Tokyo Disney, accessibility, miniatures and service

My mom emailed me a link to one of her Disney-geek websites, parkeology.com (why the e? who knows?).
The site is focused on the obscure and the small details that make Disney parks special/unique/interesting.

This weekend, they posted about Tokyo Disney, a place I am not likely to get to anytime soon. 
The writer is focusing on the (evidently incredible) results of wedding Japanese commitment to courtesy and service with Disney's formerly-legendary emphasis on customer service [in recent years, the extremely strict regulations for cast members have been relaxed, at least at the Florida parks; as a person who has worked crummy minimum-wage jobs, I empathize, but I also feel like something is lost when groups of cast members stand around and chat about their boyfriends like any mall employees might. That's not part of "the show," as the old-time Imagineers would say].

A lot of the Parkeology post is taken up with story cards for non-Japanese-speaking guests (the cards shown are printed in English). These are neat - they explain the narratives and themes of the park's attractions, and do so accompanied by gorgeous illustrations - so that non-Japanese speakers can follow along despite Japanese narrations inside the attractions.

But the thing that blew MY mind is the shorter piece of service preceding the story cards. It's accompanied by the photo at right, which is of small, evidently wooden, models of the vehicles for various attractions.Because theming and detail are so important to the Disney Park Experience, all the vehicles are different, tailored to the theme and mood of each attraction.

If you cannot make out the text on this explanatory placard, it reads: SCALE MODELS: Our Visually Impaired Guests May Touch These Models To Easily Understand The Shape of Some Attraction Vehicles.

I don't do disability studies, though it's at the fringes of my consciousness, via queer theory and fat studies and being alive in the world where one can SEE how most places and things are not well adapted for the differently abled.

I have never seen or heard of anything like this particular accommodation for visually-impaired guests. It blows my mind. It makes me feel unaccountably teary in its almost extreme considerateness. Highly detailed scale models of the ride vehicles, for guests to handle and examine if they cannot visually see the vehicles. A way to experience an aspect of the attraction that has tremendous visual impact and that adds to the overall immersive experience. Making those small details - those aspects of the show which were so essential to the project of Disneyland and its offshoots - available to guests who are visually impaired.
It makes a difference, you know; take the vehicles for, say, Peter Pan's Flight (a perennial favorite, though one I personally loathe; it terrified me as a small child - those swinging cars felt terribly unsafe - and then bored/horrified me as an adult who had spent years working on Peter Pan for my masters thesis). Guests board miniature pirate ships suspended from a track on the ceiling. They aren't just generic cars or ski-lift-style hoists; they are miniature versions of Hook's pirate ship. A blind, or otherwise visually impaired, guest won't know this. But the model allows for that experience in a literally hands-on way.

It's absolutely incredible to me. It's an adaptation or accommodation that, once it's pointed out, seems almost essential and obvious, but it's one that is absent from the other parks (and in fact, from virtually anywhere I've ever been). It's evidence of an near-universal thoughtfulness and consideration for all the needs of all the kinds of guests. I know very little about Japanese culture, and don't want to make huge generalizations based on this tiny bit of evidence. However, the fact that someone thought this was necessary, and then a number of people agreed on it and actually executed the plan - this speaks to a culture of consideration for others that I find entrancing.
When I first moved to Washington DC I used to have to take the metro from my workplace to my apartment in Arlington. I had to change trains, during rush hour, at Metro Center - this was a thing that required nerves of steel. A suit of armor would have helped as well. One afternoon, fighting towards my train along with what felt like half the world's population, I saw a visually-impaired man (he had a cane and was clearly using it to navigate) get literally pushed aside by the crowd trying to cram into the metro car. The blind man was also trying to enter the car; he had to feel for the opening with the cane. The impatient horde of rush-hour commuters actually shoved this man out of the way. It wasn't just the pressure of a crushing crowd; it was an aggressive, "out-of-my-way" shoving, the kind of behavior you see on local news on "black friday," when shoppers claw each other for deals on elmos and ipads and wiis. That man, and I, didn't get on that train.
I was shocked.
Actually shocked. I am still shocked when I think about this. That man was at a disadvantage; he had a visual impairment that demanded he take a few extra seconds to find his way into a train car. His impairment - because he was using a cane - was extremely obvious to everyone around him. Accommodating him would have been the work of literally seconds, a tiny shred of time when the crowd hung back and allowed this chap to find his way into the train.

