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The Western influences that Disney’s former Disney Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck behave are declining. That’s because, despite the awakening of American and European studios in the “progressive” they are still worried about too much about the culture war.
Inspired by the style of Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary co-founder of Studio Ghibli, images generated with ChatGpt became a global trend within hours. (Image: AFP/File)
Two disconnected events unfolded in popular culture last week.
One was ChatGpt image generator, which provides Studio Ghibli-style portraits and recreation scenes and situations. The other was a film-like release from the Snow White remake.
Inspired by the style of Studio Ghibli’s legendary co-founder Miyazaki Hayo, the images became a global trend within hours. Everyone’s timeline was flooded, and everyone and their aunt were discovering Miyazaki and anime.
Meanwhile, Snow White tanked spectacularly. Critics gave 44% to the rotten tomatoes. But at the box office, at least according to the first figures, Snow White was bringing $87 million over weekends around the world and only $43 million domestically.
Compared to other Disney movies, the Lion King made $191 million domestically, Beauty and the Beast $174 million, Alice in Wonderland $166 million, and Jungle Book made $103 million over the same period.
One of the biggest reasons that stem from the bombing of Snow White in the collection is its obsessive affection and the pro-Palestinian anti-white remarks of its lead actor Rachel Zegler. Jonah Pratt, son of Snow White producer Mark Pratt, publicly denounced Zegler for the weak box office revenue of the Disney Remake, accusing her of “narcissism,” and dragging “personal politics” into that promotion.
“Yeah, my dad, my dad, the producer of Disney’s huge IP had to line up in hundreds of millions of dollars and leave the country to rebel a 20-year-old employee. Now deleted Instagram post. “Free speech doesn’t mean you’re allowed to say what you want to do with your personal employment without affecting. Tens of thousands of people worked on the film, and she hijacked the conversation for all her colleagues, crew members, and her own immature desires to rely on the film and succeed.”
The Studio Ghibli trend is not without its controversy. The trend lies in the grey area of copyright. Although the style is not explicitly protected by copyright law, Openai may have trained the model at a Japanese studio’s Creative Works.
“I think this raises the same questions we’ve been asking ourselves for years. What does piracy mean by going out, raw the web and copying it to these databases?” Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at Neal & McDevitt, a US-based law firm, said. TechCrunch.
Miyazaki fans also expressed their anger and disapproval of reducing painstaking art to cheap memes. The 2016 video has resurfaced, with Miyazaki himself being seen assaulting him during an AI demonstration from staff. “I never want to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel this is a shame for life itself,” he says in the video.
However, these concerns help to strengthen the wild popularity of Southeast Asian pop culture works, including Japanese manga and anime, as well as Korean pop, TV dramas, and street fashion.
The Western influences that Disney’s former Disney Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck behave are declining.
That’s because studios in America and Europe are concerned about too much about the culture war, despite their “progressive” awakening. Given that deep US states were routing large USAID funds for Colombian transgender operas and Peruvian transgender comic books, there could be many financial incentives for this pop culture politicization.
But the young people refuse.
When Disney fired popular Star Wars star Gina Carano, she refused to support movements and ideologies such as Black Live Matter, co-lockdowns, and sharing pronouns, social media users trended #CancelDisneyPlus. In 2022, conservative anti-anticipated journalist Christopher Loufo revealed the Disney emergency meeting, with company officials discussing “an addition of queerness” and the LGBTQ+ agenda discussing child programming, promoting gender-neutral language at Disney theme parks.
In contrast, Japanese Marie Condo was organizing our lives with her Netflix hit I’ll clean up with Marie Condo. Korean pop groups BTS and BlackPink have made their music videos action-packed. Parasite became the first Korean film to win the Parmedollar.
Korean films experimented with themes of diversity and lateral thinking, but avoided the moodiness and culture war. Same as Japanese anime.
Childhood and adolescence in Southeast Asian content was not contaminated by the political goals of “liberal” white women with colored hair sitting in New York and Paris.
Recently, Japan has been furious with Assassin’s Creed, the latest version of the video game made in France.
Creativity cannot become prisoners of political and accurate concepts. It should flow like a mountain stream, not a laid pipeline. Unless the West recognizes this, its impact and association will continue to decline.
(Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. The views expressed in the above works are personal and are only those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of News18.)
