Pinocchio Dies, Bambi Gets Shot, and Other Changes to Disney Movies (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Pinocchio Dies, Bambi Gets Shot, and Other Changes to Disney Movies (2018)

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124 pointshawkoy65 comments

The title is a bit misleading because the changes weren't to the movies themselves but to the sources during adaptation. The subtle difference is that none of these were in the films script in pre production so weren't changes to the film in production, with the exception of fantasia.

Having worked in the animated film industry for a while, there's so much that does get changed in both pre production and production that people don't hear about.

Some of the best received animated films have been stinkers internally until something clicks. Whether that's rewriting a critical character a few months from delivery to throwing out entire sequences.

Similarly many poorly received films were great in production but after focus testing and suits getting involved, they get diluted down. Sometimes entire finished sequences get cut leaving the remaining shots from making sense to an audience.

Film making is a very organic process, sometimes good and sometimes not. There's this Illusion in public that what the public sees is the directors initial vision. But largely it's the work of hundreds of people, morphing over time to try and find what will be right.

> There's this Illusion in public that what the public sees is the directors initial vision. But largely it's the work of hundreds of people, morphing over time to try and find what will be right.

Critics can have this illusion, too: Auteur theory posits that films have an author, that author being the director, and you can see that director's style manifest in the films they make. Sometimes, sure, this is obvious: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino... they all made or make films with a distinctive stamp on them.

Where this theory runs aground is where your comment comes in, filmmaking as a collaborative process. Citizen Kane was, for example, definitely a collaboration among at least three people: Welles, Mankiewicz, and Toland, the director, screenwriter, and cinematographer, respectively. They each contributed to the film as a finished product, a thing of words and images.

And then there's the failure of the auteur: Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau, people who had creative control through working outside the Hollywood system and, frankly, blew it. Plan 9 From Outer Space might be the Citizen Kane of laughably bad science fiction films, but it's not the Citizen Kane of films. To make a baseball analogy, Wood tried hard, had plenty of heart, got up there, swung for the fences... and spun around like a top a few times before landing flat on his face, never even whiffing the ball. There's a reason Burton made a sensitive film about him and his efforts.

I forget where I read this but... A lot of mediocre or even actively bad filmmaking out there involves people mostly going through the motions for a check. Wood, by all accounts, was genuinely passionate about making movies. He and his cast of associates just were really bad at it.

I think one of the most noticeable examples of this is the original Star Wars trilogy versus the prequels. With the original trilogy, people were constantly telling George Lucas that an idea was dumb, or that he should tweak or change something, remove characters, etc. Marcia Lucas, his now ex-wife, won an Academy Award for Best Film Editing in the 70s, and edited the original Star Wars trilogies.

However, twenty years later when the legendary Lucas walked out on set with the script for Episode 1, he was met with raucous applause, after all this was THE George Lucas, he could do no wrong. Not having anyone to point out that your ideas aren’t good is what gets us the Star Wars prequels and their ponderous, meandering political plot lines and lameness.

Hey, I thought Episode 1 was good. It was the only prequel that could stand on its own as a complete story. The others were "Oops, I forgot to plan this out better so let's just add a ton of fighting and action to hide that fact".

I really enjoyed Episode 1 when it came out, but it has some seriously... err.. controversial things, starting with the whole midichlorian thing and finishing with the over choreographed lightsaber fights[0].

The "Lucas can do no wrong" feels pretty present there too.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0mUVY9fLlw

Being a fan of the books, it was nice to see the soviet Winnie the Pooh cartoons (винни пух), because they hewed closer to Milne. I haven't seen their Mary Poppins yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't closer to Travers' story, either.

"Wind of Change" (Ветер перемен) in soviet russia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbXX0Wu34f8

Edit: happy belated Tag der Deutschen Einheit to our german HN'ers!

It's been an experience seeing all the movies I watched first on TV uncut on streaming services. "Edited for content and length" understates the changes they make. It's not exactly the same, but it gives a sense of how much editing affects a movie.

What made me understand the power of editing was the Top Gun Recut trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA

Editing is everything. It literally is what turns footage into cinema. Otherwise you’re just watching a documentary of people playing dress up and pretend.

That’s why there was such an outcry recently when the Academy discussed movie the Oscar for Best Editing out of the main broadcast and into the second tier awards they do off the air. It makes sense when you come at it with the mindset that no one cares about editors. But much less so when you actually understand cinematography and movie making.

I've been thinking a lot about the distinction between facts and narrative. This puts a rainbow-coloured bow on it.

