DISNEY IS TERRIBLE
There are a number of reasons why I simply have nothing nice to say about Disney as a company. This is due to personal opinion as well as my complete bafflement at how society reacts to Disney and its products.
Firstly is the actual content of the products themselves. This squeaky-clean image the traditional Disney animated films have (think Lion King, the Little Mermaid etc.) does nothing to help me take them seriously, because at the end of it all they are are just dumbed down forms of entertainment.
That may sound like total blasphemy to the Disney worshippers out there, but it's true on the basis that all Disney tend to have done is taken a traditional fairytale (which are bland enough as it is) and dumbed them down so much that nothing of interest happens - so that there is nothing to upset all those little kids out there.
I'm not saying this blindly, I was forced to sit and watch a whole load of this rubbish at my primary school and even as a child I could see right through it. The only thing any of the Disney animated films have going for them in my eyes is "look at how bright and colourful and child-friendy our animation is!". Bringing me to the next point -
Child-friendly = good?
One of my biggest annoyances with Disney is the way society reacts to its products. This is especially the case with parents bringing up their children with Disney products as a norm. Picture this: you have a small child who is currently far too young to think for themselves, and is also too young to have received any kind of education about the way the world works. Surely you'd want to encourage them to develop an intelligent, logically-thinking outlook on life? Right? So why does it make sense to plonk them down in front of films which give them the generic "blah blah princess blah blah mild danger blah blah hero blah blah NOW BUY ALL OF OUR MERCHANDISE" message? It's as though parents are deliberately encouraging their children to take a consumerism-driven lifestyle where they buy whatever is put in front of them.
I genuinely believe that because of this Disney are a much bigger threat to society than any other media agent - including the likes of representation in drama and News International etc.. Why is this?
Because Disney gets to them before they are able to think for themselves.
If someone is older and reads a completely biased news report, there's a fair chance that they'd sit back and think "yeah, this is a load of [word of choice goes here]". If it's a small child becoming more and more obsessed with Disney they will have no way of working out that it's just consumer exploitation, but will instead think "I've got to get mum/dad/etc to buy ALL the Disney products!". This vast range of synergy sells a whole load of pointless products which only boosts Disney's power further. By this, I mean that the child will not just want to watch the Lion King film. He'll want the toys, he'll want the soundtrack record, he'll want the posters, he'll want clothes with the characters on them, he'll want pretty much anything with Lion King branding on it.
Society's attitude to this doesn't help. If you ask pretty much anyone about Disney (with myself being the extreme minority) they'll give you the same comment about how wonderful the films are, with no accompanying reason other than that they're "classics". What they mean by this is that they themselves went through this consumerism-fuelled brainwashing as a child and are still unaware of it. It is also likely to be because they just have this pleasant memory of their childhood where all they had to do was sit down and watch near-infinite numbers of children's films. This also annoys me, because I honestly believe that all the childhood phase of life is is being a less intelligent version of your adult life.
Let's look at this advert for the Disney theme parks.
This shows just how much brainwashing Disney have done to children over the years of them being alive. Although they are just staged scenes for an advertisement, one can see from the reaction of the children that this whole "Disney is a great thing. All hail Disney." ideology has been bullied into them from before they could talk, with the idea of being surrounded by Disney characters wherever you go in the theme park being the ultimate goal of which they've been trained to aim for.
All this does is - yet again - make Disney more and more powerful, controlling more and more of society's ideas.
Obsession-building
I mentioned this a bit earlier, but Disney rely on the concept of building obsessions around certain things as their primary marketing technique. This means that we have a bunch of kids who religiously hand over their money for merchandise/soundtrack CDs/T-shirts for the High School Musical nonsense. The problem? They're completely oblivious to how terrible it all is. Anyone who has even the most basic musical knowledge can tell that soundtracks from the likes of High School Musical and Hannah Montana are just manufactured digitally for the sake of selling the stuff, as opposed to having any musical skill put into them. Heck, they even manage to make Nickelback seem talented, and that definitely takes some doing. It's as though someone at Disney has identified a hole in the market for beyond-terrible music and thought "okay, we can dedicate our new programmes to this for the next few years!".
There is actually a whole ton more I could say about Disney being evil, but for the sake of avoiding even more wrist pain I'm going to stop here - so tl;dr: Disney is a massive threat to society as it can socialise people into consumerism whilst they are vulnerable.
-HM.
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