When you Wish Upon a Frog (Book II of the Jim Henson at Disney saga)

[TGW]

“Look,” he said to the assembled Shepherds. “I should have listened to you. That bitch,” meaning Fonda, whom he’d recently divorced following a cheating scandal that lit up the tabloids, “is out of her mind. The vile temptress led me astray. But I’m back in the fold.”

Look even if this is a business ploy, calm the fuck down Ted.

While it would be particularly juicy to get the Disney family weakened, it makes perfect sense that it would be Bass who is the likeliest candidate to be got at.

And now we wait! Wonder where the hell we go from here.

 

[Daibhid C]

My guess: doublethink is one helluva drug.

A combination of doublethink and circular logic -- Nothing Falwell does can be unethical because he's doing it in the name of the Lord, and the Lord wouldn't ask him to do unethical things.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Ah goddamnit Ted. I mean it's not like the guy's ever overreached in OTL but this just has disaster written all over it.

You know you’re having a mental breakdown when even Michael Eisner is warning you to pump the breaks on a hasty idea.

I don’t know whether to pity Turner for having a possible mental breakdown or worry that he’ll figuratively immolate himself in his run on Disney!

Yep, things are about to get Interesting now that Ted is throwing his hat into the ring. Canny strategy? Post-traumatic crisis? Something in between? Stay tuned and buckle up.

Also The World Burns sounds terrific and I'd love to see it in our timeline, or at least something like it.

Like an American version of Disco Elysium that's actually fit for broadcast on television.

It's actually essentially TTL's Nash Bridges, for reference.

Geez, more Ted Turner madness . I don't think he'd be the type to support Falwell or those goons though.

He doesn't support them ideologically. Turner is more of an opportunist that wants to take advantage of the chaos.

Did he find god, or not? Well, be sure that he'll, as he said, never pass up an opportunity to make money or cripple a rival.

Ah, a battle on who will make TTL's Armageddon? So is Roland for former or latter, and likewise is Zanuck for former or latter?

I suspect it's Emmerich for popcorn destroying, Zanuck for closer to source material.

Emmerich wants the popcorn flick, Zanuck wants a more faithful take.

Ted had Confederate sympathies? I don't know if I necessarily buy into that, even though he did produce Gods & Generals after Gettysburg and had some thoughts regarding ACW's origins. Which reminds me to say that The Last Full Measure should probably get made as well in this timeline.

I mean Gods and Generals is basically pro-Confederate wank propaganda.

Regardless Turner was very zealously pro-South and likely would have been against anything he viewed as attacking it, even if those attacks are ultimately primarily against the Confederacy.

Turner was pretty clearly a Lost Cause sympathizer at the time, which should surprise nobody given that he grew up in the South in the early 20th Century when the Lost Case was accepted as historical fact. His position modulated, but it's hard to give up sympathies to some degree for the "home team", and despite his "Progressive politics" he didn't stop the flagrant Lost Cause mythology present even in Gettysburg and the rather flagrant Confederate fetishization in Gods & Generals. As someone who grew up in the south in the late 20th century, I can tell you the Lost Cause myth held a lot of sway in the South even then, and some toned down version of the myth remained into the 21st century, and for a long time parts of it still held sway over me until I actually (gasp) studied actual history. When I first moved to rural Virginia in the late '80s the teachers were annoyed that they had to teach that slavery was bad for the slaves and that masters were cruel tyrants rather than like big brothers. Plenty of people still called it the War of Northern Aggression.

Interestingly, as a strange aside, my Civil War professor in College was Dr. James I. Robertson, Jr., who while fully committed to the reality that the "main cause" of the Civil War was slavery (and made no bones about this, and half of the first semester was the pre-war leadup including Bleeding Kansas) still held some personal sympathies for the CS soldiers and generals themselves. He wrote what was at the time (and may still be) the definitive biography of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. And it's funny that Gods & Generals should come up, since he was its (very reluctant) Historical Advisor, largely getting dragged into the production when his Jackson biography was discovered by the production team. They needed some focus for the film (which came from a book determined to cram the entire war leading up to G'burg in a single book) and Jackson became their man, so they pulled in him.

For context, Robertson hated, just HATED historical films. He was a stickler for historical accuracy in the details and (this is a quote) told us that "Artistic License [is] spelled L-I-E-S." As his Jackson bio had just been released when I was in his classes, he noted that the movie rights were circulating, and he was apprehensive. "God forbid if Mel Gibson ever gets ahold of it" he said (not kidding). G&G was in production and he told us all, with some apprehension, that they'd gotten "their claws into" his book and attained the rights, planning to use it as the focal point for the larger film. He approached his job as Advisor as a form of "damage control" and I can all but guarantee that he's the reason why all of the details of the battles, down to what corps when and where, are so hyper-accurate. He must have had far less sway on some of the character portrayals, since the myth of the CS Irish crying while shooting the Union Irish brigade was left in (no account of this happening according to Robertson) and since they had Jackson liking lemons (he had many quirks, but the lemon obsession was a myth; he apparently liked peaches best). So I have no idea how much his personal sympathies for Jackson affected things, but I'm sure he might have had issue with the whitewashed portrayal of slavery and hard core Lost Cause-ism, simply out of historical accuracy, for which he was again obsessive.

