Hacker Cinema
Cinderella
2015 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
When her father unexpectedly passes away, young Ella finds herself at the mercy of her cruel stepmother and her daughters. Never one to give up hope, Ella's fortunes begin to change after meeting a dashing stranger in the woods.
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So you can train AI on Disney Movies to generate and sell your own disney movies because "knowledge is extracted" from it ? Betcha that won't fly in the courts. Here is "Slim Cinderella" - trained and extracted from all Disney Cinderella movies!
Movies have much higher risk than software development.
- Shipping cast, crew, and equipment to Outer Nowhere is common. Lots of things can go wrong. Software developers sit at a desk.
- Weather affects shooting schedules in a big way.
- Film production has a lot of moving parts to be kept in sync. This can be botched.
- It's possible to get close to the end of production and see that the plot doesn't work. Most of Woody Allen's movies had serious problems with the ending, and had to be rescued by the film editor. Or that it's a total bomb with test audiences, as with the 2024 Cinderella.
Many adults of a certain age will have very happy childhood memories of watching classic disney movies such as jungle book, cinderella, toy story, Lion King. Most creative companies would love to have the kind of love that disneys back catalog has. Alas this love does mean the easy ability to sell plastic toys for every film.
Just to be clear: Disney is trying to stop their own unique creations from becoming public domain while they are still acting using those creations.
The public domain works like Snow White and Cinderella were hundreds of years old when Disney made their versions, and they have no issues with others making their own versions of these fairy tales (because there is only one "Disney's Snow White").
And Disney is perfectly fine with paying for the rights to IP to adapt into films, as with Alice in Wonderland, the MCU, etc.
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As MTV some 20 years ago said: "Once it's not enough, recycle."
Sarcastic, of course.
Just look at Hollywood. Every now and then they reboot some movies or they make a follow up: Cinderella, Pinnocchio, Mad Max, Avatar, Star Wars etc.
>here are really only five possible movie plot lines. Boy meets girl. And then... There are at most five ongoing narratives in U.S. political history. Outsiders take power, to redress grievances. And then … There may not be even five master narratives in world religions. People suffer. But then …
7 plots, there are 7 media stories.
Jaws, overcoming the boogyman/shark.
Cinderella, good personality poor becomes rich and deserves it.
LOTR, you need to bring widget somewhere wierd to save the world.
Hobbit, you adventure to strange lands and come back.
Annie Hall, comedic character has to overcome adversity to get happy ending
Sweeny Todd, flawed main character who fails, then ultimately learns to overcome their flaw and become good and happy.
Groundhog day, time travel forces bad main character to become better.
All these are aligned in the news as discovered by the author. Realistically just following 'hate inc' by matt taibi. Which really the article/author and matt just comes from Hunter Thompson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism
You can imagine, over and over in the election system the characters of democracy play out exactly this way. Once you realize this, it forces you to personally answer the obvious question. Are they doing it intentionally or is this all fake like these fictional movies?
200 years ago the Grimm brothers collected tales that had been memorized and shared for generations in the German oral tradition and made them into a book of fairy tales. 70 years Walt Disney made some animated movies based on these fairy tales. Today sharing a copy of Cinderella is Piracy.
I wouldn't say this applies as a rule. Both Snow White (Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge) and Sleeping Beauty (Dornröschen) kept their original titles in German. Cinderella is really the only exception which makes sense since it's more based on the Perrault version.
There's even a counter example. The 2010 film Tangled is called Rapunzel like the original fairy tale in German.
That's why Germans refuse to refer to Disney movies by the names of the original Grimm stories.
Disney/Hollywood version is always Cinderella, and German that closely adheres to the original is called Aschenputtel. The same goes for Snowwhite and Schneewitchen, Sleeping Beauty and Dornröschen.
> I'm more than happy if Disney continues to make whitewashed family friendly movies for people to unwind in the evening. But I would also want other companies to make other kinds of contents with the same IP, targeting different people with different expectations.
You can see how that won't fly with politicians, especially American ones: "Then some innocent kid might get hold of Black Cinderella, who is into bondage and S/M, and be ruined for life! Won't somebody think of the chiiildruuunnn!"
I admit that I liked the live action _Cinderella_ better than the animated version, but that's because the director made it different. In fact, I would have been okay if he had removed the mice entirely.
Oh, and it's a film where the phrase "Every Frame a Painting" [1] is very true. Nearly every frame looks like a Baroque painting, and it's gorgeous.
Other than that, yeah, Disney screwed up the live action versions.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting
Interesting point about reviewers skewing positive for popularity. My big issue with most recommendation engines is that they're biased towards false positives rather than false negatives. The other way would lead to fewer, more focused recommendations.
In particular, I'd like to see an engine take a reviewer's dislikes into account more. If someone likes (switching to film for an accessible example) Cinderella, The Little Mermaid and Mulan, their opinion on Brave isn't going to carry much information as they're pretty indiscriminate about Disney films. But if they love Mulan, dislike Little Mermaid and hate Cinderella, their opinion on Brave is more likely to line up with my own.
Some people like mottos that are steeped in historical depth or psychological meaning. I'm much more simple... mine is from the 2015 film, Cinderella: "Have courage and be kind".
Means all sorts of things... have the courage to; stand by your decisions, own up when you made the wrong decision, follow a path, take a different path, be yourself, be something else, put others first, etc. etc.
And there's nothing wrong with being kind.
