We Need to Talk About Bruno

Film: Encanto
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on laptop.

When you think of Disney animated films, there is a particular sense that you almost certainly have in your head. A lot of that is going to be the basic Disney Princess story. We’ve got a naïve (often) young girl who has some magical powers in one way or another, or who is special in some meaningful way and is going to spend the bulk of the film essentially finding the guy she’s going to marry. Disney has honestly gotten better at this in the last decade and a half. A film like Tangled, for instance, follows that traditional Disney pattern on the surface but gives our heroine a lot more agency. That’s more the case in Frozen. With Encanto, we’re changing a lot of the script, and the movie is all the better for it.

When I say that Disney is changing a lot of that script, I mean that almost all of the things that you associate with a Disney Princess movie are not here to the point where I’m not sure that our main character would even qualify as a Disney princess. In fact, she is the one person in her family who doesn’t have special powers. But I see I’m getting ahead of myself, so allow me to take a step back.

Preemptive Strike

Film: Zootopia
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on big ol’ television.

Oscar nominations are going to be announced in a couple of days, and since there wasn’t anything I really felt like watching tonight, I figured I do a little pre-emptive viewing. I think it’s a good bet that Zootopia will earn a nomination. It’s a Disney film, for one thing, and it was pretty well reviewed. Now, it’s possible that the Academy won’t want to double up on Disney in this category and that the nomination will go to Moana instead. But hey, you rolls the dice and you takes your chance, right?

Zootopia is Disney’s take on racism through the lens of anthropomorphic animals and a plot straight out of film noir. We have a world where predator and prey animals have evolved into something like a human civilization and have the ability to live side by side without killing each other. Young rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) has dreams of being a police officer, a job that is traditionally handled by predators and larger prey animals like water buffalo. In Zootopia, a city near where Judy grows up, having a rabbit police officer is quite a novelty—she’s the first. Her police chief, Bogo (Idris Elba) is unimpressed and sticks her on parking ticket duty.