Instead he was shoved off-balance in the tiny stampede of commuters.

Those small scale models for visually-impaired guests makes me suspect that, in Japan, that blind man with his cane would have entered calmly and unhindered into the train car.

Those scale models also make me think back - because everything is related to one's dissertation - to Mister Rogers; that kind of accommodation is being neighborly in an entirely pragmatic but essential way.

I love those scale models, and whoever thought of them.

Spaceship Earth and Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" (from Illuminations) was one of my early critical influences. I read it as part of a project on narrative theory, my third year of college; since then, I have taken grad classes that dealt with Benjamin (one in particular that looked specifically at "The Storyteller"), and have come to realize Benjamin is far more complicated than I initially thought. Still, some of the basic things in that essay that really moved me still affect me strongly, and though they have deeper meanings and connotations and contexts than I fully grasp, they also retain their surface meaning(s). In other words: this is a simplistic view of a very complex text, and I am aware of that.

Experience, Benjamin tells us, and wisdom or counsel, are what the storyteller offers. And we are losing (have lost?) the ability to communicate experience; we have lost any counsel or wisdom we might have been able to offer. In Part VI of this essay (in the version linked to above) is the stuff that really hits home for me. Benjamin identifies as concomitant with the rise of capitalism the true menace to experience and storytelling: the rise and primacy of information.
Information replaces experience, replaces story. The already-explained and the instantly verifiable replaces the psychological work of the story-listener/reader and the art of experience and counsel-sharing of the storyteller.

Benjamin wrote this essay in the mid 1930s; I would argue that, in many ways, in mass popular culture, information has almost totally eclipsed experience and story. Or, perhaps, experience has been downgraded and filtered and collapsed into information.

You can see the replacement of story and art with information in a very vivid way if you pay a visit to Disney's Epcot Center in Florida. My family began making annual pilgrimages to Disneyworld when I was a small fry; my parents now "snowbird" not far from Orlando. When I visit them during my spring break, there is disneyfication. I get almost as much of a charge from the critical outrage I experience as I do from the pleasure of entertainment.

At any rate, for years I've been touring peacefully through the iconic attraction at Epcot, Spaceship Earth, the slow-moving ride inside the geosphere at the park's entrance (the "giant golf ball" to the uninformed). As a small fry, it was narrated by Walter Cronkite; as an older kid, it was revamped and narrated by Jeremy Irons in richly British accents. One particularly glorious moment comes when the ride vehicle rounds a corner to face a tableau of animatronic figures with masks in a Greek amphitheatre, and Jeremy intones "The theatre is born." (you can hear Jeremy say this around 3:45 in the above clip). The ride was a journey through the art of human communication, from cave paintings to the invention of papyrus "paper" to a common alphabet to the movable-type printing press to the explosion of art in the renaissance (pronounced by Jeremy, wonderfully British, as the renAYsance) to mechanical reproduction on a grand scale to films, television, radio, internet.

A recent reference to Spaceship Earth ("the most relaxing 15 minutes of your life") on the website of Karsten Knight plus my recent Florida/Disneyfication spring break, made Benjamin and Spaceship Earth to collide in my brain, prompting this (lengthy and link-riddled) post.

A year or two ago, however, sponsorship of the attraction changed hands from AT&T to Siemens. And the ride changed. A lot.
Now it's narrated by Judi Dench (anglophilia at epcot, what can I say?), and instead of being the story of communication, it's the story of information, and information technologies.
No longer do we have Jeremy Irons telling us that the Greeks elevated the spoken word to an art form, and the theatre is born; now, we have Dame Judi tell us that the Greeks founded schools, and developed mathematics, which lead to mechanical inventions that paved the way for technology.

In the former narrations, Glorious Rome falls to invaders, and thus the Dark Ages descend. "But all was not lost; far across the land, from Cairo to Cordoba, Jewish teachers and Islamic scholars continue the quest for knowledge." We learn that these Jewish and Islamic thinkers "shared new discoveries with all who would listen."

