I guess I’m princess-phobic? I don’t care about royalty in real life or on the screen, and that goes double for animated movies.
As “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles” filmmaker Brad Bird often points out, animation is a medium, not a genre, and it can be used to tell almost any story. But my favorites among Disney’s many classics tend not to tell stories about princesses who end up marrying boring princes because they kissed them or put a shoe on them or whatever. I’ll give those women points for not being born into splendor — Disney princesses tend to marry into their titles — but if falling in love with some dude is the whole point of a movie, it’s a “no” for me, dawg.
The good news is Disney has long since moved away from the dated Grimms’ Fairy Tales playbook that dominated the studio’s early efforts, and the results have often been wonderful (to be fair, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Cinderella” are fine movies, even if they’re not my faves). Disney has done science fiction (“The Black Cauldron”), mystery (“The Great Mouse Detective”), adventure (“Robin Hood,” “Alice in Wonderland”) and, since “Beauty and the Beast” revitalized the animation studio in 1991, Broadway-style musicals.
Led by “imagineer” Walt Disney, the studio made the first Technicolor feature (“Snow White”), trailblazers such as the music-themed “Fantasia,” and pioneered combining live action with animation in such movies as the currently unavailable “Song of the South.” With its eye on the box office, Disney may not be on the cutting edge of animation anymore — it took smaller studios to innovate with “Flee,” an animated documentary coming later this year, and the Polish “Loving Vincent,” created so that the entire film looks like a Vincent van Gogh painting in motion.