Comradeship // Freechat

The problem with Disney's "woke" art isn't that they're actually woke, it is that it's trash. Good art DOES discuss leftist talking points. Good art DOES appeal to disenfranchised minorities. Good art DOES try to inspire social improvements. But it doesn't become good art by just ticking these boxes. The baseline expectation of any moviegoer, no matter to which groups they belong, is to at least see a good story with good characters told via good directing, supported with good music and good animation or acting; and you only get those things by taking the time and spending the money for someone to sit down and put the necessary work in. We all know many renowned leftist artists who did that, such as Brecht, Eisenstein, Lucas, Roddenberry, Tarkovsky, or Miyazaki.

If you go to see good movies, you will notice all of them have one thing in common: You can feel the massive amount of time and painstaking labour that went into them. If you analyse them closer, you will see that behind every frame, every object, every line of dialogue, every musical chord lies a careful decision to put it there in order to move you and make you deliberate the film's core themes. Doing this is both an art and a science, it is a slow and methodical process, and getting it wrong is easy and costs much more at the box office than just letting a generic remake flop somewhat.

It is because of this business logic that Disney's recent productions are all pumped out within the span of months and its workers are overworked and underpaid. It is so afraid to risk its bottom line that it censors its writers and directors to take the most conservative and uncreative positions they possibly can, that everything they churn out follows the same formula, and most people simply don't want to go to the cinema to watch the same film twenty times in a row. Making "woke" stuff is just about the only thing they have going for them, and therefore they have to resort to such methods to market their horseshit. For instance, you didn't go see "The Little Mermaid (2023)", their 21st live-action remake of an 18th-century story that has already existed in animation since the Cold War, but this time it has a black person in it? Racist! Sexist! Ableist! Way to kill the career of an up-and-coming actress, you scumbag! Of course, people don't really boycott the film because they actually are any of these things; they boycott it because it's lazy, lackluster, and an obvious cash grab by a dystopian multi-billion dollar conglomerate. But of course, some people don't like to be insulted by a faceless PR machinery and go to the cinema to feel a little better about themselves, and at the end of the day these people generate tons of revenue.