Disney Recycled
Monday, April 13th, 2009The leading French daily Le Monde has a weblog on its website that I’ve just discovered, called V Pour Vidéo. The tagline it uses to describe itself translates as “Video-essentials in a blog with real pieces of video inside” – language I imagine that you’d rather expect to see on a cereal-box! In any case, it does seem to be a weblog based around video, in a loose sense at least, with at least one video embedded in each blogpost.
Also, the blog-author’s name is Karim El Hadj – that’s something that should cause a double-take, when you realize that this is an affiliated product of the renowned Le Monde! I’m not saying that it’s surprising that someone who is clearly originally of Arab origin can come up with high-quality weblog content; I’m saying I’m surprised that such a person is, in effect, sponsored by such a pillar of the French media establishment as Le Monde.
For his blogpost for today it seems that El Hadj has been inspecting various Disney animation-films rather closely and has come up with something rather interesting. I’ll pass the word directly on to him here:
Like many animation-lovers, while watching Disney animated cartoons you have also felt a certain déjà vu. Here’s the explanation of this phenomenon. For many years the Disney enterprise has continued to duplicate animation segments from one cartoon to another. Creativity and industry don’t necessarily always go together.
Here’s the video that proves his point, from DailyMotion.com:
In the comments following the post you have contributions from various readers offering their own judgments as to whether this is really such a bad thing. Comment #3, from “Matthieu,” does cut Disney some slack, reminding us that back when these films were made there were no computers to assist so that everything had to be drawn by hand, and maybe in view of this the duplication made some sense in order to “gain time” and not have to re-do everything all the time. But El Hadj remains hard-core, sticking in his own blog-author’s comment-to-the-commend (Message du blogueur) saying, in effect, yeah they gain time, and so they gain more money, and where’s the innovation?