So, just to be clear, I'm not being flippant when I discuss these things. I've lived much of my life surrounded by the Lost Cause myth. I can sympathize with Turner there to some degree, having been trapped in that matrix myself. But at some point, if you love history you need to accept it for what it is, even if that means acknowledging the sins committed by your own ancestors. As Prager U. likes to say, "History doesn't care about your feelings." Ironically (given their overt objectives) that applies to the Lost Cause myth that they try to keep alive too. Slavery was a cruel evil, and the Civil War fought to preserve and expand it and the Lost Cause created to protect Jim Crow and White Supremacy. That's the actual history, and to my fellow southerners who, like me, got raised in the Lost Cause matrix, sorry if that hurt your feelings. Sometimes the medicine is bitter, but it'll save your life.

Sorry, that became a soapbox really quickly!

 

[Plateosaurus]

Emmerich wants the popcorn flick, Zanuck wants a more faithful take.

I see now.

 

[CountDVB]

Turner was pretty clearly a Lost Cause sympathizer at the time, which should surprise nobody given that he grew up in the South in the early 20th Century when the Lost Case was accepted as historical fact. His position modulated, but it's hard to give up sympathies to some degree for the "home team", and despite his "Progressive politics" he didn't stop the flagrant Lost Cause mythology present even in Gettysburg and the rather flagrant Confederate fetishization in Gods & Generals. As someone who grew up in the south in the late 20th century, I can tell you the Lost Cause myth held a lot of sway in the South even then, and some toned down version of the myth remained into the 21st century, and for a long time parts of it still held sway over me until I actually (gasp) studied actual history. When I first moved to rural Virginia in the late '80s the teachers were annoyed that they had to teach that slavery was bad for the slaves and that masters were cruel tyrants rather than like big brothers. Plenty of people still called it the War of Northern Aggression.

Interestingly, as a strange aside, my Civil War professor in College was Dr. James I. Robertson, Jr., who while fully committed to the reality that the "main cause" of the Civil War was slavery (and made no bones about this, and half of the first semester was the pre-war leadup including Bleeding Kansas) still held some personal sympathies for the CS soldiers and generals themselves. He wrote what was at the time (and may still be) the definitive biography of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. And it's funny that Gods & Generals should come up, since he was its (very reluctant) Historical Advisor, largely getting dragged into the production when his Jackson biography was discovered by the production team. They needed some focus for the film (which came from a book determined to cram the entire war leading up to G'burg in a single book) and Jackson became their man, so they pulled in him.

For context, Robertson hated, just HATED historical films. He was a stickler for historical accuracy in the details and (this is a quote) told us that "Artistic License [is] spelled L-I-E-S." As his Jackson bio had just been released when I was in his classes, he noted that the movie rights were circulating, and he was apprehensive. "God forbid if Mel Gibson ever gets ahold of it" he said (not kidding). G&G was in production and he told us all, with some apprehension, that they'd gotten "their claws into" his book and attained the rights, planning to use it as the focal point for the larger film. He approached his job as Advisor as a form of "damage control" and I can all but guarantee that he's the reason why all of the details of the battles, down to what corps when and where, are so hyper-accurate. He must have had far less sway on some of the character portrayals, since the myth of the CS Irish crying while shooting the Union Irish brigade was left in (no account of this happening according to Robertson) and since they had Jackson liking lemons (he had many quirks, but the lemon obsession was a myth; he apparently liked peaches best). So I have no idea how much his personal sympathies for Jackson affected things, but I'm sure he might have had issue with the whitewashed portrayal of slavery and hard core Lost Cause-ism, simply out of historical accuracy, for which he was again obsessive.

So, just to be clear, I'm not being flippant when I discuss these things. I've lived much of my life surrounded by the Lost Cause myth. I can sympathize with Turner there to some degree, having been trapped in that matrix myself. But at some point, if you love history you need to accept it for what it is, even if that means acknowledging the sins committed by your own ancestors. As Prager U. likes to say, "History doesn't care about your feelings." Ironically (given their overt objectives) that applies to the Lost Cause myth that they try to keep alive too. Slavery was a cruel evil, and the Civil War fought to preserve and expand it and the Lost Cause created to protect Jim Crow and White Supremacy. That's the actual history, and to my fellow southerners who, like me, got raised in the Lost Cause matrix, sorry if that hurt your feelings. Sometimes the medicine is bitter, but it'll save your life.

Sorry, that became a soapbox really quickly!

No worries! Despite growing up in the South in the late 1990s and early 2000s, never really had to deal with the revisionism, especially since I grew up in a smallerish town. But yeah, I can see your point and understand your grievances. Keep on the wonderful work and would like to thank you for reminding of something else to address in my timeline.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Posting early, since I have a very long day tomorrow and Wednesday! Enjoy!

---

Chapter 20: So, I Married a Dragon…
A Guest Post for the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Andreas Deja

With the completion of principal animation on The Swan Princess, Richard Rich was tagged for more Richie Rich work. But Jim and Roy wanted more from me, so I was partnered with Rob Minkoff after his co-director on The Lion King Glen Keane was promoted to Creative Vice President for Feature Animation.

