jane

female impersonator

last.fm listening

nothin' but the frog in me


MayaGay
@MayaGay

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.


tessesseff
@tessesseff
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