[Quiet Man Cometh]

Looks like "SFX" in The Lion King to me since the bottom part of what would be an 'E' is missing.

Disney has been griped at for lots of things, frontrunners being Racism, Patriarchy, maintanance of the status quo, etc. There's a phrase about Disney that makes a good point I think that being, "the frog only turns into a prince if he was a prince before." To their credit Disney (the company) is getting better though. Mulan is argued as their first move into active female protaganists and for once she's not after a husband, though she gets on in the end anyway. ;). And she has a mom!

Things like The Lion King and Aladdin reference the whole status quo thing. Challengers to authority are bad guys, ie Scar and Jafar. Add in the racism card with Jafar looking dark and non-cucasian and hero Aladdin who is suspiciously white looking. All is well in the end when the usurper bad guys are offed and the proper person assumes authority or is granted authority by someone with a right to do so.

I personally thing Disney got a bit gunshy after The Lion King with the gripes about it being too violent. The older movies are much more dramatic really, like Maleficent's death scene in Sleeping Beauty. There is blood there but it's purple, and I do think that Prince Phillip is among the more manly of the succession of Disney princes ;). Older kiddy stories were outright nasty sometimes, but people tended to die a lot more of things that modern medicine considers minir so death wasn't as big a shock, I don't think.

Disney does mangle a lot of stuff but I suppose it's not necessarily worse than other movie interpretations of stories. Folk tales like Sleeping Beauty are up for grabs though, given there are no original pieces to go back to. Fairy tales like The Little Mermaid that actually have an original literary source do get messed up though. Take pretty much everything from The Little Mermaid and reverse it and you pretty much have the original story. King Triton doesn't run things, his mom does. The Little Mermaid (not named in the story) is the only one of her sisters that doesn't decorate her garden with human things from shipwrecks, and she waits patiently until she's 16 when she's allowed a special trip to see the surface. She's not after a man either. Prince Eric is a guy she sees and happens to like. Her real goal is an immortal soul, which Mermaids don't have. They live for 300 years then die and all that's left of them is sea foam. The Little Mermaid though, is offered the change to get an immortal soul by wandering as an air spirit for 300 years. She peeks in windows and watches children and if they are being good she smiles and a year is taken off and if they are bad she weeps and a year is added. Lengthy convoluted method of telling your kids to behave.

All that said, Disney was a pretty amazing guy, if a little quirkey. The technology the came up with was fancy stuff, like the multi-layered camera with different painted images that gave an animated film a 3D look, ie. the beginning of Pinnochio.

Surprised me when I learned that Disney actually did a collaborative work with Salvador Dali. Never heard of Disney as a surrealist but apparently cartoons about a talking mouse were something of an oddity at the time.