The instructions that Roy and Jim had for us were simple: “something Chinese”. The People’s Republic was opening up under Qiao Shi and there was a desire to tap into that growing market while also expanding the scope of the Disney Princess line for Bo Boyd. We met with some Chinese mythology experts and came to Roy and Jim with a few options. At first the Moon Princess Chang’e seemed a natural, but it was a limited story and was superficially too much like the Japanese Bamboo Princess, who also came from the moon. The tragic Butterfly Lovers was a very short and simple tragic tale, so that was a no-go (maybe for WED-Sig), and their relationship also had superficial resemblance to Aladdin and Abbi in the “she’d dressed like a guy and they fell in love after the reveal” thing. Similar problems killed a story based on Fa Mulan, which honestly had a lot of epic potential.

To be honest, I was starting to think that Roy was taking some of the evangelical complaints about Aladdin and The Little Mermaid seriously, particularly since he kept mentioning that we didn’t need “another crossdressing story”.

“You know I’m perfectly fine with gay people,” Roy said [1], “but we do have a family reputation to uphold.”

I love you Roy, I really do.

The Princess Kwan-Yin seemed a natural at first, with a pure-of-heart Princess rejecting an arranged marriage and being put to work by wicked nuns. She even had friendly forest animals to help her! But it was not very action heavy and a bit too much like “The Swan Princess meets Cinderella” and there was a fear that it would look like we were just resting on our laurels. Jim wanted us to push the boundaries.

That at first led us to The Legend of Lady White Snake, which has nothing to do with an all-female ‘80s hair metal cover band, Jim’s bad dad jokes non-withstanding.

The Legend of Lady White Snake (image source Wikipedia)

The story had lived on and evolved over the centuries, from the tale of a monk defeating a seductive and evil snake spirit that had enchanted a prince into a story of forbidden love that cast the snake lady and her husband as the heroes and victims of the monk’s jealousy and bigotry. It seemed perfect and we had some great storyboards.

The problem was, of course, that John Musker and Ron Clements were already in production on Medusa, which recast her and Perseus as lovers rather than opponents! That was a rock opera and we could have taken things in a different direction there, but no…we were stuck.

We re-pitched Fa Mulan, but Roy still wasn’t having it.

Besides, we all remembered hearing about how much the Chinese complained about Mask of the Monkey King for getting their stories wrong.

In short, we needed something original.

We did notice some patterns and common motifs in Chinese legends. There were a lot of legends of tragic, forbidden romances, often between a celestial being and a mortal. There were often fantastic beasts like Dragons and Qilins and mystic snakes who could take human form. That seemed like a place to take things.

What about a Dragon Princess? Just the name had potential. There was a legend of a Dragon’s Daughter gifting an Emperor with magic pearls, but perhaps a celestial dragon princess who falls for a poet? Something inspired by White Snake Lady, but a different, original story.

The Poet and the Dragon was thus born.

No connection to the Miyazawa Kenji novel The Dragon and the Poet, whose existence we learned about much later, and which is a totally different story. Also, there is no truth to the rumors that we took our name from the Chinese film The Warrior Poet, though its success did help us push back against those who feared the name would alienate audiences.

But Marketing still hated the name. “No kid will want to see something about poetry!” they said. But since the proposed alternate names were awful (“My Girlfriend the Dragon”? Really?) the working title became the final title and frankly didn’t seem to make a difference.

So, to keep things very much different from Medusa, we made the Dragon Princess Longzhu (literally “Dragon Pearl”) an outgoing girly free spirit instead of a tragic romantic and our poet-philosopher Meng Yun (“Dream Cloud” – this was years before the mattress company, mind you!) a melancholic dreamer rather than a warrior. He’d be a hopeless romantic struggling to keep his spirits up in the drudgery of the bureaucracy while dreaming of more. She’d appear in his life, sew chaos, they’d fall in love, and run afoul of the Celestial Order by loving one another, with dangerous consequences.

Nowadays they call Longzhu a “Magic Dragon Girlfriend”, even saying that we even named [2] the trope! But that trope never applied, because Longzhu had her own dreams and desires and was more than an empty wish fulfilment fantasy and living plot device for the guy, like in the many copycat films that came later.

Instead, this was a simple “opposites attract” love story, and built on equal terms, I might add. With romantic music by Stephen Schwartz and Alan Menken, naturally, with Yo Yo Ma on board to help with the musical arrangement and East/West mix. While rather classically Broadway, they none the less used Chinese traditional instrumentation, timing, and keys to give it a Chinese feel, which meant “working between the notes” and Schwartz put it, since the Chinese use entirely different musical scales than the West.

From The Cowherd’s Flute (1963) (Image source Annency.org)

And we the artists, having seen the old Chinese animated feature The Cowherd's Flute among others as part of our research, all fell in love with the art style, which quoted old Chinese ink and watercolor scrolls and painted screens. We decided to mimic that style to a degree, but in a distinctly Disney way, sort of a hybrid between East and West, sort of like some of the transitions in The Bamboo Princess. We learned the art of Chinese painting and travelled to China for research and initial concept art, which was an adventure in its own right!

