#the orient

Vintage Travel Poster - Fly TWA: The Orient

Art by David Klein

i had a ramble on Twitter and thought i'd just copy-and-paste(-and-edit) it here because why not.

sorta bouncing off of my previous tweet.. i feel like we should ask for some Disney Princess stories rooted in reality, you know? like the closest things we had to real life situations was Pocahontas & Mulan. somehow Mulan was the more real scenario bc though Pocahontas was real, the movie wrongly depicted her story to make something enjoyable for white audiences, aging her up and built that relationship between her and John.

i think a Disney Princess film where fantasy is not an element would be very cool. because, you know, cool things happen when there's no talking dragon or you get turned into a frog along with a future husband.

i think that a tale where a girl or woman of royalty isn't needed to go on a quest to save her people but chooses to go on a mission that she believes would satisfy her and/or others is a marvelous idea. to explore characters facing real-world issues in real-world settings.

maybe this could be a good prompt for somebody to go write this story, a prompt that spawns ventures in film that otherwise wouldn't happen because it strips you of elements that for a long time, seem to have always been there as part of the crafting of the story. Walt Disney Pictures is indeed, very good with, and very big on the theme of fantasy. but it has proven to also be good at producing media that is realistic fiction as well as nonfiction. i think it could also help destroy the idea that Disney only does fantasy or is only good for that.

so if Walt Disney Studios or just Walt Disney Animation Studios could ever have my attention, i want them to know that though live-action adaptations are nice ways of drawing in old audiences to get a little financial boost and tell stories again differently (i am a HUGE fan of Cinderella (2015)), that maybe instead of adapting old motion pictures, there's a whole array of new ones that you can craft just by stripping the writing of an element that many of the films have relied on to produce the stories in the past.

anyways, how's about we call Disney to raise awareness on the human rights violation going on at the Xinjiang internment camps. some of the live-action adaptation of Mulan was filmed in Xinjiang. surely if kids under 12 can view it with their parents and see the special thanks given to several government entities in Xinjiang at the end of the credits, Disney should have no problem talking about such a huge and hugely wrong thing going on there before its consumers, no?

it would be more of a surprise to me that Disney's corporate policy doesn't appear to care about Muslims if Aladdin (1993) hadn't been made. here's a neat video on that if you don't get it.

what a shame, that so many Arabs and Muslims grow up consuming stuff from the Walt Disney Company, finding identification, solace or positive ideas in its media, but by the same company to this day have been so alienated, so disrespected. we have been victims of erasure and whitewashing from them. now fellow humans practising Islam, are being held in concentration camps, and the company that allowed for Aladdin, filled with orientalism, to be made isn't standing up to China. very on-brand.

The Orient owned by L. Meehan, Erie Pennsylvania

Brass, Heart shaped.