This is a bit of history that I don't think most people know about; we mostly get that Anglocentric history with the blacked-out bits of the dark ages, where Europe and the world just goes dark for a few centuries, until slowly, aided by unicorns and King Arthur, they pull themselves up into the medieval age, then the Renaissance. Meanwhile, everyone outside the white Christian world continues to writhe around in abject squalor and ignorance (see 7:20 or thereabouts for the best visual representation of this).

Obviously, this unicorns and ignorance version is utterly false; as Jeremy tells us, Jewish and Islamic scholars (in Spain, in much of North Africa and the Middle East) were working away, inventing modern medicine and any number of other things; meanwhile, all of Asia was clicking away, China leading the race of progress by a good many miles.

My point here is: Jeremy includes the non-Christian, non-white world, briefly, here. And it's a really important inclusion, one that makes note of both the preservation of and the continuance of scholarship.

Judi Dench, on the other hand, now tells us that these "Arab and Jewish" chaps had all this Roman-and-earlier knowledge stored away in libraries, where they, the Arabs and Jews, "watched over it." No mention here of new ideas or inventions made by the Arabs (who used to be Islamic scholars) and Jewish folks; no, they're just maintaining the warehouses.
Dame Judi makes this entirely too clear by saying: "call it [the Arabs & Jewish folks] the world's first backup system."

BACKUP SYSTEM?
no.
no!
NO!
you did not just call thousands of humans, some of them truly brilliant thinkers, a "backup system."
Oh, but she did.

The ride does not improve from this point. We got paeans to progress and technology, information, computers, a very nerdy fellow (Steve Wozniak? Bill Gates?) in a garage fiddling with a prototypical personal computer, greenlit screen and all. We get told a new language was invented, one spoken by computers. We get technology and computers are awesome rah rah huzzah!
We got lots of tableaux of people alone with their technology.

In the old days of Spaceship Earth, it was about communication and the arts; it was about the way humans were able to connect with one another. In the setup to the ride, accompanied by misty images of fur-wearing folks hunting woolly mammoth, Jeremy Irons and Walter Cronkite told us that human invention of arts and language and writing meant that we were "no longer alone."

The tableaux at the end of changed. Used to be a pair of voice actors in the radio booth; now it's just one man. The woman seems to have been repurposed into the 80s, where she gets an afro and yellow tights and stands alone surrounded by huge computers. The small obnoxious child who shrieked "Extra! Extra!" while brandishing mass-printed newspapers at us in our ride vehicles is now, very curiously, pushed back and facing into a corner, back to us, while a new, older voice says "extra! extra!" in a muffled way. This child laborer, turned to face the corner, is a freakish alteration, reminiscent of the end of the Blair Witch Project and absolutely baffling.
Instead of seeing how communication technologies connect people - through a series of mini-tableaux of - essentially - webcam communications (a mother singing to a child at bedtime, grandparents watching a grandchild's graduation, a field researcher discussing a find with a colleague, two kids sharing clips of their athletic achievements, one in California, one in Japan), we get the nerdy guy alone in his garage, and then a new "interactive" gag about where you, the rider, want to live.

Information and isolation, instead of experience and wisdom. Technology and data, instead of arts and invention.
It's a grim visualization of the (admittedly first-world) ills of contemporary life.

As noted above, my musings were partially prompted by Karsten Knight's fairly offhand comment on his website. Spaceship Earth used to be a very blissful 15 minutes of slow-moving British narration through a eurocentric but otherwise fairly inoffensive art-appreciation show. As a kid, visiting the park in August with my family, Spaceship Earth was a blessed relief:  usually with a short line, the ride was cool and dark, enabling us to sit, slightly tipped back in our ride vehicles, relaxed.

Now I feel unhappy, tensely awaiting that awful "Backup system" comment, angered by the translation of some of the west's greatest artistic achievements into nearly literal blips of data. Computers are great - I'm using one right this second, and so are you - but Steve Wozniak or his avatar inventing a PC really doesn't have a patch on Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. You see both of these represented now, but the avatar-nerd gets more time and focus than Michelangelo. Greek theatre has vanished, replaced with mathematics. The very real scholarly, intellectual and artistic pursuits (of which medicine was one very important aspect) of the Islamic/Arab world are totally elided, replaced with the truly offensive and insulting "backup system," as if cultures and civilizations and humans are some kind of primitive floppy disk, a precursor to that old 5-inch floppy.

