Departing from Disney...

Before I start off this post, I have to say that I absolutely love Disney shorts and features (read: NOT direct to home videos). Disney teaches you how to dream, and that any goal can be reached if you try hard enough. I love that message because I believe it. That and it makes my inner children happy.

BUT.

There comes a time where you hear this message too much, and, eventually, you get sick of it. If all you had to watch were romantic comedies staring Richard Gere or Hugh Grant, I'm pretty sure you'd go insane.

This is why I believe cartoons like Family Guy, The Simpsons, South Park, and anything on Adult Swim is so popular with people my age. We've heard this message of happiness and hope all of our lives, yet, in reality, life really sucks and is full of hardships (hey, it's life). If anything makes these modern day cartoons great, it's the fact that they're a direct opposite of what's now known as the Disney style. You expect a happy ending, but you get a cow pie in the face.

Even Disney has started to move away from that message. Have you seen Enchanted? The entire premise of the movie is about how fairy tales conflict with real life and how there is no such thing as a "happily ever after" because, in reality, there never really is. Charles Schulz, depressed as he was all his life, had it right in that misery is what's believable and what's funny and what makes us relate to characters more.

I posted that video of Lilo and Stitch because it's a Disney cartoon that departs from the normal Disney conventions. You won't find broken homes or a lovable anti hero in any other Disney animated feature (I think... correct me if I'm wrong.), and that's what makes this film so great. Even the direct to home Lilo and Stitch 2: Stitch has a Glitch was darn good, again, because for the most part, it departs from the normal, now stale conventions of what usually happens in a Disney cartoon.

Oh and then those films are pretty much ruined by the happy endings. It's the same thing with Horton, really. I watch these and think "Finally! A deviant!" but then it falls right back into the predictable WELL EVERYONE HAS TO HAVE A HAPPILY EVER AFTER ending.

The point I'm trying to make here is that I'm going to try to steer clear of the normal recipe as possible, since that's stale and predictable*


* I'm finding that I do a lot of saying, but not much doing. I should really be doing more.