Credit: DisneyAlthough they’ve done wonders with recent additions to Disneyland, the Walt Disney Company is truly struggling with its cinematic releases. According to recent reports. Disney has suffered a multimillion-dollar loss with the past eight films, including successes like Wakanda Forever and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. It’s easy to blame the corporate monolith side of things, but it might be that the studio is being too protective of its fabricated image.
Disney has built their empire surrounding a family-friendly image with cute cartoons and theme parks, it’s been that way for the last century. Anything that strays away from that is swiftly dealt with, including the company’s classic films.
Disney Erases History to Avoid Controversy
We’ve mentioned before how modern audiences have made Disney afraid to take risks, so much so that the studio will outright alter, redo, or remove projects if there’s even the chance that someone could be offended. That’s creating a major problem for the company’s identity, and Disney is definitely starting to feel the squeeze.
Thanks to cancel culture and other social movements, Disney has made blatantly overzealous alterations to some of their movies and theme park projects. When puppets in “it’s a small world” are labeled problematic, there’s a bigger problem at work than censorship.
@sayheyjames Disney’s eight recent films set the company back by losing almost one billion dollars. #disney #disneyplus #disneytiktok #disneytok #waltdisney
@sayheyjames is a TikTok creator that covers Disney news in concise chunks, but one of his most recent posts makes a poignant observation about the company and their recent heavy use of censorship.
The user states,
“Disney’s progressive direction seen its efforts to remove offensive imagery from its archives and make its content more exclusive has sparked criticism from conservatives who believe the company has gone too far in its woke reinvention.”
From altering animation frames to remove pencil marks to outright censoring with CGI, Disney has made several changes to some of the older films in its library on Disney+. While there’s nothing wrong with criticizing or warning of offensive imagery, going this far in changing original works takes away some of the artistry that made them so popular in the first place.
That’s not to say Disney has gone off the deep end with all of its choices. Recently, animated classics like Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, and Fantasia were saddled with a content warning to keep viewers informed of cultural insensitivities, but the films themselves remain generally untouched.
The crows from Dumbo, Si and Am from Lady and the Tramp, and the natives from Peter Pan definitely didn’t age well, but putting a content warning acknowledging that the stereotypes are as wrong now as they were then is a far better solution than trying to hide the movies under forced censorship or altering the original cuts of the films.
It’s been said that the artist shouldn’t fear the censor, but when a company like Disney starts becoming too afraid to make a fart joke or cutting a frame of animation for Goofy lighting up a cigarette, it’s time to pump the breaks. With the company planning to re-release and “restore” some of Walt Disney’s original animated short films from the ’20s and ’30s, how long will it be before Disney is censoring and erasing their own foundation?
Has the studio gone too far to avoid controversy? Tell Inside the Magic what you think in the comments below!