FILM

11 Disney Plus Movies That Are Weird to Watch As Adults

Sometimes ya gotta confront the demons of your childhood, especially when they were created by a bunch of overworked, underpaid animators in a California warehouse.

Disney

If you grew up with a TV, chances are you spent a lot of your childhood watching Disney movies.

Do you ever wonder where all those images and stories went? They must be lurking around in our brains somewhere, having embedded themselves into our psyches when we were at our most impressionable.

Because of this, watching something you last saw as a six year old can be distinctly surreal, especially when you realize just how strange, messed-up, and often, wildly psychedelic so much of the media you consumed as a youth was.

Disney Plus has entered the streaming game, and naturally, it's sure to rake in billions despite the glitches. For better or for worse, Disney was part of most of our childhoods. If you're looking to tap into some of those hidden reservoirs of childhood memories and nightmares, look no further than these 11 odd films. Many of them hold up, but others are full of cracks and flaws you may never have noticed.

1. WALL-E

This heartwarming story appeared to be about a cute little robot, but it actually was very clearly about the climate crisis. In 2019, when scientists predict untold suffering due to global warming and natural disasters are picking up in speed and ferocity, WALL-E's desolate vision of global apocalypse feels...too real. Also, since Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are considering space communities, the surreal spaceship habitat that houses all the remaining humans in WALL-E hits a bit too close to home.

Empire

2. Fantasia

This film was made in 1940, and if you view any of the clips, you'll notice that every frame seems to have been spawned from some sort of psychedelic experience. What was Fantasia? What is Fantasia? The truth is that no one really knows—Fantasia exists beyond human comprehension, in a sphere all its own—but the music is magnificent and the imagery is so surreal that you'll be amazed that you just accepted it as a kid.

syfy.com

3. Sleeping Beauty

This film was made in 1959, so it can be forgiven for its lack of feminist sensibility, but still… watching the prince plant a totally non-consensual kiss on a woman who is mostly only known as "Sleeping Beauty" is rather disorienting. If you're a woman who was raised on princess movies but are still wondering why you're having so much trouble getting over the impulse to be shy, submissive, and acquiescent, look no further. (The same goes for Snow White, who also goes to live in a house with seven strange men).

1000-Word-Philosophy

4. Robin Hood

Robin Hood was kind of a militant socialist. If you've been motivated by Bernie Sanders in recent years or have been organizing since you were a teen, watching this movie and seeing Robin Hood's dedication to redistributing the wealth can feel oddly resonant and inspiring.

animationsource.org

5. Hannah Montana

This isn't a movie, but watching Miley Cyrus gallivant around in her blonde wig as the super innocent, ultra-perky Hannah Montana will inevitably be disorienting for the adult viewer. Cyrus has spoken openly about the struggles she went through while filming the show, saying that playing Hannah Montana made her "hate her body" and leveling other critiques at the franchise. Watching the show is eerie in that it'll remind you of the days of your innocent youth—before you ever saw Miley Cyrus naked (which simply became a rite of passage around 2012)—but maybe it'll also make you realize that you have a lot of internalized sexism.

HANNAH MONTANA: THE MOVIE, Miley Cyrus, 2009. Photo: Sam Emerson/ ©Walt Disney Co./courtesy EverettEntertainment Weekly


6. Dumbo

Is this movie a critique of animal abuse or an insane, racist acid trip, or a bit of both? The crows are racist (their leader is literally named Jim Crow), and there's a racist song, etcetera. In one scene, baby Dumbo gets drunk and hallucinates a parade of pink elephants. Scarring? Undeniably. Poor Dumbo. This movie is almost sadder to watch as an adult knowing just how sad Dumbo's plight actually is.

Dumbo's dreamwww.youtube.com

7. The Black Cauldron

This movie is not as well-known outside of Disney aficionados, as its release almost brought down the entire franchise. Made during Disney's "dark period" when the company was experimenting with horror and new technologies, this genuinely creepy movie is often called the "darkest Disney movie ever." I definitely remember watching this as a kid and being seriously terrified by the skeleton crew and onscreen suicides in this film. In that way, it makes sense that the film has amassed a cult following largely made up of the generation it scarred for life. Sometimes ya gotta confront the demons of your childhood, especially when they were created by a bunch of overworked, underpaid animators in a Glendale warehouse.

Rich Menga

8. Alice in Wonderland

Like Fantasia, some of the imagery in this movie is undeniably eerie and almost too surreal. The fact that Alice winds up at a strange luncheon with a Mad Hatter where time doesn't exist? That she takes something that makes her grow small, then large? That she falls down a rabbit hole? What drugs were the people who made this movie on? Or perhaps the better question: What weren't they on? As a child watching this movie, I imagine that I developed some strange ideas about reality and rabbits that haunted me to adulthood. Also, the movie brings up complex questions about physics, math, philosophy and more—that's a lot for a children's fairytale.

steamcommunity.com

9. Beauty and the Beast

This one has also been discussed ad nauseum, but Belle...lets a man imprison her and then falls in love with him. This is Stockholm Syndrome at its finest. She gets imprisoned and then marries the man who imprisons her. Sure, it's a tale as old as time, but I think that in the recent live-action remake, we all let our feelings about Emma Watson's vocals and the Beast's anthropomorphization overtake the simple strangeness of the tale.