Then came the cast and characterization, which we developed together so that they could inform one another in an organic way.

Meng, voiced by Jonathan Ke Quan with singing by Donny Osmond, became a creative young man with a poetic heart who struggles with the drudgery of working in the Imperial Bureaucracy, with an obnoxious and abusive boss Zhengfangxing (literally “square”), voiced by James Hong. We introduce Meng in the mechanistic and droning opening song “Celestial Order” timed by the metronome-like clacking of abacus beads, a clumsy man out of step with the clocklike rhythm of the other bureaucrats working at their desks. Eventually his lyrics, which play in flowing counterpoint to the staccato chorus of bureaucrats (kind of like in the song “Inchworm” that Jim loves so much), break away, becoming his “I Want”, which speaks to a desire for a philosophical connection to the greater Celestial Order that goes beyond the bureaucratic and into the divine and transcendent. “A Celestial Love” is a critical foreshadowing line.

This song then carries us up past white clouds and into the stars of the Heavens and up to the young dragon Longzhu, voiced by Lucy Liu with singing by Lea Salonga. She starts to sing her own flowing version of the song as she flies through the clouds and among the stars, the Celestial Bureaucrats (various mythical creatures) mirroring the chorus of the Earthly Bureaucrats. She is the eldest daughter of the Mountain Dragon Shan Long (George Cheung) and has a pithy younger sister Longhua (Dragon Flower, voiced and sung by Ming-Na Wen). Longzhu sings her own “I Want” lyrics, of wanting something real, a connection to the “Heart of the Earth” and meaning beyond the bureaucratic work of running the heavens and making the planets rotate and the stars flare and the moon wax and wane.

With this song we link them and their desires, but also set them apart. We deliberately used Yin and Yang concepts with the black and empty Yin-like heavens and the busy, organized, life-filled Yang-like earth. And while Longzhu is a female (Yin) from a Yin-like place, she has that “spot” of Yang in her lively demeanor: playful and romantic and upbeat, and chaotic on the outside like Yin, but with a Yang-like warmth and light and need for purpose at her heart. This plays against Meng’s melancholic, morose nature, a man in love with life and beauty and other Yang-things and part of a structured Confucian order, but with a touch of the coldness and emptiness of the Yin at his heart. The suggestion is that as Yin and Yang together they complete each other. And yet both together have the fatal flaw of being impractical dreamers in a hyper-organized Confucian universe where “everyone and everything have their place,” as both Zhengfangxing and Shan Long like to say.

So Meng wanders into the mountains with his chirping pet cricket, which he calls Jie Mei Ni or (roughly) “little sister who hides” (but sound it out yourself for an Easter egg!) and exposits to her about how much the mountains mean to him since they remind him of the Heavens. Longzhu, meanwhile, ignores her sister’s warnings not to mingle with “those below” and descends to Earth and blissfully flies through those same mountains, always just outside of Meng’s sight as he exposits. At one point he notices her flying by and tells the cricket, “Oh my, a dragon! It is very good luck to see a dragon!”

He then sits before the setting sun over a beautiful lake, pulls out some ink and paper, and starts to write a romantic poem about the sunset, narrating it to the largely disinterested Jie Mei Ni, who manages to make a chirp feel like an exasperated sigh (thanks to the great Frank Welker). As Meng recites, Longzhu appears behind him, terrifying the cricket, but Meng is oblivious as this huge dragon hovers above him, listening to his recited poem. She seems intrigued, and ultimately assumes a human form as a beautiful young woman, just as he turns around.

Something like this, but with a young, clean-shaven man (Image source “weingartdesign.com”)

She approaches in a friendly manner, but he’s nervous and embarrassed and acts afraid. While she wants to hear more and asks him to read her more, he keeps trying to avoid her eyes and ultimately comes up with an excuse and runs away with a shriek. We played it a little ironic: when he saw her as a dragon and was enthralled and happy, but when he sees her as a beautiful woman, he is terrified, in reverse of the usual trope of falling for the beauty and being afraid of the beast.

But she is now curious about this strange poet, and pines away to her little sister that she wants to find out more about him, which sister Longhua snarkishly tells her is dumb and beneath her station. “Dad would kill you, sis.”

And while they talk, the demonic King Yan of the underworld (Mako) is watching all through a magic portal, and tells his thin and glutinous minion E Gui (Phil Fondacaro doing his best Peter Lorre) that this is the perfect opportunity to shake up the Celestial Order and “bring forth a new era of terror and darkness,” with a maniacal laugh like only Mako can do.

Actually, quite a bit like this… (Image Gamespot)

So we return to Meng, who has returned to his desk where Zhengfangxing admonishes him to pay attention. Zhengfangxing teaches Meng and the other bureaucrats the correct hanzi characters for the scrolls they are making for the Daoist monks, who will use the incantations to banish ghosts, but Meng is finding it hard to focus, having visions of the strange woman he met in the mountains. As he leaves the building, he bumps into her. She smiles. He smiles. He screams and runs away.

