Why are we cheering for Disney when they repackage the same old stories, again, as live-action remakes?

This article was written in response to the news that Disney is adding Mulan to their live action remake line-up.

Walt Disney was many things. Some of them not so fantastic. But I think, above anything, he was an absolute genius when it came to business. Yes, he had a brilliant imagination, but what made the Disney corp. so successful as a franchise was his ability to find a formula and stick to it: Walt Disney took edgy, dark stories – fairy tales, children’s books, real life events – and repackaged them for a family audience. He “Disneyfied” the old stories and reinvented classic characters; that’s where that term comes from.

The old stories still existed, though, and the Disney Corp. notably doesn’t have complete ownership over many of its most iconic characters. Take Alice in Wonderland: this will always be Lewis Carroll’s creation, and the Disney Classic version is just one of many, many incarnations of the tale. What makes Disney’s version unique is the Disneyfication: turning the story into an animated feature, drawing the plot points with bolder strokes, simplifying some elements while highlighting universal moral lessons.

This formula has served Disney well. Cinderella, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Robin Hood, The Lion King (Hamlet) and Peter Pan were all given the same treatment by the company, and suddenly, the stories were made accessible to a brand new audience. Parents and their children. Children who then grew up, and got to pass on the immortal tales to their own children. I grew up watching movies made in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and I had no idea, because animation didn’t (and still doesn’t) date itself the same way live action does.

This is what makes Disney special. This is what makes the Disney Classics especially important in terms of film history – they took grim (and Grimm’s) old stories and reinvented the meaning of the word “fairy tale.”

A remake of a remake

Which is why the decision to begin turning their Classics back into live action movies flabbergasts me to no end. Disney is not only asking me to believe that this is revolutionary – because there’s never been a live action Beauty and the Beast, oh wait, never mind, I take that back – but it’s also telling me that the twists and added darkness is a new invention.

“It’s not just the same story,” people claim. “They’re making it darker! More magical. More beautiful. Finally, a Cinderella for a modern audience!”

Except… Cinderella for a modern audience was Ella Enchanted. Ever After. A Cinderella Story. Into the Woods. Rags. Cindy. If the Shoe Fits. All more or less successful re-imaginings of a fairy tale that had nothing to do with Disney to begin with.

Because, reminder: Disney did not invent Cinderella, or Mulan, or Beauty and the Beast. Which means that, at the end of the day, a live-action version of a Disney Classic is just a remake of a remake.

And that’s really the clincher. Because for all the talk of darkness, Disney can’t change the story too much, because then they’re losing the nostalgia factor.

So, Disney isn’t actually changing the story. They’re just enhancing it. This is the logical next step after remastering the animations and releasing special edition DVDs (which we probably all bought, too), and we should not be so excited about the fact that they’re replacing hand-drawn backgrounds with CGI landscapes, and smacking pretty faces on cartoon characters.

The first time Disney ripped off existing stories, they changed them up, and drastically altered our perceptions of the stories and characters involved. People are still shocked to realise that, spoiler alert, Ariel dies at the end of The Little Mermaid. Disney really did something special back then, and is still occasionally using that old storytelling model. (Frozen is the Disneyfied version of The Snow Queen, and I’m not gonna lie, it’s pretty cleverly done.)

But with these live action remakes, Disney is ripping off its own stories, and there’s really no reason for this except to cash in on this disturbing remake trend which is, to put it bluntly, destroying the creative industry.

There is nothing whatsoever fresh, revolutionary, or different about these new movies. By throwing away what Disneyfied them to begin with, we end up with yet another version of the same old story. Told again. With different actors. CGI backgrounds. Airbrushing. Big white plastic smiles. The Disney logo slapped on at the start to remind us we have to love it. That’s all this is.

This is not storytelling. It is money-grabbing at its very worst.

‘I just want to be entertained’

This is obviously an opinion piece, and I’m expressing some pretty strong ones.

But I was speaking to some of the Hypable staff members about this, and they had some really good counterpoints. As Tariq Kyle explained, “I think the appeal of remakes (for me) is that it’s interesting to see what they remake about it. What they change, what they keep the same, and what makes us go, ‘WTF!?’ That’s why I’m loving all of these live-action remakes because, like with Cinderella, they were able to make it just different enough where I was thoroughly entertained the whole way though despite knowing the entire story. I like that. I just want to be entertained, and these are entertaining!”

It’s a compelling argument. I just want to be entertained. To an extent, we all do. That’s why we’re writing for Hypable (and presumably why you’re reading the site). It’s why we watch movies and television, and maybe even why we read books. It’s why we exist, right? Just to pass the time?

