Favorite childhood Disney film

lycoris asked: Your favourite Disney film in childhood and do you still feel the same about it now?

Either Cinderella or Fantasia, although I only liked select parts of each. In Cinderella, I was all about the mice. In fact, we usually never got to the ball: once the mice put together their dress for Cinderella, the movie was over as far as I was concerned.

With Fantasia, I liked the seasonal fairies, the Nutcracker songs - the dancing mushrooms and the waltzing flowers particularly - the Greek myths, and occasionally the dinosaurs, but the stegosaurus’s death was too sad to bear much watching. :( The dancing hippos were totally disturbing, though, and as for the giant Satanic figure at the end - good night! I saw that part once and it still pops into my mind to scare me.

It’s been ages since I’ve seen either movie, so I don’t know how I would feel about them now. I think Cinderella tends to get a worse rap than she deserves: people say she’s weak, but would a weak person be able to pull herself together to go to the ball after having her first dress ripped apart by her stepsisters? Indeed, could a weak person withstand her stepfamily’s constant campaign to undermine her self-worth? Her fairy godmother only gave her a new dress. Cinderella had to supply the self-confidence to wear it like she meant it.

This is not to say that Cinderella is an unproblematic story. The stepmother and ugly stepsisters can send a variety of misogynistic messages, depending on the choices made in the retelling, and in Cinderella Disney makes mostly the bad choices. But Cinderella’s character and in particular her supposed weakness are not one of those bad choices.