Black and fab. 22. Libra. ENFJ.
Bay Area. UC Berkeley Grad: Media Studies.
Writer, artist, illustrator, producer, critic.
Benevolent Media Proprietor in training.
I #E*TonesOrBust.
It's also my business standard.
Look, it’s fucking Disney.
Disney.
They are a modern paragon of creativity, design, and innovation.
It is not a matter of them being physically and imaginatively incapable of creating varied designs.
It is a matter of them not giving a single fuck in terms of creating visual diversity,…
Before you defend you endless babble again let me explain you a thing. Rapunzel was whitebecause the story called for blond hair and was set in Germany. The original story of Rapunzel calls for it. As for Frozen it’s most likely set in a northern country and Anna’s ethnicity is not debatable. Maybe her hair color is, but not her ethnicity. Have you ever read The Snow Queen? When they’re following previous material there are certain things they can’t change.
Okie dokie.
This response is so absolutely basic that I could probably link you to at least three other posts per point you’ve made, but sometimes peeps respond a little better when things are custom tailored to their recycled defense.
So, symphonie-excentrique, let me break down my problem, and why your response does little to alleviate any issue I’ve ever had with Frozen.
Thank you for using a tale’s origin as defense of the Disney’s history of super-princess-whiteness. Let me tell you why I fail to see how that justifies anything:
Aladdin is originally set in China. You will note that Agrabagh =/= China, almost as if the origin had no bearing on the ability of the writing team to re-envision the story taking place elsewhere! The Princess and the Frog lore draws from Germany rather than New Orleans, yet again, Disney had no problem altering the setting and races of the characters. Hell, even Lion King is Hamlet with lions in Africa. Just three examples, but hopefully that frees you from the idea that the original language, author-ethnicity, or origin country of the fairy tale in question has to dictate where a retelling takes place. (It doesn’t! Whoa!)
I would argue that to say that Disney, Disney, doesn’t know how to creatively deviate from the source material is doing the company and it’s legacy a huuuuuge disservice, tbh, and it’s equally telling that the “SOURCE MATERIAL!!!” defense tends to rear it’s ugly head whenever maintaining the utter Whiteness of a story is called into question.
Disney altering stories is. not. new.
It is not unheard of.
(Likewise, altering the setting of fairytales and making them PoCentric is not detrimental to the story, as proven by HBO!)
If you think that Rapunzel could only function as a coherent narrative when starring a blonde White princess, I assume the entire “Tangled in India” meme -and it’s spinoff Racebent Disney- passed you by. (Her hair glows! This is the point Disney went with, and glowing hair can be pretty darn magical if she isn’t White too! :O)
As for Frozen it’s most likely set in a northern country and Anna’s ethnicity is not debatable. Maybe her hair color is, but not her ethnicity. Have you ever read The Snow Queen? When they’re following previous material there are certain things they can’t change.
Surprisingly enough, I have read the Snow Queen!
Have you?
Would you like to talk about all the narrative changes Disney has made from the “previous material they’re following” (who is “Anna?” Where is Gerda? Where is Kai? Where is the little thief girl? Gerd-anna is related to the Snow Queen now? Oh the Snow Queen is a teen? They’re sisters? There’s no more mirror shards? Everything is completely different and it’s really more of a loose retelling than anything? YADON’TSAY).
No, sorry, excuse me, your point was that the ethnicity of Anna (do you mean Gerda?) was the only thing they “can’t change.”
Why is that, exactly?
They’ve changed plenty else in the story, and you know, non-White people live in cold places too! :O
So no, please don’t come at me as if Disney had literally no choice with Frozen but to create another White Princess. Don’t.
Not when media representation is so fucking important and formative, and when their endless parade of White princesses is so problematic, and when Disney doesn’t have any other Princesses of color lined up to join their roster, and when their last Princess of Color -a Latina princess named Sophia- was an absolute fakeout, and when Disney already gives their current PoC princesses background treatment.
Don’t come to me like there is no solution to the problem, let alone like there isn’t a problem at all.
Don’t even.
Star Trek/Gravity Falls racebending ▶ Tyree Brown as Peter “Dipper” Kirk | Quvenzhané Wallis as Mabel Kirk
“It all began when our parents decided we could use a change in scenery. They shipped us off into deep space to stay with our Uncle Jim aboard the USS Enterprise.”
