On Friday, Tim Cushing over at Techdirt posted a piece that discussed another article by Jeffrey A. Tucker in which he discussed Disney’s Tangled and the political allegories of the film. With me so far? OK. One facet that Jeffrey touched on was how ideas/stories can be, in his words, turned into 2.0 versions, that is to say, be remixed and improve upon the original.
Both are great articles and I encourage you to read them both, but it was in the Techdirt article’s comments where a flame war seemed to break out. Now I do not condone flaming or trolling, but sometimes it brings out the true nature in folks, poking the beast as it were.
Anyway, reading down the comments, I came across one that epitomises that particularly nasty attitude that seems to linger around animation sometimes:
What kind of grown man calls watching children’s Disney movies a “pleasure”? Seriously, do you have the intellectual capacity and interests of an 8 year old girl?
It refers to Disney, but then they are only one of the many that the comment could apply to.
There are eejits everywhere and, much like the guy who called me an asshole on Friday after I apologised for taking his parking space, it says more about who its coming from than who it’d directed at.
Does it really matter that a grown man finds watching Disney movies a pleasure? Why should you even care? They’re good films and being the free society that we live in, can’t anyone enjoy them? How about the way such a statement insults all the fine people who worked on such a film, do they have the same, limited capacity?
It’s disheartening to be reminded that people like that exist. Sadly, the very nature and behind-the-scenes nature of animation leads to that kind of attitude because some people are incapable of separating what they see on screen from how things are actually created. Well, that and the fact that they believe that something needs to be ‘grown-up’ in order to be considered entertainment.