This leads into the “Worlds Apart” duet, which plays during a montage of her seeking him out, and surprising him in various locations. It serves as a falling in love montage, where Meng ultimately throws away his abacus, pulls Zhengfangxing’s hat down around his eyes and runs away laughing with Longzhu and they appear ready to live happily ever after.

And here’s one of those moments where Real Life came in. Originally, we were going with the usual sappy, happy sunshine and cute music montage with Happiness Eternal as they Fall in Love. But hearing from Terrell about the ongoing drama in his personal life (albeit the typical minor and pedestrian “you annoy the one you love” stuff rather than anything relationship-threatening) I insisted that we add some unhappy moments for our couple, some hard-times Yin to balance the happy-times Yang. So, in addition to sharing an accidental hand-touch or Perfect Moment with Birds and Carp by the pond, we’d have him say something (soundless behind the montage) and her get angry and dump a bowl of rice on his head. Or him freaking out because she straightened up his messy room and now his things are out of order. We wanted those little complications to add verisimilitude to the relationship. It was something that I learned from Miyazaki-san.

So, by the time the montage is done we (hopefully) have you convinced that this love is real and meaningful. But Longzhu’s father Shan Long soon finds out from her sister what has happened and he is furious. He flies down and confronts them, but she rejects his admonishments to return to the heavens and she transforms back into a dragon and carries a terrified and confused Meng away in her mouth as her father screams after her.

Meng seems at first shocked by her appearance as a dragon, screaming as she carries him through the sky. And initially, once she sets him down and tells him the situation, he freaks out. “I can’t marry a dragon!! It’s against the Celestial Order! My family would never approve!!” Then there’s a moment of coming-to, recognizing the reality of the situation, and, finally, an acceptance and catharsis:

“So…you’re the dragon I saw that day, aren’t you?”

“Um…yes,” she says. “Is that ok?”

“Um…” says Meng, and after a tense pause: “Yea. It’s OK. I mean, it’s still you in there, right?”

To this day I take particular pleasure in slipping in one of the most subtle queer coded scenes in Disney history. Poor Roy managed to avoid “another crossdressing story” by refusing Fa Mulan, but he unknowingly got instead one hell of a Trans love story!

And as a bonus Rob even found a team of young animators who made us a Short telling the story of Fa Mulan to play before the film!

Something like this (Image source “peakpx.com”)

And speaking of disapproving patriarchs, Shan Long is both infuriated and scared for his daughter, fearing that the Celestial Order will not approve of this “disharmonious” relationship. And that is when he is approached by King Yan, who in the menacing song “Hearts and Minds” sells Shan Long a mystical potion that will constrain her “stubbornness” and have her obey him “like a proper daughter”.

But as Yan exposits to E Gui after the fact, in part through a darker reprise of “Hearts and Minds”, in truth the potion will separate her eternal Chi from her external form, resulting in an empty shell. Yan, in turn, will claim her Chi (and by extension her soul), giving him, along with his shelf full of jade jars containing other creatures’ and mortals’ Chi, great powers with which he can challenge the Celestial Order and remake the Heavens and Earth in his own diabolical image. “The Chi of a Dragon shall make me…unstoppable!” Cue maniacal laugh.

And oh, my lord, Mako’s singing! So not professional, but so over-the-top awesome!!

Anyway, Shan Long, now planning on slipping his daughter the potion “for her own good”, pretends to have a change of heart and invites Meng and his daughter into his abode in the Heavens, just wanting to “make sure” that his daughter is “happy and harmonious”. Meng is scared and suspicious and younger sister Longhua is irritated about who’s coming to dinner, but Longzhu is ecstatic and shrieking in naïve joy. This leads to the obligatory Awkward Dinner with the Family, made all the more awkward given that Meng as a human can’t eat the bizarre mystical food of dragons (“Is there something wrong with your eternally burning pearls of celestial fire?” “I, um…have trouble handling, um, spicy foods”) and given that Longhua keeps bullying and intimidating him (“Come on, sis, can’t I have just one little bite?”). As hijinks ensue (such as an assumption by the shaggy Qilin chef, voiced by Tommy Chong, that Meng intended to eat his cricket rather than just feed it; “why didn’t you just say so, man?”), sister Longhua, though unimpressed by the clumsy “mortal”, starts to see the love in her sister’s eyes and Meng’s alike and, in a heartwarming sister moment punctuated by the duet “Devotion”, gives her blessing to the union.

Shan Long starts to warm to Meng as well, punctuated by their own lyrics for “Devotion”, but still fearing the Celestial repercussions of the marriage, reluctantly slips the potion into his daughter’s tea, singing his own ironic closing lines to “Devotion”.

Needless to say, the many meanings and interpretations of the word “devotion” play out in the song.

Now heartbreak ensues as Longzhu drinks from the spiked tea that her father gives her and her Chi/soul slips out of her mouth in a jade-green cloud just out of her dad’s sight. The Chi sinks down through the Earth and into King Yan’s realm in Diyu and is soon imprisoned in a jade jar by a laughing King Yan, and added to the many other identical jars on his infernal shelf.

