In echoing a sentiment held by many a former fan of the once-beloved entertainment company and their various subsidiaries, legendary Disney animation director John Musker believes that the House of Mouse is in desperate need of a “course correction” away from activism and back towards making quality productions.
Musker, whose Disney directorial credits includes such classics as the The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, The Princess and the Frog, and most recently Moana, offered his thoughts on the company’s current direction while speaking to Spanish news outlet El País during the 2024 edition of the annual Animayo industry conference.
Pressed by the publication’s Eneko Ruiz Jiménez as to whether he and his fellow production crew members on The Princess and the Frog were trying to make a political statement with their decision to introduce a black princess into Disney canon, the director asserted, “We weren’t trying to be woke, although I understand the criticism.
“The classic Disney films didn’t start out trying to have a message,” explained Musker. “They wanted you to get involved in the characters and the story and the world, and I think that’s still the heart of it.” You don’t have to exclude agendas, but you have to first create characters who you sympathize with and who are compelling.”
Closing out his answer with a word of advice for Disney, the esteemed animation director turned to the company’s future and ultimately opined, “I think they need to do a course correction a bit in terms of putting the message secondary, behind entertainment and compelling story and engaging characters.”
Notably, Musker is not the first Disney-affiliated individual to call for the company to put down their signs and pick up their storyboards.
Asked by the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin in 2023 for his thoughts on the criticisms against the company’s ‘woke’ output, CEO Bob Iger admitted, “I think what had happened over a period of time, and was building and building and maybe it reached a peak of some sort while I was gone, is that creators lost sight of what their number one objective needed to be.”
“Often when we entertain, and we’ve entertained as a company over the 100 years we’ve been in business, we have entertained with values and with having a positive impact on the world in many different ways – I use Black Panther as a great example of that, just in terms of fostering acceptance, or the movie Coco, which Pixar did about the Day of the Dead,” said the embattled Disney head. “I like being able to do that: entertain and if you can infuse it with positive messages that have a good impact on the world, fantastic. But that should not be the objective.”
“When I came back what I have really tried to do is to return to our roots, which is, remember, we have to entertain first,” Iger concluded. “It’s not about messages. Again, if your story can have a positive impact, so there’s that, and I’ve worked hard since I’ve been back, in reminding the creative community who are our partners, our employees, that that’s the objective. And I don’t really want to tolerate the opposite, so there’s that.”
Musker’s next confirmed project is set to be an animated Metal Men film for Warner Bros., for which he will serve as its director, writer, and producer
Unfortunately, excited fans aren’t encouraged to hold their breath for its release, as the film has received absolutely zero status updates since its initial announcement in 2021.