It's Benjamin's essay in animatronic form, and it's truly heartbreaking. My dissertation work also deals with Disneyland, and my reading about Walt Disney and the early years of his work has me genuinely convinced that, at the heart of what Walt Disney and his studio did, was a true commitment to the twin forces of technology AND art, and what each could do for the other. Spaceship Earth strips art right out of the picture, replacing it with gleaming technology for its own sake, information instead of experience and story-telling. It's a vast step backward for Disney, in my estimation of that company's philosophy (not its corporate philosophy, which was never Walt Disney's philosophy to begin with; this is a man who plowed most of his eventually sizable income right back into his studio and his techno-artistic endeavors).
It's a bloody shame is what it truly is, and it's no longer that 15 most relaxing minutes of your life. Now it's a hurried-along, 10-minute barrage of information without counsel, wisdom or art.

Tangled up & new

I saw Tangled this weekend, courtesy of the strong-arming of two friends of mine. Though I like Disney, and I'm crazy about Pixar, somehow I don't always do a good job of getting to the Disney animated films when they open (case in point: still have not seen Princess & the frog).

But I am glad I saw Tangled, especially since I very recently taught two pieces of Disney criticism to a class, and so had my Disney-critic brain finely tuned. A lot of people in the children's lit academic community are passionately opposed to Disney, for a variety of reasons (many of them pretty good reasons, too). I do not share this wholehearted opposition to Disney, though I am pretty much on board with the skepticism and disapproval of the "princess" films and attendant marketing, etc.

Tangled does the Rapunzel story with some nice twists. The original story, collected by the Grimms, is not particularly charming nor enlightened. It seems that Disney's collaboration with Pixar, and perhaps, response to criticism, has created a more serious effort at remedying the outdated princess formula.

We get the backstory in an opening sequence: the magic golden flower of the sun takes the place of the rapunzel-lettuce; the generic man & woman are replaced with the king and queen - but essentially, we get the gist. Gothel steals the baby to use the magical powers of her golden hair, which is how Gothel stays young (youthfulness and healing are its powers, incidentally). Rapunzel is raised in a tower in valley enclosed by cliffs and a waterfall.

But what Disney does is give this princess an actual personality, with some real psychology. We see Rapunzel going about her daily activities (accompanied by a forgettable song) - she bakes, cooks, reads books, sews, brushes her hair, looks out her window, dances - and paints. Rapunzel's paintings are one of the most charming effects in the film - soft washes done on the walls of her tower. They tend to imagine scenes featuring Rapunzel and her immense quantity of hair, but they have a very charming style, especially the van gogh-esqu central piece picturing the floating night lanterns released by the kingdom annually, in honor of the lost princess.

Gothel, the villain of the piece, is a masterful and terrifying piece of psychological abuse. She is sickeningly sweetly passive-aggressive, wearing down Rapunzel's natural curiosity, playing on her emotions, telling her she is getting "chubby," telling her she is too weak to handle the world outside. Gothel & Rapunzel have a truly disturbing dysfunctional psychology between them, and it's the most realistic thing in the film. It's scary. Gothel's big number is titled "Mother knows best," and its manipulative force makes it perhaps the most frightening villain song of them all (though Scar's nazi-esque "Be Prepared" in The Lion King is pretty creepy). This psychology is continued consistently throughout the film - we get a number of scenes of Rapunzel alternating between joy at freedom and weeping and wringing her hands in anxious self-loathing and self-reproach at leaving her poor mother.

Having just taught June Cummins' essay on Beauty and the Beast ("Romancing the Beast"), I was especially aware of Rapunzel's dream or motivation. Cummins points out, accurately, that Belle initially wants to travel, explore, see new places - but jettisons all of that for life in the castle which (oddly) creeps ever-closer to the village as the film progresses.
Rapunzel's dream, her one goal and desire for a large part of the film, is to go in person to see the night lanterns.
That's it.
That's her goal, and she sticks to it.