Wait. Really? If that’s why we’re here, then I’m clearly going about this “life” thing all wrong. I watch movies, read books, and watch television series to be inspired. The most terrifying thing in the world, to me, would be to just exist, to distract myself from my own mortality until it caught up with me.

I know I’m not alone when I say that fandom speaks to me because it adds value to my life. Not only am I inspired to write my own stories, but I’m also encouraged to examine my real life and the world around me, seeing it through a thousand different lenses as I allow myself to live vicariously through works of fiction. I don’t judge a story by its technical prowess or its prestige, I judge it by how it makes me think. And the more a story makes me think, the more value it holds to me.

Disney’s remakes of its remakes is just another step towards a world in which we repackage the same stories every five years, pretend they’re original, and throw away our hard-earned money to see them. Over and over again. Disney’s just cashing in on an existing trend; Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and Batman are perhaps better examples of just how gullible consumers really are. We don’t care that we’ve already seen the story. We want it again, and again, and again. Like always going to the same restaurant and ordering the same meal, taking the same route on the way to work, letting ourselves get lulled into sweet routine and familiarity.

Nothing wrong with that. There is certainly a case for updating stories like Cinderela and Mulan (although the argument kinda falls apart with Dumbo). But when routine comes at the expense of imagination, someone needs to take a stand.

Nostalgia is key

Clearly, the classic stories are revisited over and over again because a lot of creative minds want a chance to play in the familiar old sandbox, changing just enough to make it fresh, but not enough so audiences feel alienated by newness. And the trend is a response to a demand from audiences to update the classics. There are Cinematic Universes for everything, including the frickin’ Lego Movie. There are two Ghostbusters revivals in development at once. And this isn’t just Hollywood being evil and forcing us to do their bidding; we’re all willing participants in this game.

Every single comic book and YA novel you can possibly imagine is being developed into a movie, a TV series, or both. We’re being bombarded with new Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean instalments; even something as decidedly standalone as Independence Day is getting a sequel. Any day now, they’re going to announce the long-awaited sequel to Casablanca. And we eat it all up, begging for more.

Because at the end of the day, we WANT this. More superheroes, more fairy tales, more adaptations. More sequels, more prequels, more revivals, more spin-offs. It’s what sells tickets. I imagine Hollywood execs just have giant signs with the word “NOSTALGIA” hanging up everywhere, because that is the one and only thing guaranteed to fill seats in the cinemas. Who cares if the cost of their success is creativity itself? The only color that matters is green.

Disney, ironically, is also putting out some great original content. And I don’t blame them for cashing in on the nostalgia trend. But I do blame Hollywood for the fact that creativity is dying, and everyone – including Disney – who contributes to the remake trend is a culprit. Check out this infographic I found on Short of the Week, which is just too good not to reference:

But as Kyle pointed out, every remake of a story has something unique to offer. I’m not above remakes; I was all about the new Doctor Who, I’m psyched to see Chris Pratt dancing with dinosaurs this summer, and if they ever redo Harry Potter, I’ll be interested to see what they change. Storytelling is ultimately cyclical, and why shouldn’t it be? Life itself is cyclical. One might even say this is the circle of life.

The difference here is that Disney isn’t interested in reinventing the wheel here, it’s just shining up the same old wheel. And yet it seems like every single time news of another live action remake breaks, people act like the chicken just laid a golden egg. I don’t get it. It’s a very white egg, guys.

Why this is all so disturbing

I’ll end on a more philosophical note, just to get us thinking about why this nostalgia trend is really so prevalent in society right now.

I once took a course in media sociology where the teacher pointed to trends of nostalgia through time, and presented an interesting hypothesis: the closer a society is to collapse, the more its citizens will flock to what they know. The more uncertain reality becomes, the more reliable and predictable our escapism outlets need to be. And what’s safer than good old Disneyfied fairy tales where everyone is thin, beautiful, and gets their happy ending?

When another Cinderella is announced, we’re relieved. When a narrative becomes too challenging or hard to follow, we get nervous. Overly critical. Hostile. This isn’t because we’re stupid, it’s because we’re afraid.

Ultimately, we’re all monkeys wearing pants. We go where the crowd tells us. When everyone else cheers at the Emperor’s beautiful gown, we begin to believe that there’s something wrong with us because we don’t see it, so we cheer, just to be safe. To fit in. Hollywood knows this, and it’s why actors make billions of dollars to do their jobs, while millions of unemployed Americans starve and end up living on the streets, as the job market dries up and more and more young people discover that their supposed skillset is useless in today’s society.

We don’t see this. We don’t want to. We just want more Cinderella, because when we watched it as children, everything was safe.