Facts are events. Narrative is the relationships between those events. Unconnected data vs. an interconnected graph, individual nodes vs. integrated network.

It's possible to take the same facts (or a small sample of them, as here) and create an entirely different story.

Or at least the appearance of one. A recut trailer might be sustained by recutting the film as a whole, or not. The Maverick-Iceman romance ... probably ... wouldn't be sustained without a fair bit of extra (or previously cut) footage, but there's definitely enough to cast a trailer-length spell.

Good narratives address more of the facts, concisely and with few contradictions, loose ends, or holes Something often missing even in officially released films.

facts vs narrative, from a journalistic POV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858477

autogenic narrative via pure juxtaposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect

Edit: before deepfakes, we had to make edits like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmLPhx6N8Vc

Appreciated. Before make edits we had Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac:

“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”

More generally known as Cardinal Richelieu.

Having been wondering if it were he or Dumas who came up with that line, I found:

https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484

but a quick perusal of de Motteville's bio suggests she had been exiled from court at Richelieu's behest, so she may not exactly be a disinterested observer, but was probably very aware of court politics in the years before her arrival.

For what it's worth, I haven't been able to find (Isaac de?) "Laffemas" via full-text search of any of the scans of her memoires I've turned up. (Two of them I searched for "innocent", a word seemingly rare in court memoirs, but no luck there either.) Gallica has a much longer scan (about 50% more pages) but it doesn't seem to have been OCR'ed, and I'm not going to manually check 630pp.

Wikiquote also notes dispute:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu

My dad on more than one occasion has ranted that whoever did the 'additional' cutting of Star Trek TOS for commercial time obviously was not paying attention to the actual plot of the episodes (because they would often cut out things that helped a lot in making sense of WTF was going on).

So "Shrek" as "the Gulag" is real?

> "It was known as the Gulag,” one animator told author Nicole Laporte. “If you failed on ‘Prince of Egypt’ [a DreamWorks movie that later flopped], you were sent to the dungeons to work on ‘Shrek.’ ”

https://nypost.com/2010/05/16/ugly-green-montrous/

I'm surprised to hear Prince of Egypt described as a flop - https://m.the-numbers.com/movie/Prince-of-Egypt-The suggests it made $140M profit from a $60M stake. I could cope with making a flop like that!

It's all relative. Shrek made $487M internationally, on the same $60M budget. And it also started a franchise that grossed over $2B

> Having worked in the animated film industry for a while, there's so much that does get changed in both pre production and production that people don't hear about.

I wonder what some of the biggest changes to happen in production are?

One of the biggest I've read about is How to Train Your Dragon.

The book series is aimed at kids around 10 years old. The main characters, such as Hiccup, are around that age. The vikings are not at war with the dragons, and many vikings have dragons as pets, mounts, and hunting aids. Toothless is in the books, but he is not a Night Fury--those do not exist in the book universe. He's just a common garden dragon (their model became the Terrible Terrors in the movies), named Toothless because he lost his teeth.

The big issue in the first book is a rite of passage where kids have to train a dragon or be exiled. Toothless offends another dragon during this, a big fight breaks out, this is seen as a failure of training, and Hiccup and the other kids also undergoing the rite are going to be exiled.

They were 3 years into production of a very faithful following of the book, with large parts animated and most of the dialog recorded, when they realized they were going to end up with a "drop off" movie.

Kids around 10 would love it...but their parents or their older siblings who had taken the kids to the theater would not be interested. They would just drop the kids off at a mall theater and go hang out at the food court or shop or something until time to pick the kids up.

Making a drop off movie is fine if you don't spend a lot of money on it. HTTYD was a $160+ million movie, though, and no way can a drop off movie come anywhere near making that back, let alone profit.

So one year before it was supposed to be released, they put "The Croods" on hold and moved Chris Sanders from that to take over as director of HTTYD, with the task of coming up with a completely new story...and they didn't move back the release date.

Sanders brought in Dean DeBlois, who had been his writing/directing partner on "Lilo & Stitch" when they were both at Disney, to be co-writer/co-director.

They made the kids 15 instead of 10, created the viking/dragon war, added Astrid and Ruffnut, created Night Furies and upgraded Toothless to one. They needed a lot of new models, new settings, and mostly new dialog.

