Untapped goldmine: Disney Princesses 'to the rescue'.

There is a spot near the beginning of Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture that details the origins of the Disney Princess brand that originated around 2000.  Long-story short, the compromise for allowing all of the various Disney princess characters to appear on the same merchandise was that they not actually interact with each other in any way.  You may not realize it, but you've never actually seen a Disney Princess t-shirt or storybook with Jasmine and Belle playing tennis together or Aurora and Cinderella picking out party gowns.  They are always staring either at us or off into the distance, but never at each other.  I bring this up because in the midst of all the 'who should be in Expendables 3' or 'who should be in that female Expendables spin-off', I realized that Disney was in fact practicing a remarkable bit of restraint when it came to financially mining their properties.  Imagine: Jasmine, Belle, Mulan, Cinderella, Aurora, Pocahontas, Snow White, Ariel, Tiana, Rapunzel all in one spectacular adventure to do some kind of derring-do and/or saving the proverbial day.  Of course since most of their arch villains are suffering from a slight case of death, the already-established antagonists would be pretty limited (although Jafar and Dr. Facilier would be the easiest to resurrect since they both perished via magic).  But putting aside the whole 'art' argument, can you imagine how such a film wouldn't gross hundreds of millions of dollars in theaters?  Can you imagine how many untold millions of DVDs or Blu-Rays such a thing would sell? Say what you will about the alleged greed of the Walt Disney studios, but it says something that they haven't leaped at such a seemingly obvious opportunity to rake in untold amounts of money.

Scott Mendelson        

"Girl Power" animated films used to be 'no-big deal'. Why Pixar's Brave, and its feminist narrative, is not a step forward, but merely a course-correction.

I don't generally watch clips, let alone post them, for upcoming films.  I somewhat dislike the practice of releasing full-blown scenes of upcoming films, as it's purely spoiler material, plain and simple.  But I will make an exception, as posting the above clip gives me the opportunity to rant about something that came to mind about a month ago while I was on a Disney Cruise with the wife and kids. Point being, there will be any number of essays written over the next few months about how Pixar's Brave is some kind of groundbreaking picture because it has a female lead, a warrior princess no less.  It's story seems to involve a young girl who rebels against her family's expectations regarding his place in life as a girl in 1300s (?) Scotland (see the teaser and the trailer HERE and HERE).  That's fine.  The film looks gorgeous and I'm a sucker for Scottish music (Patrick Doyle is handling the scoring duties). Alas, I think it's frankly downright regressive that we view this film as a feminist breakthrough.  Quite simply, Disney released an animated film back in 1998 starring a female protagonist who rebelled against society's expectations of her.  Mulan was as much a feminist fable as Brave is selling itself as, and there wasn't nearly as much huffing-and-puffing about it at the time.

Jan De Bont returns, will direct live-action Mulan with Zhang Ziyi.

Good news for those nostalgic for 1990s action. After a seven year absence, action icon Jan De Bont is returning to the director's chair. He has signed to helm an English-language, live-action version of the Chinese myth Mulan. Independently financed, the alleged $100 million-budgeted project will star Zhang Ziyi as the icon made popular to US audiences by the 1998 Disney animated musical. It's a pleasant return of someone who really had it all for a few years.