Ramona

I clicked on the front page of The AV Club today, mostly out of muscle memory, and looked at this list of the 50 best Disney animated characters of all time. The top five are (in descending order) Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, Woody, Ursula and Donald Duck. I have spent a minute looking at this piece of content and, for the love of me, what the fuck are we even talking about here? What is the metric of best when it comes to the animated characters at the Disney corporation? Is it their complexity? Their influence? Their popularity? The favorite choices of the author? Well it's kind of all of those points so, in a way, it's nothing. From the entry on Cinderella:

Fairy godmothers, evil step-sisters, and Prince Charming would all become powerful icons of the animated fairy tale, but only one character can claim them as her own. That she does all this and still retains potency is the magic of Disney and, more importantly, the character.

I've mentioned it before but The AV Club really was one of my favorite places on the internet as a youth. I would spend so much time reading about film, it really was my first peek into that world beyond Roger Ebert in the local paper. (The New Cult Canon, which still exists in newsletter form at The Reveal, remains a touchstone.) The site once had real meaning in terms of what its project was: to create a space where discussion of art could be facilitated. I'm not going to argue it was always a stellar example or that it did not have its own more mercenary interests in mind, but at the very least it was trying to do something in terms of building a critical framework. Looking at this list all I can see is the opposite of anything approaching that. Instead here we just have a list of 50 characters from the most powerful film company on the planet in celebration of it's 100th year for little reason except to get people to click it and say "oh yeah, I remember Mike Wazowski."

But the future is here and change is inevitable, so I can either grouse about the world being different then it was when I was 17 or I can move forward with humanity. So I am adding my own additions to the list. It took 8 people to come up with the top 50, so I will round down & add 6 more to the pile.

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I saw The Princess and the Frog once when it was in theaters 15 years ago and haven't revisited it since, and honestly I don't have a huge desire to. (It had a great Keith David song, I will not deny.) But I do remember the firefly who during the whole movie is just, like, the worst. Super annoying, has this obnoxious cajun accent and just doesn't shut the fuck up the moment he appears on screen. I hated him. Then towards the end of the movie Keith David squishes him under his foot and it's treated like it's the greatest tragedy in the world, but watching that in the theater I just remembered the waves of relief that Ray was finally leaving the story. That he does all this and still retains potency is the magic of Disney and, more importantly, the character.

Anastasia is funny cause it manages to blame Communism on an evil wizard. Rasputin was of course a real guy who existed, but in the movie version he is a weird zombie man who is after the faultless Romanovs because he is jealous they are beloved, or something like that. His head can come off in this one, and he talks a lot to a bat voiced by Hank Azaria. That he does all this and still retains potency is the magic of Disney and, more importantly, the character.

Zootopia is one of the better examples of modern Disney, taking a buddy cop setup and turning it into a beleaguered metaphor for racism that it just is completely unequipped to handle. But that's not why she's here, no. She's here for all you sick freaks who saw her and immediately started imagining what her rabbit tits look like. This is the great influence of Judy Hopps. Long after Mickey Mouse is forgotten she will remain hidden in the jpgs of Rule 34 dot ru, confusing SafeSearches until the heat death of the universe. That she does all this and still retains potency (😉) is the magic of Disney and, more importantly, the character.

If I had to sum up The Good Dinosaur in one sound effect, it would probably be that of Arlo screaming. Every minute of this movie I feel like he was yelling. He's yelling at his dad, he's yelling for his dad, he's yelling in the woods, he's yelling cause velociraptors are closing in, just this wheezy little dino screaming his heart out for 90 minutes. That he does all this and still retains potency is the magic of Disney and, more importantly, his lung capacity.

God, just look at him. Look at that tall drink of water, that God among mice. You just know he is running a train on Minnie. That hip alone! No wonder Mickey is pissed, what can he do but be cucked by that? That he does all this and still retains potency is the magic of Disney and, more importantly, the raw sexual prowess of this mouse.

That he says all this and still retains potency is the magic of the ouroboros that is the modern Disney machine and, more importantly, the character.