Quote Originally Posted by EricJ View Post
Well, she was supposed to be a villain in the early storyboards--Or, at least, the tragic antagonist whose complexes and refusal to give in to the heroine threatened the entire kingdom.
But then, when they made her more sympathetic, that left the story without an actual Villain-villain, and story doctors had to come up with one out of thin air....And boyyyy, did they ever.



Although Brenda Chapman's little personal choo-choo going off the rails during the production of Brave hasn't exactly put a good light since on "Female animation directors appealing to both halves of the audience"--Which seems to be one of the main complaints with the Y-chromosome crowd that tends to concentrate on, y'know, the story and stuff.

Up to now, some of us hadn't really noticed whether Jennifer Lee's screenwriting was too "skewed", since Tangled came off without a hitch, even with the whole teen-girl "Moo-mm!" theme of the story.
But now, it's starting to reflect suspiciously on just how much Lifetime Networking we were getting in Lee's other films--The whole subplot of Vanellope and the Mean-girls in Wreck-It Ralph, for instance. (Only a female screenwriter could have come up with the "I'll have you all executed! " joke.)

I'm not going to get into a whole off-topic battle-of-the-sexes discussion about "5 Mistakes Female Viewers ALWAYS Get Wrong About Snow White" ( ), but there seems to be a lot of "We're not damsels in distress!" battles being fought, long after they....really need to be, by audiences who still want to fight them. Yeah, I remember back when it was cool to use Disney as a symbolic all-purpose social whipping-boy too, but I grew out of it, and so did their films.
(I remember back when we were having this EXACT SAME symbolic championing of Merida as Feminist-Warrior Symbol, and those coming to the defense of Disney pointed out just how much spunk some of the "classic" princesses had, despite being pasted with an unfairly negative Snow White stereotype, by those whose private personal issues wanted to paste them with it: Just think of half the things Jasmine, Rapunzel, Esmeralda or Pocahontas accomplished in their films, and they still ended up with their prince at the end of the film...C'est l'amour, and it ain't all that bad as a subplot.)

As we both note, the loony sudden gear-switch of having You-Know-Who suddenly out of nowhere turn out to be a baddie-waddie is due to some emergency last-minute script-doctoring, but that still doesn't excuse the low-comedy humiliation the Duke is forced to endure near the beginning of the film (his toupee falls off because he's old and he's a dance-date from hell, oh, the symbolic hilarity!), or Kristoff forced to be the unthreateningly-emasculated parody of the Grungy Lonely Single Guy, so that he'll be "safe" (ie., flawed) enough to be a funny romantic interest.
Walt used to be a stickler for making sure that his stories appealed to EVERYONE, because of the story, and I'd make a safe bet that in Walt's day, this movie's gender-agendas would've gotten Jennifer fired from the studio faster than Brenda was. And no, I'm not talking about Brenda's "Evil Male-Hollywood Conspiracy".
There were plenty of bombs on Walt's watch.
Sleeping Beauty was considered a flop. And truthfully the story is a real snoozer - the only saving grace being Maleficent.