Words by Yasmin Donald
Disney’s live-action efforts often get criticised for peddling a supposed ‘woke’ agenda, but is the real problem in fact a lack of creativity over at the House of Mouse?
The trailer for Disney’s live-action Peter Pan & Wendy movie has been released and the online reaction is enough to make you want to sprinkle some pixie dust, fly off to Neverland, and leave social media.
If you are familiar with the controversy surrounding the live-action trailer release of The Little Mermaid, you’ll probably know that Twitter descended into chaos when Disney casted Black singer-turned-actor Halle Bailey in the titular role, and their new Peter Pan venture is looking to be no exception to this kind of tiring criticism.
Labelling Disney as “woke“, many are taking to social media to express their annoyance at Yara Shahidi’s casting as Tinkerbell, and the Lost Boys now including girls. The main criticism seems to be based on the film’s supposed unfaithfulness to J.M. Barrie’s original work.
Peter Pan & Wendy‘s purpose is not to erase any of the previous Peter Pan movies: it’s simply an adaptations and, with adaptation, comes creative licence. How the story should be told through the eyes of Peter Pan & Wendy director David Lowry, is different to how Steven Spielberg interpreted it in 1993’s Hook, and furthermore different in the eyes of each reader and viewer.
When someone is a true fan of something, they often wish to have more than just the original cultural property. Fan-fiction, for example, involves bringing fans together to reimagine their favourite characters in new contexts. As Francesca Coppa writes in her book, The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, “fan-fiction rewrites and transforms stories currently owned by others”. This process of transformation can entail changing the setting, time period, race, gender, sexuality and more and, this is seen by fans as homage, not sacrilege. Looking at the history of film, book adaptations such as Clueless, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Forrest Gump are all drastically different from the original source material yet are widely adored.
With this in mind, it transpires that the real umbrage taken over Disney’s live-action adaptations lies not in the idea of Disney making a new movie based on original texts, but how these new movies distinguish themselves from their predecessors. If Disney’s live-action movies simply retell the same story as their animated adaptations, they run the danger of becoming more or less a carbon copy of the original, created merely for profit. Disney have however made successful imaginative live-action adaptations in the past: one of its most recent and critically-acclaimed is Cruella, based on Dodie Smith’s 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians.
Cruella is a fine example of how you can make something entirely new out of playing with the original content. For starters, the movie is centred around a young Cruella, presenting an entirely new version of the evil woman featured in the novel and previous film adaptations. Whilst Cruella’s signature look, love for fashion and mischievous nature all remain the same, her obsession with fur and inclination towards harming Dalmatians is absent, making her motivations a lot easier to support.
People shouldn’t take offence because Disney’s live-action movies are different to the original: adaptations are all about change. If anything, people should take offence at the fact that these movies do not make nearly enough changes. The producers really ought to follow in the footsteps of the ever-dreaming Peter Pan and never grow up, because narrow-minded thinking gets you the same old thing but creativity and wonder, well that’s where the real magic is.