Crosswalk the Musical: Beauty and the Beastwww.youtube.com

10. Cars

Cars is full of adult humor, from the stoner hippie bus character Fillmore to the scene where Lightning McQueen's fans "flash" him. Actually, it's implied that the cars have sex, so that says more than enough. What universe is this?

Slate.com

11. Hunchback of Notre Dame

This movie is adorable and charming in a lot of ways, but it also has an undercurrent of disturbing sadism and sexual violence. Frollo harasses Esmeralda to no end, and she's almost executed at the end of the film. There's torture, death, abuse, hallucinations…

Disney

Then again, all that is part of what made Disney movies so enduring, right? Kids get exposed to a lot growing up, and if all Disney films were all squeaky-clean and innocent, that would defeat the purpose of stories, which are meant to relate to people and resonate across ages and demographics. That doesn't mean that it's not strange to look back on these films after a while, but what's funny is that a lot of these strange films were also some of Disney's greatest. If anything, the grains of reality that Disney built into their fanciful stories are what make these films that much more powerful and timeless.

TV

Phoebe Waller-Bridge Brings Her Brand of Psychopathic Raunch to "SNL"

The "Fleabag" writer shines brightest (in her usual vulgar way) in her opening monologue.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge has had a successful past few years, to say the least.

The Emmy-winning writer of Fleabag and Killing Eve brought her brand of unfiltered brashness to the SNL screen this Saturday in an episode that felt like a victory lap. Still, while worth watching for any Waller-Bridge fans, the show wasn't quite able to live up to the level of comedic brilliance we've come to expect from her.

The best part was probably Waller-Bridge's opening monologue, in which she stated that everything she writes has a "grain of truth" to it, discussed genit*lia for several minutes, and definitively explained why Fleabag's "Hot Priest" is so hot: It's because he actually listens. She discussed psychopathy, which is brought to the fore on Killing Eve, and theorized that she herself might even be a psychopath (or at least, everyone she knows is). She closed with some killer lines like, "Back then horny women were to be burned at the stake. Now they're given Emmys!"

Unfortunately, the rest of the show took a slightly downward turn following that monologue. While it might be a bit harsh to call SNL an "aging, decrepit beast that should've been put out of its misery seasons ago," as Vice did in its review of this episode, several of this show's sketches faltered dangerously. Last week's debut episode was promising with its clever depiction of the Democratic presidential candidates, but then again, those jokes kind of write themselves.

At least this episode, despite no shortage of lackluster jokes, we got to see Phoebe Waller-Bridge use many different accents and play a couple of memorable roles, including a psychopathic war wife who gallivants around with Hitler in the sketch "Words of the War." That sketch was possibly one of the episode's best, mostly thanks to Waller-Bridge's excellent deadpan and the scene's escalating absurdity. Weekend Update was also a highlight, featuring Kate McKinnon's lovably aggressive Elizabeth Warren, a well-placed Pete Davidson joke, and a flamboyant Chen Biao, played by freshman cast member Bowen Yang. "Mid-Day News" was also excellent, bringing racial politics and stereotypes to the fore as South Floridian news anchors try to determine whether the criminals they're reporting on are black or white.

Weekend Update: Chen Biao on US-China Trade War - SNLwww.youtube.com


Mid-Day News - SNLwww.youtube.com

On the other hand, the odd sketch "Royal Romance" made fun of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry but never quite hit its stride, and its jokes pushed the boundaries between satire and racism. Then there was the painful "Kaylee, Crystal, and Janetta," a sketch which featured four women at a bar. Perhaps meant to be a subversion of the super-feminine, stereotypical Sex and the City type of girl gang, characters portrayed are loud, tattooed, mullet-wearing, totally unfeminine, and frequently violent women. But that sketch doesn't seem to do many favors for any of them, instead asking the audience to laugh off a sequence where they each attack an ex-lover, refusing the kind of self-aware nuance that makes Fleabag such a standout example of how to write a "difficult woman" character.

Kaylee, Crystal & Janetta - SNLwww.youtube.com

It's hard to say exactly why SNL has struggled so much over the past few years. Comedy writing is incredibly hard, but with all the absurdity in the modern era, we need excellent satire now more than ever to put it all into perspective. Still, the show could benefit from more diverse perspectives, more boundary-pushing and nuanced comedy, and stronger characters—the latter of which, specifically, Waller-Bridge is so good at creating. One has to wonder what would've happened had Waller-Bridge been able to write a few sketches herself.

Frontpage Popular News

OSCARS 2018 | 90th Academy Awards Recap

The Highlights

Judging by the build-up alone, you'd figure the 90th Oscars were going to be some kind of wild and crazy. #MeToo, inclusion and representation, and Donald Trump, were all to be expected as topics of speeches. Jimmy Kimmel would have to make self-referential jokes about last year's Best Picture gaff. It's the 90th anniversary of the event which, I guess, is a milestone, maybe?

Keep ReadingShow less