CW's Beauty & the Beast Flirts... No. Has "A Full On Date" With Domestic Violence (Yes, They Went There. No It Was Not A Good Thing.)

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

It's Season 2, Episode 3: Oh CW, what have you done?

While I'm one of those people who, perhaps too easily, sees more than a little Stockholm Syndrome in retellings of Beauty and the Beast (not so much the originals but many stories "after" it), but the places the CW's Beauty and the Beast has gone/is going, is... kinda a not-good thing.

OK. No "kinda". It's just not.

Quick summary after the jump to catch you up, in case you haven't seen the episode and don't care about spoilers.
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The Good Thing About Comas and Sleeping Princesses (?!) aka Ugly Princesses Not Allowed Pt 2

It's been days since the "girls having feelings are so difficult to animate" goof quote by Mouse House employee Lino Disalvo (head animator on Frozen's crew)*, and the disbelief/outrage from various corners of the web continues to grow.

There was one (snarky) comment I wanted to report on the blog, since it does impact animated fairy tales (from Slate):

...it’s really hard to accurately convey characters’ inner lives when they have to look hot in every frame. Feelings are so ugly. Ask Freud. Ask Claire Danes. No wonder a great many Disney movies like to place their leading ladies in comas. If only "pretty," as the Cut’s Maggie Lange writes, could “just be an emotion … we could all go home early.”

So: comas, sleeping, still-as-a-statue and sobbing face down on the nearest object - these are animators favorite girl scenes??

(Wow - my brain just zigged and zagged into some dark places regarding the issues you could riff on from here..!)

Disney still haven't responded to the "what-the-flop!" reaction media-wide, by the way. I'm beginning to wonder if they're going to pretend it never happened and shove it under the carpet, while quietly, just to be on the safe side, they take those sleepy/coma-ish princess fairy tales off the Disney options table for the foreseeable future, just to be sure they're not accused of adding "yet another easy sleeping scene".

Here's a few I can think of we're unlikely to see on the big screen anytime soon:

• Twelve Dancing Princesses
• The Water of Life
• East of the Sun, West of the Moon
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• The Snake Prince
• The Tinderbox (noooo! that would be so awesome.. *sigh*)
• The Princess and the Pea

Here's another good point on the difficulty of animating "lady feelings":

Representing characters’ feelings without diminishing their attractiveness was only the first hurdle. Filmmakers working with two princesses also had to distinguish visually between them, as if there wasn't just one way for a Disney princess to look. MovieViral tells us that the animators were also tasked with creating “2,000 different snowflakes that can be seen in the entire film.” After they’d spent so much time individuating all those snowflakes, can we really expect the poor Disney employees to turn around and dream up a pair of nonidentical female characters, too? Come on. At least snowflakes are allowed to be ugly.

But I should balance this with a different perspective. Surely there's something.... ah - here we go, a quote from New York Magazine:

In fairness to all creatures of the world, Disalvo did also mention that adding emotion to a snowman is super tricky as well.

Ungh.

* By the way, congratulations Mr. Disalvo - this is how your long, enviable and distinguished career will be summarized for the rest of time. Ain't immortality a bitch?

Disney's Ugly Princesses (Just Kidding. Pretty Is A Requirement. On the Record.)

This is the bottom half of one of the new Frozen posters. (Ugh)

Sometimes I want to change the name of this blog to Oh No They Didn't! but that's already taken...

(Coincidentally, I was preparing a two-part post on other controversies centering around Frozen that are affecting the public's opinion of fairy tales - slushee indeed...)

So here's the news out of Disney, originally posted in a 50 Things You May Not Know About Frozen article (intended as a publicity "cast-interview" and peek behind the scenes) but certain excerpts were quickly reposted (& shredded) by Tumblr, then quoted and well summarized HERE by Cartoon Brew:

Disney’s Frozen won’t be released theatrically for another month-and-half, but it’s already melting into one giant slushee of controversy. Some people have chosen to boycott the film because of the chauvinist revisions to its storyline. But the real shitsnowstorm of controversy started from within the studio after Lino DiSalvo, the head of animation on Frozen, claimed that it was “really, really difficult” to animate women because they have to be kept pretty while expressing emotions:

“Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, because they have to go through these range of emotions, but you have to keep them pretty and they’re very sensitive to — you can get them off a model very quickly. So, having a film with two hero female characters was really tough, and having them both in the scene and look very different if they’re echoing the same expression; that Elsa looking angry looks different from Anna being angry.”

!!!!!!!

Disney did NOT just confirm "pretty" as the most desirable attribute in their female leads, did they?

Yeah they did.

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