Longzhu’s empty body, now the perfect, demure, obedient daughter to Shan Long, politely acquiesces to her father’s demands and passionlessly tells a heartbroken Meng that they cannot be together.

King Yan

A shocked and suspicious Longhua now carries a devastated Meng back to the Earth. He, alone with his cricket again, sings the heartrending “An Empty Heart” and Longhua sings her own suspicious version seeing her supposed sister as the early second act ends in tears.

This midpoint gave us the moment where the themes established in Celestial Order are reflected and commented upon. Pursuit of an established idea of “Order” has led Shan Long to betray his daughter and take away her agency while simultaneously (and ironically) giving the evil King Yan the very tools he needs to overturn the Celestial Order.

This leads into the second half of the story, starting in the Heavens, where Shan Long seems superficially happy with his newly obedient and “perfectly harmonious” daughter Longzhu. But his younger daughter Longhua is furious with him. “You did something to her!” she accuses, ignoring his denials. She soon discovers the truth when he sees her father arguing with E Gui, who informs him that King Yan now demands his obedience in “the coming war”, or he will claim Shan Long’s Chi too. Shan Long learns, as does the eavesdropping Longhua, that Longzhu’s soul belongs to King Yan now, “freely given” in tribute by her own father.

Longhua gasps and as E Gui vanishes, she confronts her father, who admits to everything. Longhua is irate and tells him to join her in going into Diyu, the land of the dead and damned, and retrieve his daughter’s Chi. But Shan Long states that no Celestial may enter the realm. “Then I will find someone who can!” she says, and flies off. As Shan Long stands in shock, mouth agape, the empty shell of Longzhu appears and politely but vacuously offers him Baozi and tea.

Longhua flies to Meng and tells him everything. Though a normally a scared and hesitant person, he pledges to her that “the fires of the underworld cannot keep me from my love.” Suddenly in Action Hero mode, he hands her the cricket cage and walks boldly through the portal to Diyu that Longhua creates for him. Suddenly, surrounded by demons and fires as the portal closes behind him, he starts to rethink his impulsive decisions and runs shrieking.

The newly all-powerful King Yan, meanwhile, ascends from Diyu and into the Heavens, a powerful, flaming giant in a nod to “A Night on Bald Mountain” in Fantasia with the score giving us chords to match. He confronts the Celestial Powers, and brushes aside their forces, declaring himself Celestial Emperor. And “no one can stop me!”

This is where the animators had their challenge. We mixed hand-drawn/digitally inked and painted animation with CG, particularly to control the many Celestial Warriors assaulting the giant King Yan. The flow worked very well, and was reasonably cost-effective while being dynamic and visually beautiful on the big screen. The bright blue of King Yan’s flames played well against the cold darkness of the heavens, the dark sides of Yin and Yang expressed visually…or so we hope.

The Ten Courts of Diyu (needless to say, the Disney version is far less gruesome)

We transition back to Meng, who we follow, to the song “Fires Inside”, as he dodges demons and monsters and ghosts amid the blue flames of the infernal land. The chorus of Tortured Souls is mechanistic in a reflection of the bureaucrats’ chorus in “Celestial Order” as he sings his determined song in counterpoint. We took great inspiration from Chinese artwork in its depiction of the hell-like land of the dead.

Sneaking past various infernal guards and forces, Meng finally reaches King Yan’s abode, with all of the Chi Jars in front of him, in apparent triumph, when E Gui appears before him.

“Hello, tasty morsel!” says E Gui.

Where the Heavens were warm colors, oranges and golds with a touch of soft blue, the Underworld is all blues and silvers, butane-blue flames and grey and black smoke wit ha touch of harsh blood red. Again, Yin-Yang symbolism was central to our art direction.

Back in the Heavens, all are cowering before King Yan, who has defeated all the armies of Heaven, with the color pallet symbolically shifting into the blues and silvers and away from the orange and gold. But one being stands up to him: Longhua. She challenges him to single combat for the throne. He laughs, and proceeds to attack her with literal hellfire, which she struggles to avoid. She finally manages to bite him, drawing black blood, but he starts to blast her with his fire, pulling her Chi from her. Suddenly, hearing his daughter’s cries across the Heavens, Shan Long rushes in, confronting Yan and offers his own Chi in return for that of both of his daughters. King Yan, agrees…to take all of their Chi! He is soon pulling out Shan Long’s Chi as well, laughing maniacally as only Mako can.

You’ve got to see the special features of Mako recording his lines if you haven’t already!

Back in Diyu, Meng is fleeing around Yan’s lair from E Gui, but as he throws or swings things, they pass right through the incorporeal ghost, who assures Meng that this will not prevent E Gui from devouring him alive. Meng then remembers the calligraphy that he had to make for Zhengfangxing, the special phrase for the Daoist priests to chase away ghosts. He strains his memory and remembers the chant, which he recites after a few clumsy takes. This causes E Gui to distort and disappear with a pop. Approaching the shelves, unsure which of the hundreds of jars contains Longzhu’s Chi, he just starts smashing them all, freeing soul after soul in ascending jade-green clouds.