It is hard and risky to create quality animation movies. But it is pretty easy to milk a brand - just witness all the cheap sequels and spin-offs Disney have produced based on classics like Bambi or Cinderella. Disney (or someone similar) might very well buy Ardman to milk the IP.
> it would be in the purchaser's best interest to manage it as if it were a butterfly.
Maybe so, but there is no guarantee they will do that. Remember that Disney fired the whole hand-animation department, despite the whole company being build on hand-drawn animation.
If you think about it this came about through laziness and to lower budgets, same deal with great programmers, programmers shouldn't want to do repetitive lazy work but innovate it away. Tedious work becomes a pain on time and budgets, so you innovate to do it faster/better.
Animators didn't want to draw all the backgrounds slightly moving and this allowed re-use and new innovations to make movies faster. This allowed animators to focus on the character cels and making characters look better, the main focus.
The multiplane camera with movable layers for parallaxing directly led to some of the best early Disney movies (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and The Jungle Book) and helped their budget as well as made them look better. Plus at the time, it was actually an improvement that animators welcomed to speed up their tedious work.
That was the predecessor not the multiplane aspect of it with moving layers, definitely inspired it. Lotte mostly just used it to swap out colored backgrounds on her silhouette cel style to adjust placement and color.
A predecessor to the multiplane camera was used by Lotte Reiniger for her animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). Berthold Bartosch, who worked with Reiniger, used a similar setup in his film L'Idee (1932).
Ub Iwerks invented the multiplane camera with movable layers to create parallax and zooming [1] which created immersive depth. It also saved on budgets, tedious background animation and allowed animators to focus more on the character cels, the star of the show.
The first multiplane camera, using movable layers of flat artwork before a horizontal camera, was invented by former Walt Disney Studios animator/director Ub Iwerks in 1933, using parts from an old Chevrolet automobile. His multiplane camera was used in a number of the Iwerks Studio's Willie Whopper and Comicolor cartoons of the mid-1930s.
Fleischer Studios (Popeye/Betty Boop) also made one or copied in 1934 [1]
The technicians at Fleischer Studios created a distantly related device, called the Stereoptical Camera or Setback, in 1934. Their apparatus used three-dimensional miniature sets built to the scale of the animation artwork. The animation cels were placed within the setup so that various objects could pass in front of and behind them, and the entire scene was shot using a horizontal camera. The Tabletop process was used to create distinctive results in Fleischer's Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, and Color Classics cartoons.
William Garrity took Ub Iwerks invention further and that iteration was used in many large successful movies they made [1]
The most famous multiplane camera was invented by William Garity for the Walt Disney Studios to be used in the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The camera was completed in early 1937 and tested in a Silly Symphony called The Old Mill, which won the 1937 Academy Award for Animated Short Film. Disney's multiplane camera, which used up to seven layers of artwork (painted in oils on glass) shot under a vertical and moveable camera, allowed for more sophisticated uses than the Iwerks or Fleischer versions, and was used prominently in Disney films such as Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and The Jungle Book
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera
> So the only alternative to paying for something you don't own is to steal it and pretend that you're somehow justified because you don't agree with the way the law is written?
Well laws are meant to be interpreted rather than followed verbatim. But that genuinely wasn't the point of my post and I'm certainly not advocating piracy. That doesn't mean I have to agree with how the movie industry is run either.
My point was that Disney should be upping their game to make their content more accessible rather than making it harder and using their monopoly via intellectual property laws to force their market position. That just seems really disingenuous with the point of intellectual property - like how Apple and Samsung went to war.
Copyright law wasn't intended to last the period of time it does. In fact copyright law was first conceived to allow publishers to make money from publishing but then the information was always intended to go into the public domain. Granted we are talking about 300ish years of history (IIRC) and times change but given the profits Disney are raking in you can hardly argue that they haven't recouped their production costs. However I'm not trying to argue against capitalism here either. My real issue with Disney is that they have been one of the biggest campaigners of extending copyright law, and also one of the biggest abusers of the public domain with a multitude of stories adapted and then trademarked (Jungle Book, Little Mermaid, Cinderella, etc). They make billions from "stealing" public domain stories and yet people like yourself complain if someone suggests pirating Disney's work as an alternative (I'm not by the way, but you assumed I had) and that seems somewhat unfair in the general sense when Disney have intentionally priced themselves out of reach for many parents. As an aside: I think the fact that Disney often targets younger audiences really helps them here as well because it makes it harder for parents to boycott their services.
This is why I say I'd rather see them working with existing providers instead of running their services in their own silo forcing people to pay for yet another subscription service just to access Disney content. You're right they have no legal nor economic obligation to do so; but I think respecting your customers wishes should count for something given that in any other industry customers could vote with their feet and easily switch services.
You know the worst part? You can't even prevent it if you are raising your kids otherwise.
My 5 year old has never seen a Disney movie, yet she told me today that for her 6th birthday she wants a Cinderella shirt and an Elsa costume - both characters she has never actually seen on screen. Her friends at school all talk about it though and recount fantastic stories.
I hear from people saying that we will raise a kid who is out of the loop, so she won't be able to relate and will be an outcast if we don't keep her up to date with all the trends like her peers.
At a certain point as a parent, it's kind of like, it doesn't really matter what we do.
Nope, you can still make a Cinderella film. The tricky bit is to make sure that all your visual and story inspirations for the movie comes only from the 'original' sources (Grim, Lang etc.) and nothing the Disney movie.
IANAL, but in that case can I make an animated film about Cinderella? The story is in the public domain, but Disney have recent films. By making a Cinderella film did Disney gained the right to block subsequent works based on it?