Sunday, February 19, 2006

Michael Eisner, Childhood Rapist


I know that it's a bit out of style to bash Michael Eisner now that he's no longer part of Walt Disney, but I was listening to the soundtrack to Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away in English) and I realized that Disney (meaning Disney itself, not Pixar - although Pixar is now Disney anyway, and not Studio Ghibli, although Disney has distributed their films here in the US) hasn't released an animated film with any redeeming qualities at all in over a decade. I'm not blaming Robert Iger for this - he brought Pixar into the fold and gave John Lasseter full creative control over Disney animation, so they may have turned a corner here, but Eisner managed to tear the door off of Disney's animation vault, where they store movies for 10 years so nobody can see them, then re-release them with a lot of fanfare and a new cover so that another generation of shmucks will go and buy them again, and destroy everything that was good about Disney animation. During his tenure, he greenlit direct-to-video (i.e. crap) sequels to every Disney animated movie ever made, except for the Aristocats, a movie so bad that a bad sequel to it would have been so bad as to create a paradox of sorts where the crappy animation actually imploded on itself, like a miniature black hole.
Seriously, I remember the day when i loved Disney movies. They were the stuff of dreams - things that I watched in between Star Wars airings. I was looking forward to showing them to my children some day, but now I worry that I'll get sucked into the same trap my mother did with my little sister - she has all the bad sequels. Of course, I still have Miyazaki to help me out. I am certainly going to indoctrinate my daughter to like Ghibli films because they're things I can tolerate. I may even buy into the old Disney vault and get some of the actual classic films (they call these masterpieces, and the sequels are called the Gold Collection, as in fool's gold) (not some of the crap like Pocahontas, which teaches children that all white people are evil and Gaia is your friend and personal diety). I refuse to go any further than this though. Buying bad Disney sequels is like being an Accessory to Murder. You're just as guilty as the guy doing the killing.

1 comment:

Forro said...

I personally will never find it out of style to bash Eisner.