As the Disney+ versions gradually become the canonical releases of all Disney movies, I wouldn't be surprised if they retcon a number of their movies. There's already been blatant examples like adding Hayden Christensen to Return of the Jedi[1], but they've also changed movies like Lilo & Stitch, Toy Story 2, Splash, etc and I think it will only get more prevalent as time goes by (although I'm sure the changes will be similar to the ones mentioned in the article- removing some of the darker aspects of their stories, or ones that might offend more puritan viewers.)

[1]: I realize this change was pre-Disney+, but presumably Disney has the rights to previous cuts of Star Wars in addition to the "Special" ones

I can definitely see many of the Simpson episodes being taken down within the next decade. Physical media will always matter for this reason

*piracy will always matter for this reason

You're assuming that current content doesn't tend to drive out the older content. Piracy works a lot better for popular new material than for obscure older material. (The Simpsons is popular enough that this may not apply but torrents don't work very well for mostly obscure works.)

I think the GP is just pointing that physical media mostly doesn't exist anymore, and even when it does, DRM means it's not durable.

>physical media mostly doesn't exist anymore

It mostly does. Of course, that will certainly change over time.

>torrents don't work very well for mostly obscure works

You’re not on the right sites :)

Private trackers FTW.

Disney+ is already missing at least one Simpsons episode (the Michael Jackson one). A lot of jokes have also been censored or neutered, although some of those changes were already made to reruns before Disney+

When and why did America become so embarrassed of itself?

I'm a liberal, but I hate all of the censure going on. I think people have the capacity to understand change and social progress. In other instances, we're actually backsliding into conservatism (wrt sex and nudity). Replacing sex with violence is not a good alternative.

As a cynic, I'd just guessed that every time they change a work they reset the copyright clock.

It does not reset the clock on the old version (which people might prefer), the changed version is technically a new work. However, the copyright terms are so long that the clock won't run out even for the old versions during my lifetime, so that's probably not the main reason.

Its a lack which manifests through an entire generation. Probably because movies are at the intersection of big money and expressive art. So revision of classics becomes status quo. Theres a good word to describe it : DECLINE.

It's fundamentalism. Steven pressfield says it best. We cant find our way into the future so we retreat to the mystical 'golden age'...there are people pitching to remake Bambi - with a straight face. Why? Is there no new story to tell? No new classics to be written?

> We cant find our way into the future so we retreat to the mystical 'golden age'

This is such a perfect quote. Apt for many things.

Not all the changes are because of embarrassment.

The Lilo & Stitch change was to one scene, where Lilo tries to hide from her sister by hiding in the clothes dryer. They changed the dryer to a storage cabinet.

It turns out that a couple thousand kids a year are injured by getting inside washers and dryers, and a few die. They either get locked in and suffocate, or somehow the machine gets turned on which can cause a lot of trauma.

I think the only movie that D+ won't touch is Song of the South (for understandable reasons) though yeah, some other changes might be good ideas or not

(though I don't mind so much the "updates" in the Star Wars movies)

Hiding $Song of the South* is silencing Black voices and erasing Black culture.

If they cared about racism they'd do a remake that keeps the beautiful art and reframes the context a bit.

Br'er Rabbit, like Rabinovich in soviet jokes, is often worthy of emulation.

Was it Br'er Rabbit or a cousin (or maybe even El-ahrairah himself?) who convinced the Greedy Lion to attack his own reflection in the well?

It's a movie, made by white people, based on a book written by a white person, which was a re-writing of African American tales he collected on plantations. While at the very core there is a hint of Black culture, I would say that it's viewed through a very, very white lens, to the point that it's more of a statement of white America's views of Black culture than it is a piece of Black culture.

> If they cared about racism they'd do a remake that keeps the beautiful art and reframes the context a bit.

The controversy is almost core to the current interpretation of the movie. It's the fact that the characters (slaves or not slaves, but free men, if you follow the book which establishes the setting as antebellum) seem happy, or at least unperturbed, by their relationship with their master and their status in society. If you reflect the truth, that they were unhappy and being held down, that seems more like a new movie than it does a remake.

The article is about how a story changes and evolves during the development of a movie. This happens for every movie and has nothing to do with censorship.

I think it's interesting how the story can evolve and develop once the movie is already released. I think it's interesting how we perceive movies as being these immutable works, but they're actually being changed to better fit in with modern times (eg the removal of the bit in Toy Story 2 about Harvey Weinstein bit because jokes about his predations are less socially acceptable)

I've read several traditional variations of the Rapunzel story, and they don't -- in general -- make much sense. (A pregnant woman will refuse to eat anything except Salad from lettuce that grows in a witch's garden; sends husband to steal lettuce. Witch catches him, takes newborn instead. Then there's other stuff about the prince that makes no sense).

