generating these specific provocative characters.

Beauty and the Beast Day 1

Today's class started with the realization that none of the three groups that were supposed to present were able to as all the presenters seem to have dropped the class. It really has started to scare me a little to see how many people dropped the class. Nevertheless after reviewing Ms Newsam's newest additions to our blackboard page we went on to start a short class discussion on The Beauty and the Beast. 

We mainly focused on the "Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont" version and the Disney version today, and tried to underline some of the key differences in both of these tales. We first talked about why characters like Lumiere and Cogsworth were added to the tale in the Disney version. This brought us to discuss several concepts on how these characters were used as communication aids between Belle and the Beast, as they really were not able to spend much time together otherwise. We also argued that it might be useful to have such characters in order for children to better grasp the moral of the story, they allow the tale to be narrated by several different characters, helping young ones follow along with the tale without being overly confused by it. In my mind not only do these characters serve as means of clarifying the tale, but they also help make the story more exciting and fluid ensuring that children are kept entertained and watching. 

This really led us into a good discussion on how children today are so over stimulated with visual inputs and media information, it seems that especially over the last decade these industries have evolved way beyond what they were in the early nineties when this movie was released. One would think that if this movie was made in 2009 it would greatly contrast the original, a film that was only released in 1991. It really does drive generations apart, and one gets the feeling that children, and people in general are constantly presented with more vivid forms of entertainment, causing our desire and threshold for more excitement in everything we do for fun to grow more and more. The age of Videogames and constant streaming information really has taken over, and hopefully this wont effect us negatively in the future.

When talking about the original tale, published in the late seventeen hundreds we all thought that although it wasn’t as filled with characters and imagery stimulus, the tale its self seemed more elegant and developed, in terms of its characters, like Belle and her sisters, who seemed better introduced and appeared to have greater depth in the written tale. Most of us felt that although today's children might find the Disney version of the story more entertaining and easier to follow, as a parent the original tale should be considered as it offers many other interesting aspects that could very well leave a child just as mesmerized.