In the Heavens, Yan is pulling the Chi away from Shan Long and Longhua, when suddenly he shrinks slightly as a slight puff of green smoke escapes from his mouth with a burp. This happens again and again and again, until jade clouds billow relentlessly from his toothy maw (I took a poetry class for this assignment, can you tell? ). We cut between Diyu and the Heavens as each soul released by Meng leaves Yan smaller and weaker.

We get a montage of various beings and creatures having their souls restored, and regaining some measure of personal autonomy, including many of the beat-down human bureaucrats, including Zhengfangxing himself!!

Eventually, Meng smashes Longzhu’s jar. Her Chi form appears before him, smiles and vanishes into the air. We now follow her Chi as it darts up to her home in the Heavens, bolts back into her vacant body’s mouth, and suddenly Longzhu is awake…and pissed (we had a lot of fun with the transforming facial expressions from vacuous cheer to absolute rage there!).

Back in Diyu, Meng is smashing the last of the Chi jars when a portal appears and Longzhu’s arm appears and yanks him through into the Heavens. Soon he is on her shoulders flying through the clouds and stars, joined by a whole army of other celestial creatures, who thank Meng for freeing them. They rush in and surround the now small and weak King Yan. As Longzhu rushes to embrace her father and sister, the other restored souls descend in a circle upon Yan, who screams “no! No! Please! I beseech you for mercy! NOOO!!!” as they approach. We pan away as Something Bad happens to him just off camera.

The final confrontation was designed to be the culmination of the prior actions: Meng’s self-actualization, Shan Long’s repentance, Longhua’s devotion, and Longzhu’s re-empowerment. And Yan’s deserved punishment, of course. We overtly worked to make each of the main characters multidimensional and self-actualizing, with Longzhu’s loss of self being the greatest crime that we see. We could have made Longzhu as empty of a shell of a love interest as the potion left her from the beginning, but we instead made her a self-confident and outgoing, if naïvely romantic to balance Meng. Her sister Longhua could have been a shallow snippy snarker to be little more than her sister’s foil, but we wanted her to have a complex relationship with her family, particularly with her sister. It should be no surprise to the viewer that she’s the one who sets up the final battle. And Shan Long could have been a standard issue overbearing father, but we wanted him to be complex and conflicted, Parochial without being patronizing, and made his big sin against his daughter an action taken out of misplaced love rather than empty anger.

And now reunited, we follow our three dragons with Meng on Longzhu’s shoulders as they fly along. “You went through Diyu for my daughter,” says Shan Long. “I can think of no one better to bring joy and harmony to her life.”

And there’s your lesson, kids: love isn’t a magical fait accompli, it’s a series of ups and downs, and true love is a willingness to go through hell to be there for the ones you love. Terrell and his wife both thanked us for that one, and said that it really helped them recontextualize a hard time in their own lives caused by the move to Florida.

And that brings us to the obligatory wedding scene with the chorus singing “The Poet and the Dragon”, with fireworks and music. Longhua bumps into Zhengfangxing of all people, and they make snarky comments together, Statler and Waldorf style, about the whole event, finally turning and smiling to each other just as the bouquet lands in Zhengfangxing’s hands before we pan to, and then iris out on, the newly married Meng and Longzhu. They literally went through Hell for each other, but in the end, their love triumphs.

The film was a labor of literal love, and thankfully, it did well. Critics loved the complex character relationships and innovative animation. We won some Annies and were nominated for the Best Animated Film Oscar, losing to What Dreams May Come, which, given the artistry of that one, was pretty much primed for Oscar, so I feel no loss there. We broke $364 mill at the Box Office (Batman: Terror of the Scarecrow and The Flintstones: On the Rocks just didn’t come close), driven by a strong domestic showing and a surprisingly good return in China, where we managed to actually be seen as a fair go at depicting Chinese culture…for a bunch of Gweilo out of California. Maybe we did not do Lion King good, but by that point the whole Animated Feature Renaissance had lost a bit of its novelty. Animated features were no longer “events”, they were just another movie option. Everybody saw The Lion King. Only most people saw The Poet and the Dragon.

Art like life has its ups and downs. This was an “up”. We managed to be a success both artistically and financially with The Poet and the Dragon. They managed to love us in China, perhaps because we didn’t try to tell their own Legends back to them but instead gave them an original American story inspired by Chinese culture. Some didn’t quite like the portrayal of King Yan, who though fearsome isn’t necessarily “evil” per se, just an unpleasant but necessary part of the wheel of life (though apparently some took it as a subtle poke against Buddhism). I hear that some hardliners in the government didn’t approve of our antiauthoritarian and pro-self-actualizing themes, but the majority, including the ruling moderates, simply saw it as a standard “Taoism vs. Confucianism” narrative, like has been told in China for literal centuries.

And while we didn’t make this film for China, I’m glad that they got something out of it. In the end, we have different lives and different values, but if we remember that we’re all one family in the end despite our differences, then perhaps we can all live and love.

---

[1] Recall his long mentorship and friendship with the openly gay Thomas Schumacher in our timeline.

[2] We’d say “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”. In this timeline The Poet and the Dragon names the trope even though it’s arguably not actually an example of it.