Okay, so there’s been a lot of confusion about these graphics that I made and I want to state that for the record, these are meant to be a crossover between Star Trek and Gravity Falls and Dipper and Mabel Kirk are actually Dipper and Mabel Pines. Yeah, I just realized that I confused everyone so I’ll start from the beginning.
I’m an editor over at TV Tropes so I pretty much spend a lot of time fixing up the Star Trek and Gravity Falls pages. There’s a separate page called Wild Mass Guessing that’s specifically for fan theories and while I was cleaning up the page I came across this theory that inspired me to create the Star Falls series in the first place: that Jim Kirk from Star Trek is related to Dipper and Mabel Pines from Gravity Falls.
For those of you familiar with Star Trek, Jim’s brother Sam ran away when he was a kid and this theory states that Sam adopted their mom’s maiden name so that he wouldn’t be easily found. Winona Kirk’s maiden name happened to be Pines, the same last name that Dipper and Mabel have on Gravity Falls. So according to this theory, Sam Kirk is Dipper and Mabel’s dad, making Jim Kirk their uncle.
This graphic that I made at the start of the crossover series should make things clear.
As for the racebending? One of the people I follow, the very awesome astroprojection, reblogged this adorable racebent drawing of Mabel and that was the inspiration for casting Tyree Brown and Quvenzhané Wallis as Dipper and Mabel.
So there you go. If you are going to tag this or this or any of the Star Falls series, please tag it under Gravity Falls as well as Star Trek. Hopefully this clears things up and if you guys still have questions, feel free to ask me.
What a cool concept!
HEY KAZUO WHAT AM I NOW?
UHH STUPID?
NO I’M THE XBOX ONE!
WHATS THE DIFFERENCE?
This is Ravi Rider, Tangled in India’s version of Flynn Rider. Inspired by m-azing’s idea of Tangled in India and Flynn’s designs by jhenne-bean and artbyraveyrai.
Drawn and colored by althelamp.
I NEVER SAW THIS :O
Y’all need to note me when you do bootiful stuff like this! <3
Anna vs. rapunzel.
Guys, I know they look similar but Jesus the movie isn’t even out yet! Wait till you see it to judge it! Be proud of Pixar, in close ups of Anna’s face it looks like they have really improved the way they do skin and eyebrows.
Frozen is a Disney film. Both companies are doing CGI animation now…
“you try animating a movie”
“character design is hard”
…yeah maybe if the kind of diversity you’re going for is different goddamn hair colours then sure bro, but seriously. if your gaze is not hyper-zoomed in on skinny conventionally-attractive white people then maybe you could see that there are about a million *daily* examples of ladies who display a full range of diversity in FACIAL FEATURES ALONE - never mind shit that studios are really scared of mucking with (race, size, gender markers, etc.) - WHOM THE CHARACTER DESIGNERS PASS DAILY ON THE WAY TO AND FROM THEIR JOBS.
I mean goddamn character design is hard but not for these reasons! these assholes have found a formula that works: conventionally-attractive features to the point of being boring, thin, white, same facial shape, slight variation in eye shape (note: if you’re basing differentiation on eyebrows now then you need to look at the bigger goddamn picture), then different hair colour and virtually no change in skin tone.
same tired old lifeless shit that has shown to be a perfect match for how society wants little girls to look like to be considered valid and loveable (and of course this has a hand in creating this bullshit), while allowing the largest numbers of little girls to project themselves onto these crappily-designed representatives of the ideal.
these character designs suck. any character designs that require a microscope to become distinguishable suck.
like you could practically take every Disney princess (esp. the white ones) and swap out their faces and various features without incident. they are playing it fucking safe. they always have.
male characters however have every single opportunity to be designed with MUCH greater respect for human variety, even within male body standards. men are considered the human standard; infinitely mutable figures who are representative of all. women are just women and can look like what we want women to look like and are kind of just placeholders most of the goddamn time anyway.
and before some yahoo comes in and starts defending this racist, generic bullshit I am a trained and working animator, and trust me, making women look different from one another is actually fucking doable. for fuck’s sake my current gig is on a sitcom teeming with super interesting and effective, realistically-designed female characters, AND NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM HAS A WAIST OF COMPARABLE WIDTH TO THEIR NECKS. or a remotely similar facial mould. goddamn some of these women even vary in body type! who knew!
/rant
heres a close up of the scary but cheerful OLAF
so antm reruns are on, and its the weird modelland stuff, and now I want to read the book…