Enter Flinn Rider, our erstwhile Hero, who is a bad guy (more like an arrogant guy) at first but eventually, of course, softens into a sweet romantic hero.
I don't expect, in a huge and hugely mainstream movie, to see the heterosexual romance plot disappear. I'd LIKE to see that, but I don't expect it. I don't expect it in Tangled, in Love and other drugs, in any of those comic-book-movies. Feeling angry, disappointed or frustrated in the presence of this plot, in this kind of film, is truly counterproductive. The Disney princess films - and this one especially - operate as fairy-tale romantic comedies, and those follow a very set formula. Even the really great ones (Bringing Up Baby) follow the formula. We can criticize the heteronormativity of this love plot - and we should - but to react as if Disney is doing something unusual and/or unusually bad in continuing to follow this pattern is simply unfair and unrealistic.

But Rapunzel is - despite her creepy appearance, which is a cross of Precious Moments figurine and Bratz Baby doll - a truly spunky heroine. The movie isn't paying lip service to the spunky heroine, as I think it does in Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. Rapunzel is in charge of her quest from minute one, when she clocks Flinn Rider with her cast-iron frying pan and locks him in her wardrobe. She keeps her hold on that frying pan for much of the movie, in fact. She bullies Flinn into guiding her to the city for the night lanterns, and emotional outbursts about her mother aside, keeps a pretty solid grip on things.

Look at this still: this is essentially a bondage scene, with a dominatrix. Rapunzel has the upper hand here, and not because she's captivatingly beautiful - it's because she's got some weapons (frying pan, and her hair, which she wields like a lasso, a rope, a whip), and she's got a whole lot of determination.
Even the moments of romance or sentimentality are cut with Rapunzel's almost-edgy sense of humor. In the Snuggly Duckling, the tavern to which Flinn guides her in an effort to get her to renounce her quest, the viking-esque thugs who threaten them all are disarmed when Rapunzel yells "Where is your HUMANITY? Don't you have a dream?"

The opportunity for treacly sentiment is huge, but the movie doesn't take it: Mandy Moore puts an edge in Rapunzel's voice, and she sounds more exasperated and impatient than saccharine. There's no soft focus here. The song that follows, sung by the thugs, reveals that all of them do in fact have dreams - and those dreams have a decidedly queer tone (one wants to do interior design, one wants to bake, one wants to be a concert pianist, another is a mime, and finally one is passionate about collecting tiny ceramic unicorns). But the number is staged as a kind of comic tavern-song, reminiscent of Gaston's big song in Beauty & the Beast (but much, much more positive and much, much more playful about gender norms). These same thugs reappear to aid Rapunzel and Flinn, and their arrival is signalled by the presence of a tiny ceramic unicorn placed strategically for Flinn to see.


Throughout the film, we see Rapunzel insist on her own dreams; we see Flinn agreeing to help, and then helping (but not taking over) along the way. Rapunzel rescues him more than once from various sticky situations - the Snuggly Duckling is just one of these - and it is only at the very end of the film that Flinn sacrifices his own life to rescue Rapunzel from Gothel.
The scene when Rapunzel realizes that she is the lost princess is done with psychological smartness; you do not feel like you're watching a Disney Princess soft-focus number. There are "camera tricks," which of course are animation tricks, there is horror registering in Rapunzel's (still disturbing) babyface. It's a moment with as much emotion as the scene of the Queen's transformation to the Witch in Snow White, a scene that was (and is) much heralded for its effectively. Rapunzel decides to confront Gothel with her new realization, and fight for her own life, her own self - unlike princesses of old, who usually attempt to flee when something goes kaput.


Visually, this movie is lovely - Rapunzel's hair is an absolute masterpiece of digital animation. The scenes with the night lanterns are beyond stunning - I want to live in that kingdom. I'm partial to floating lanterns anyway; ever since the millennial new year's celebrations and the glorious, gorgeous lanterns released from - Thailand? I think. But this is rendered beautifully, affectingly - it's the moment of Rapunzel getting her wish.


