Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Romani and Notre Dame

Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the most popular films of the Disney Renaissance. It’s famously dark, and Judge Claude Frollo might be the most evil Disney Villain of all time. And that makes sense: Victor Hugo’s original gothic novel makes the Disney film look like a heartwarming bedtime story. One of the things I love most about the movie is its complex portrayal of religion. My fellow authors point out how it contains both positive and negative portrayals of religious beliefs and people. But The Hunchback of Notre Dame contains more just a few Catholic characters; we also see some relatively faithful portrayals of Romani beliefs, too.

Oh, My Pop Culture Zealotry: Religious Fanaticism in Fiction

It’s my opinion that the scariest sort of villain is the kind that believes that what they’re doing is truly good. Hell, a quick Google search tells me that a lot of people have trouble deciding whether Umbridge is more evil than Voldemort himself. This sort of villain is even more frightening when they think they’re doing God’s work, because for them, that’s the ultimate justification for their actions. No human force is gonna convince someone who thinks they have divine purpose to stop what they’re doing.

Oh, My Pop Culture Jesus: The Catholic Clergy and Pop Culture

Sometimes you watch TV shows, or movies and you see priests, bishops, monks, or nuns and often the portrayals of these people aren’t very favorable. Sometimes they are portrayed as downright evil.

Pictured Above: Pure evil!

Theatre Thursdays: Disney’s Technical Greatness

MadameAce has talked about a Disney animated feature-turned-musical (Beauty and the Beast) before in this segment, but I want to look at them more as a whole. Now, as both a performer and a tech person, I have enormous respect for the amount of work it takes to put on a musical like The Lion King or The Little Mermaid. Disney has used any number of methods to make theoretically impossible things (a cast of animals, talking furniture, setting the show underwater) happen on stage. And it’s always technically astounding.

But I have a possibly unpopular opinion: I think the amazing technicality of these productions lessens the impact of the story. Disney movies immerse you in their world conversely, when I see a Disney musical, I’m less moved by the story because I’m too busy being awed by the girl wearing a giraffe puppet on her head and wow that must be hard and it’s really impressive but it takes away from the story. (This, of course, was turned on its head for me when I saw The Little Mermaid musical, since Ariel and her story are annoying and it was more fun to just gawk at the beautiful costumes and scenery and technical magic than pay attention to the whiny sixteen-year-old who needs a sassy gay friend.)

Disney is certainly not the only producer of musicals to fall into this problem, (here’s looking at you, Seussical, Shrek, Spiderman: Turn off the Dark, et al…) but I think his failure on their part is the most tragic. Disney movies, for all that they are often problematic from a feminist perspective, are still known for telling classic stories in a way that resonates with people of all ages. The musicals don’t do it for me in the same way at all.

And this problem looks to be continuing into the future of Disney’s productions: They apparently are in talks to do a Dumbo musical (so flying AND an animal cast), an Aladdin musical (flying, talking animals, and magic), a Jungle Book musical (more talking animals), and a Hunchback of Notre Dame musical, which… might be okay, actually, except for the talking gargoyles. I’m not saying I won’t see these musicals—especially Aladdin and Hunchback are favorites of mine—but something like Dumbo? The touching and, yes, depressing as nut story behind this movie is going to be completely overshadowed by making a person who is in some magical way an elephant fly around the stage.

What are your thoughts about Disney’s musicals, readers dear?