The Disney version, though quite far, keeps enough main elements to be recognizably related to the original story; and the storyline makes a lot more sense.

I made sure my children are aware that it's disneyfication of the original story, but I don't blame them for not caring much.

The Little Mermaid, by comparison, is much closer to the (sad, dark) original -- with a notable exception of the end being a happy one. In this case, my children do care about the two very different endings, and like both.

There’s a Japanese film adaptation of the little mermaid which is very close to the original, except in the original they make the mermaids death a little nicer by having her become basically an angel, but the Japanese version just has her turned into sea foam and that’s the end of that

On the other hand, there's Ponyo - The Ghibli+Myazaki version, which has a disney-style happy ending where she just gives up everything magical to become a person.

watching Pinocchio (the series[1]) as a child was always somewhat scary. there were some moments that I remember until today which I was really terrified and that gave me actual nightmares.

I'd really love to see a remake of the film (or the series) but for adults and as a fantasy thriller/horror show. It would have lot of potential I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio:_The_Series

So I don't know if this is real, but what an incredible read explaining the actual story of Pinnochio as written by the author:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/cyuy4c/z/eyv1pe3

Real af, that's the Carlo Collodi story I remember. I don't know if Tolstoy's буратино was any more saccharine, but it's doubtful. Fairy tales as recorded by the Grimms are also generally dark (and folk songs generally filthy).

Thomas Bowdler, LRCP, FRS (an inspiration for Orwell's crimestop?) was an english bowlderiser who flipped up Antony+Cleopatra, among other plays, which causes one to wonder what that melonfarmer did with lines like:

    "She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed:
    He plough'd her, and she cropp'd."

Bonus script: https://web.mit.edu/johanna/Public/skinhead.hamlet

You can read the actual book: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/500

This [1] is a TV series I remember watching when I was a child, I can't remember how faithful is to the original story (at least I remember it having a shark instead of a whale) but I remember too being scary. I am not sure how easy is to find it and if there are any English subs for it though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Pinocchio_(1...

You might enjoy Jordan Peterson's take on the story. Has almost 1.5 million views https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN2lyN7rM4E

Semi related: A great YouTube video by Lindsay Ellis about how Disney has further changed aspects of their stories between Disney originals and the live action / CGI remakes / modern sequels, largely in the form of the remakes being woke meta-commentary on the original works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU1ffHa47YY

Topics it covers include:

• Dumbo and the attempts to paper over ideas of racism, alcoholism, animal cruelty;

• Beauty and the Beast and feminism/female empowerment;

• Aladdin adding redundant ideas of female empowerment (that the original arguably didn't lack);

• Mary Poppins being a story about not caring about material possessions to the 2018 sequel being centred around concern for material possessions.

The woke Disney remakes have all been worse than their previous counterparts. The pseudo-empowerment of Jasmin in the live action Alladin was particularly egregious. She is a strong character in the original with nuance and agency. In the remake she sings a song about female empowerment where she tells everyone off, but it turns out to be a dream sequence. Sigh.

Having said all that, the live action Cinderella remake was really something special. I can’t recommend it enough. After seeing it, I great hopes for the rest. I’ve since been disappointed.

> In the remake she sings a song about female empowerment where she tells everyone off, but it turns out to be a dream sequence. Sigh.

Any "empowerment narrative" that has "be a princess" as step one is doomed to failure. Might as well drive the point home that it is all a fantasy.

I thought Enchanted did a reasonable job, but may be from an out-of-touch generation.

Not all princesses are royal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TQmo5TvZQY

I knew that Big Hero 6 was originally a Marvel comic. Quite frankly, it was lame, and originally intended as a way for Marvel to capture the weeaboo dollar. Disney was looking through the back catalog of their acquisition, Marvel, for properties to adapt into animation, came across BH6, and set it in its own universe which in many ways is even more grounded than the MCU. Sometimes, an adaptation -- even a Disneyfication -- brings out the best elements of the original and leaves behind the junk.

Sometimes really bizzare elements get carried over to movies.

Like Black Manta suit in Aquaman movie. It felt like something from power rangers.

Wait, but Babmi does get shot in the Disney movie version.

And disney ruined the star wars franchise like nothing else. The sequels are such a punch in the face of fans of the franchise.

>> Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the author of Faust.

Ah, yes, I thought the name sounded familiar.

Surprised it didn't mention "The Little Mermaid." Ariel doesn't get Eric and sorta dies at the end.

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