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Monday, April 2, 2012

Disney Characters Are Unrealistic

          Pretty much everyone in the United States--and probably beyond--watched the classic Disney movies growing up. Obviously, a lot of the talking animals and spontaneous yet well-choreographed songs in these movies aren't real, but even some of the human characters are really unrealistic


Belle (Beauty and the Beast)

          Okay, I see what the moral of the story is supposed to be: form your opinions of people based on their personalities, not their appearance. But apparently, that idea only applies as long as everyone ends up being both attractive and rich at the end, because everyone knows good things only happen to you if you're pretty. But I guess being pretty enough to earn being called Beauty is supposed to make up for everything else wrong with Belle. She's considered the "smart princess," I guess because she reads a lot, but how much are you really going to get out of a book when you only read while singing, dancing, and carrying out a conversation with various townspeople all at once? Also, the way she falls in "love" with the Beast is a little sketchy. She befriends a giant hairy monster dude with fangs because a teapot told her to.Good thing that big yellow dress is pretty much just a portable padded room.

Ariel mermaid.jpg

Ariel (The Little Mermaid)

          Okay. Just look at this girl. THAT IS NOT NATURAL. I have no idea how you would go about dying your hair underwater, but even if that was somehow possible, it's not going to stay that flowy all the time. Now look at her eyes. Those things are freakishly huge. Eyes are spheres, Disney--part of them is inside of her head. Just imagine how much room those vapid golf balls must take up. Where exactly does her brain go? Ah, but that's the magic of Disney; girls don't have brains! Which explains my next issue with Little Miss No-Legs. At one point in the movie, she's singing about the world of land while examining all the mysterious items she collected. She is especially fascinated by a fork and doesn't seem to know what to do with it because she has never seen before. Because I guess the GIANT FORK HER DAD CARRIES AT ALL TIMES hasn't left much of an impression.
Lastly, there is one big problem with Ariel that I haven't been able to get over since I was about four, and if anyone can answer this they will be my hero forever. How does she poop?

Princess Tianna.jpg

Tiana (The Princess and the Frog)

          I haven't actually seen this movie, so maybe that's just why parts of it don't make sense to me. Tiana is Disney's first (and probably only) black princess. I see what they're trying to do, and I think that's great, but some of the logistics still don't quite add up. All the other princesses live in a place that actually exists (France, China, England, India, the ocean, etc.). I'm not trying to be racist at all here, but the only countries I can think of that have a black royal family would be in Africa. And maybe their governmental assets would be better spent on ending starvation and preventing malaria than on sparkly blue dresses. But maybe that's just me.

UPDATE: I looked up some info on this movie, and it turns out Tiana is actually an American, and is not a princess at all, but a waitress who aspires to open her own restaurant called Tiana's Palace. That's actually super cute and is probably one of the only Disney movies where the girl is actually able to do something on her own. I kind of want to go see this movie now.



(Almost) All the Princes

          For the record, I'm mostly talking about the very earliest Disney princess movies (specifically Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Belle). The more recent ones have gotten a lot better and don't do these things as much.

          Most of Disney's characters are pretty two-dimensional (well, technically ALL of them are two-dimensional, but I'm talking personality-wise), but I think the task of character development for the prince role must be given to the laziest and stupidest interns Disney can find. The prince's only role in these movies is to marry the princess. His personality, interests, and even the country he rules aren't really all that important, all that matters is that he saves the princess from whatever stupid and incompetent girlish mischief she's gotten herself into before her hair gets messed up.
          These princes are so similar in the way they look, act, dress, and recite generic and limited lines that Disney didn't even bother to give some of them real names. Prince Phillip and Prince Eric are okay, except for the fact that 'Prince' appears to be their first name, but Cinderella falls in love with Prince Charming, who I would assume has family members with names like Duke Generosity and Sir Fancy the Glamorous. As if it weren't bad enough that he decided he was going to marry her after about three hours, he  forgot what she looked like and had to figure out what she looked like based on her shoe size. Which is totally a legitimate way to ID someone, because no one wears the same shoe size. I'm thinking if you know so little about someone that you've forgotten their hair color, you might want to postpone the wedding for a while. And it shouldn't have been that hard to figure out who Cinderella was in the first place, because everyone knows Cinderella was nice, and only ugly people are mean, so he really didn't even have to bother with her ugly stepsisters.
          But the very worst name of all belongs to The Prince in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. No, that wasn't sloppy capitalization, that's his name. I checked. Four times. This poor guy actually has "The" as his first name on his birth certificate. I guess that's okay, though, because his girlfriend gets her name from being whiter than WonderBread, and everyone else in that movie has an adjective for a name.

3 comments:

  1. Answer... she does it the same as other fish do.

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    1. But she has a human digestive system. In order to properly digest food and turn it into ATP to be used for energy, all cells must receive oxygen. Humans get their oxygen from the air around them, while fish use oxygen in the water they get through their gills. Because it is generally accepted that mermaids are human from the waist up and fish from the waist down, they are assumed to have lungs instead of gills. Even if mermaids were somehow able to inhale only oxygen underwater, the respitory systems of humans and fish are so different that the cellular respiration process would have to completely switch halfway through. This is not possible, so either the mermaid must have the entire respiratory sysem of a human or that of a fish. If the mermaid had the entire respiratory system of a fish, it would not technically be considered a mermaid because it would only be human on the exterior. Therefore, if mermaids existed, they would not be able to poop like any other fish.

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  2. LOL! I just about died from laughing reading this!! If you ever find the answer, please tell me!!!

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