Word: disneyized
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...Like many of the soldiers who were forced to cancel long-planned vacations, Howard had to forgo a trip to Disney World with his family. "It was disappointing for everyone," he says. "But my goal was to make it worthwhile. I don't want [the soldiers to go home at 16 months] saying that wasn't worth it. Instead they can say, look at what we achieved in four months...
Shrek consciously rebelled against the sentimental Disney hegemony of fairy-tale movies. But today the outlaw is king: parodying fairy tales has become the default mode of telling them. 2005's Hoodwinked! reimagined Little Red Riding Hood as a crime Rashomon, while this year's Happily N'Ever After sent up Cinderella. Broadway smash Wicked posits that the Wicked Witch of the West was misunderstood. This fall Disney (et tu, Mickey?) releases Enchanted, in which a princess (Amy Adams) is magically banished by an evil queen to modern New York City, where she must fend for herself, parodying her princess...
...White turn from cream puff into kick-ass fury in Shrek the Third--launching an army of bluebirds and bunnies at the bad guys to the tune of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song--is more than a brilliant sight gag. It's a relief to parents of girls, with Disney's princess legacy in their rearview mirrors and Bratz dolls and Britney up ahead. It goes hand in hand with a vast genre of empowered-princess books (Princess Smartypants, The Princess Knight) for parents who'd rather their daughters dream of soccer balls than royal balls. As for the boys...
Tweaking fairy tales also allows moviemakers to tell stories about themselves without boring us. The Shrek movies are full of inside jokes (the kingdom of Far Far Away is essentially Beverly Hills; the first villain was widely seen as a stand-in for then Disney chief Michael Eisner). Fairy-tale parodies are safe rebellions, spoofing formulas and feel-good endings while still providing the ride into the sunset that pays the bills. In Happily N'Ever After, a wizard runs a "Department of Fairy-tale-land Security," seeing to it that each story--Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, etc.--hews to the book...
Sound like a formula to you? What these stories are reacting against is not so much fairy tales in general as the specific, saccharine Disney kind, which sanitized the far-darker originals. (As did Shrek, by the way. In the William Steig book, the ogre is way more brutal, scary and ... ogreish.) But the puncturing of the Disney style is in danger of becoming a cliché itself. The pattern--set up, then puncture, set up, then puncture--is so relentless that it inoculates the audience against being spellbound, training them to wait for the other shoe to drop whenever they...