I survived the Aladdin trailer
A man with a singular vision, working and inspiring a small team of experts out of a garage in California. Technologically ahead of their time, experimenting with groundbreaking new techniques, creating things people have never seen before, and, over time, growing into one of the most influential, beloved, and controversial companies in America.
Is it Steve Jobs? No, it’s Walt Disney, creator of Mickey Mouse, and of an entire culture around what American childhood, and to an extent, entertainment, should look like, for the past century.
Almost no one in the Western hemisphere is immune from the reach of Disney’s multicolored claws of culture. When my family first immigrated to America, one of my first solid memories of American childhood was my cousin’s Jasmine doll, from the then-revolutionary Aladdin cartoon.
“Can I play with her,” I ask, reaching up . She is encapsulated in the box she came in. Most Americans throw these boxes away, but my cousin has kept it, meticulously attaching each piece of clothing to its original twist-tie, organizing all the accessories in one place. “No,” she yanks Jasmine away.
“You’ll lose her earrings.” “I promise I won’t. I’ll stay right here.” She hesitates, then carefully unties Jasmine from her plastic exile and hands her to me. I am pure joy. I stroke her hair. I feel the fabric of the pants, the tiny plastic shoes that come with her. I’ve never seen the movie Aladdin, unlike my cousin, who, even though she’s been in America less than me, already knows everything and has seen everything, but I love Jasmine.
As a child of the 1990s, I grew up in full bloom of Disney’s renaissance, and, like many people my age, have cemented this time as a reference point for what Disney could and should be. Although the animated films Disney turned out during this time period were amazing - Aladdin, Little Mermaid, Lion King, and Hunchback of Notre Dame to name a few - the studio was still recovering from its stale decades of the 70s and 80s, and
In 1985, to make more room for live-action filmmaking, the animation department was moved from the main Disney lot in Burbank to a "temporary" location in various hangars, warehouses, and trailers about two miles (3.2 km) east in nearby Glendale, where it would remain for the next ten years. Thus, most of the Disney Renaissance (in terms of where the films were actually made) actually took place in a rather ordinary industrial park in Glendale, the Grand Central Business Center.
In Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull talks about visiting that dark space and what a negative impression it had on him as someone who had idolized Disney animators in the 1950s and 1960s.
The studio kept churning out hit after hit, but box office returns started tapering off in the late 1990s. What happened? One theory is that digital ways of film-making took over, and audiences got bored of hand-drawn animations. But the success of Studio Ghibli, as well as Disney’s previous enormous successes (Mulan, one of the last movies it made during that period, grossed $120 million at the box office. For comparison, Private Ryan, the top movie that year, made $216 million) proves that it’s not the case. Here’s one theory, and the one I believe,
This is what became the major problem for the second half of the Disney Renaissance. Most of the films produced between 1995 and 1999 by Disney’s animation division were based on stories that simply did not lend themselves to the Disney formula. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) is a dense, complex work of literature by Victor Hugo, and it is not a fairy tale that can be so easily tinkered with. When you add comical, talking gargoyles (not unlike the talking candlestick and pots in Beauty and the Beast), you take away from the tragedy of the work.
Contrary to industry wisdom, I do not think that the formula quit working or that audiences really grew tired of hand-drawn animation. There is no denying that the formula was incredibly played out by the end of the 1990s. So much so, that real gems like Mulan (1998) disappeared under the radar when it actually was not about a girl in search for a guy (though she does find one as a bonus at the end). Audiences show a vast willingness to see the same story again and again, as Disney’s newer acquisition of Marvel Studios can attest. The problem is the formula was too blatant after one fairy tale romance almost every year. It was also starting to be used on material that was far too incongruous with the Disney brand, thus creating films that were at odds with themselves.
With the company continuing to take on new ventures through the late 1990s - online portals, baseball teams, a cruise line - the company needed capital to finance these expansions. The logical way to do this was to come up with movies that stuck to the tried and true formula of a family happy ending.
But with each film becoming more expensive to make than the next and high expectations from audiences, particularly after such daring, individual works like Lion King, Disney found themselves in a classic management conundrum: How to continue normal business operations while also innovating? This is the central thesis of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and the first time I read the book in business school, I laughed at how trite and stupid it sounded. But now, I can’t stop seeing this pattern everywhere I go in the business world. How do we make a new thing while keeping the old thing going and paying for the new thing? New York Times going digital. Pharmaceutical drug development. Refactoring software. The patterns is everywhere.
With Disney’s constant thirst for expansion, the company had to do something. In order to finance continuous building, you need stable work, not risky, out there, we-might-go-bankrupt work. Hence, the increase in creative movies that still followed the tried-and-true Disney pattern. And, this is what continues happening now. As the Disney empire keeps growing (Star Wars, Marvel, a streaming service, and much, much, more) and the share price keeps rising,
they need to keep funding expansion, and the obvious way to do that is with movies that they’ve already made to cater to existing and broader, less risky audiences.
But, a funny thing happens when you become less risky: you become boring. I’ve quoted this post by John D. Cook before, but I think it’s such a great way of succinctly explaining the dangers of mass media:
Trying to please too wide and too critical an audience leads to defensive, colorless writing.
You’ll never use an allusion for fear that someone won’t catch it.
You’ll never use hyperbole for fear that some hyper-literalist will object.
You’ll never leave a qualification implicit for fear that someone will pounce on it.
What you’ll do, is make bland movies. Which brings us back to modern-day Disney. Here’s a sampling of the upcoming movies Disney has in the pipeline for the next couple years:
Dumbo (live action remake)
Aladdin (live action remake)
Lion King (live action remake)
Toy Story 4
Frozen 2
Mulan (live action remake)
Descendants 3
Lady and the Tramp (live action remake)
Onward (original)
Maleficent 2
Artemis Fowl
Star Wars Episode 9
Indiana Jones 5
Not exactly the inspiring, visionary Disney of the early years. And, judging by the Aladdin trailer, they’re not even willing to take any risks on the content they’re rehashing. Everything follows the same exact formula that made for ground-breaking blockbusters from the 1990s. Everyone in the movie is beautiful, and completely bland.
Even the genie, who should be outrageous and flamboyant, something Will Smith excels at in his other movies, is sluggish and a pale comparison to Robin Williams’s groundbreaking performance.
When these clips first came out, Twitter (me included) was outraged. How dare they desecrate this thing that has been the magic of our childhood? Make it flat, dull, without any affect, without any risk, stripped of all its sharp edges and innovation? Surely this thing was going to flow.
However, me and the haters on Twitter have turned out to be all wrong. So far, Aladdin has managed to gross over $600 million and has largely favorable reviews from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. It truly seems that Disney has found the sweet spot in its innovation strategy, and one that makes shareholders happy: reduce the risk by churning out regurgitated content, keep putting out live remakes and action films, and keep straying further and further from the original vision of the man in the garage hunched over a drawing of a mouse.
What I’m reading:
A look at the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines:
What do you do when your job wants you to lie about something? Three approaches from a publication called “The Bureaucrat”
This very excellent blog post on what the difference between junior and senior developers is.
The biggest problem with Slack is that it doesn’t have a mute/block button.
A podcast about Stripe’s machine learning infrastructure
An amazing documentary about babies that were airlifted out of Vietnam after the war:
About the Author
I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia. Most of my free time is spent kid-wrangling, reading, and writing bad tweets. I also have longer opinions on things. Find out more here or follow me on Twitter. This newsletter, including warm takes about data, tech, and everything around those two. It goes out twice-ish a week for free. Paid subscribers get even more warm takes.
If you like this newsletter, get friends to subscribe!