The movie also takes up what happens after your dream comes true, in a way that works really well. Flinn and Rapunzel discuss this more than once, coming to the conclusion that when you achieve your dream, you move on to a new dream. There are always more dreams to be had. It's uplifting in a matter-of-fact way.

This movie does not fix all of the problems with the romantic comedy and/or fairy-tale genre. It doesn't shatter fairy tales the way Angela Carter does in The Bloody Chamber. Like all romantic comedies, you know the outcome from the first moment you see the two main characters - you know before you get to the theater that Flinn and Rapunzel will live happily ever after. But Tangled does something different, for a Disney film: it gives us psychologically developed characters, with complications and personalities of their own. More than that, it places Rapunzel in the true center of the film - she is the sun around which the whole story orbits. It is her gravitational force directing this show, and none of the characters are allowed to forget it. Compared to Disney princess films of the past, this one has made some very big leaps forward. It isn't perfect, for sure; it's not a masterpiece of feminist rhetoric. But it creates a space in which that kind of progressive ideology can be glimpsed, and even achieved, in moments.

Ah-ha moment, courtesy John Hench

 

from the back page of John Hench's Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of the Show. 

quote on the illustration is not attributed to anyone else, so I assume it's either Hench or Walt Disney himself.

notes on disney/pixar

Last night, I watched an advance promotional trailer, announcing the release date for Toy Story 3. That, plus this weekend's release of UP, Pixar's tenth full length feature film, got me thinking about how Pixar is changing the face of disney filmmaking.

Disney has been criticized (often rightly) for its conservative animated films. Critics point to a kind of overall hegemonic or normative quality in the films: primarily white protagonists; reinforcement of the heteronormative love plot; nonfeminist heroines (if not outright antifeminist heroines); stereotypes of all kinds of people.

Pixar changes all of this, and it seems to me that they have been overlooked in critiques of Disney coming from the world of children's literature. I'm late coming to the film party - most of my knowledge of my field is with books. But there is a substantial body of work on Disney films that crops up in ChLA publications and conferences, and that is what I'm primarily thinking of here.

It occurred to me this morning that, of the nine Pixar films I've seen [going to see UP next weekend, in 3-D), only a few feature a romance plot at the center (or near the center) of the film's plot. A Bug's Life, Ratatouille, Cars, and Wall-E each have a love story as part of their plot - for WALL-E, the romance plot between wall-e and eve is absolutely central to the film. For the other three, however, the romance is a secondary feature. For Ratatouille, the romance doesn't even concern Remy, the rat protagonist. And in all four films, the romance plot hinges on a semi-hapless male seeking approval and affection from a powerful, sometimes scornful, female. The males, generally, change for the better in their quest for affection from their fair ladies, rather than the females changing or compromising in some way for the men.

The remaining Pixar films barely mention romantic love at all. Woody and Bo-Peep clearly have a relationship of some kind, but it's so bracketed as to be barely visible. The primary relationships in Toy Story are between Buzz and Woody, and Woody and his owner Andy, and with internal conflicts that have nothing to do with romance. Toy Story 2 sidelines romance even more; it isn't until the last few minutes of the film that Bo-Peep and Woody re-emerge as a couple, and Jessie, the cowgirl, dazzles Buzz with her derring-do.
Finding Nemo has virtually no romance at all, once Nemo's mom has died (which happens in the opening sequence). The Incredibles likewise opens with a chase scene-cum-wedding, but the plot turns on the family dynamic, not so much the traditional romance plot. Monsters Inc gives Mike Wazowski a girlfriend, but Celia is not a main character, and their relationship is not central.

Pixar has made vast amounts of money for Disney, and has achieved enormous critical success as well. The way Pixar is discussed now in the press is remarkably similar to the early days of Disney's studio, when Walt Disney was pathbreaking in animation and cinematic technology. The Disney studios are continuing to work on traditionally animated features, but Pixar has really assumed place of pride in the company's stable. This shift in importance and popularity signals a change in Disney and in the viewing public, and needs to be recognized as such. The "rights" of Pixar don't correct the wrongs of Disney's previous releases, but I do think that, as critics, we need to give credit where credit is due. When a studio gets it right, we need to be supporting that, if we're going to call, publicly in our work, for new kinds of stories and departures from the old romance plot.