 

[Migrant_Coconut]

I take it the Chinese International Market (TM) will carry them the rest of the way? For better or worse, the rest of Hollywood's bound to start paying attention.

 

[Plateosaurus]

What a lovely surprise. I see a worthy replacemrnt for Mulan. Nice to see Na Wen got in too.

 

[Bbone91]

Another entry for the long, LOOOONNNNG list of "Films I'd have loved to see but can't because I don't live in the Hippie Timeline."

 

[Plateosaurus]

We broke $364 mill at the Box Office (Batman: Terror of the Scarecrow and The Flintstones: On the Rocks just didn’t come close), driven by a strong domestic showing and a surprisingly good return in China, where we managed to actually be seen as a fair go at depicting Chinese culture…for a bunch of Gweilo out of California.

Well as many rightfully thought, that'll put a dent in Peltz's arguements.

 

[LordYam]

Hopefully this will help Jim in the power struggle against Peltz

 

[Ogrebear]

Does not sound like fun times at Hollywood Animation at all.

"the threat of Jeffrey Katzenberg axing the studio had been seemingly silenced in the wake of the success of Heart and Soul." - well that is a good thing,

"Katzenberg, of course, understood the subtle message Murphy had given him:" - good. Learn.

"These projects would all be a continuation of Katzenberg’s dualling film release strategy" - still not sure this does not just split the animation audience, but sure.

"was especially rooted in one primal thing: fear of the possibility of Michael Eisner getting the last laugh over him." - such a unhealthy mental state.

"Zahn Tokiya-ku McClarnon and Joaquin Phoenix, who star alongside Michael Rooker and Christina Hendricks." - sounds like a decent cast there.

"When Spirit manages to escape captivity along with a similarly imprisoned Little Creek, the two find themselves on the run from a perusing Colonel Michaels and his Calvary." - I can see complaints from some quarters that this movie paints the US military in a bad light.

"splits the Colonel character between Colonel Michaels and his lieutenant, the Calvary Sargent." - who voiced the sergeant?

"fantastic musical score by Hans Zimmer, great songs by Garth Brooks and Phil Collins" - sounds like a good audio experience then.

"ultimately making only $187 million at the box office" - not terrible, certainly more than the budget, but yeah not bonkers cash. The name confusion was a bad idea.

"and even managed to spawn a few straight-to-video sequels" - not all terrible news then- I'm sure the 'further adventures' where brought by someone.

"Eisner randomly called up Katzenberg one afternoon, where he proceeded to only say three words to Katzenberg before abruptly hanging up," - so petty.

"but for right now, as far as Jeffrey Katzenberg was concerned, Universal Animation was to be considered lowest of his list in terms of priority for his attention." - didnt learn that much then.

"Katzenberg's newfound indifference to Universal Animation have gifted them a rather large amount of newfound independence" - good luck to the animators!

Nice post there @Nerdman3000 and @Geekhis Khan - Spirit of the West sounds like a fun film ITTL me probably caught on video.

 

[Ogrebear]

"I suddenly found another opportunity to direct a feature animated film, this time directing the “big” winter piece. The catch? I had to move to Florida." - well that is a pain, but hopefully family understand, though it will be hard.

"Still, it was a hard offer to turn down, particularly since it came with a promotion and pay raise and a nice house on Lake Buena Vista as a perk." - bet that helps.

"ready to launch a new animated feature with the Disney Animation East group," - new studios everywhere!

"Spooky stuff and right up Tim’s alley" - could have been written for Tim in fact.

"But the truly scary and horrifying thing is the true story behind it." - scary, horrifying, and damm depressing.

"perhaps the first Black Princess for Disney…and no, the damned Lion doesn’t count." - LOL

"reframed for New Orleans rather than Victorian England, Vodou Mamans instead of Rabbis, and Klansmen instead of roving Russian lynch mobs" - it might just work!

"Or as Tim put it, “We gave Terrell ‘The Finger’ and told him to go to Florida.” - heh.

"sometime amid the Jazz Age in New Orleans (our soundtrack was going to wail!)" - sounds like another soundtrack LP that ITTL me buys!

"Tim had this envisioned as another of his creepy stop-mo things, but I insisted on pushing for the Animated Canon." - for the better by the sound of it too.

"Vodou would feature heavily, but be done right." - can hear the complaint letters already being written...

"I took all of the main animators there for a week" - well that experience should seep into this films soul.

"we had to keep him from slipping into anachronistic slang, so that meant having Winton teach him how to talk “N’awlins back in the day”. - I could see Smith soaking that sort of data right up. He's a good actor.

"her head chef Maman LeBeaux (Eartha Kitt at her hammy best)," - and I thought that would be Queen Latifah!

"Now Achilles is pulled down into the Underworld" - scary bit for the kids!

"Achilles is even reunited with his childhood dog Napoleon" - hope he is still a good boy.

"For the Downstairs, we did our best to make the whole thing feel less like a crypt than a Basement Blues Club." - almost sounds fun.

“Ahhh…” she says after performing a series of arcane (but authentic) rituals," - glad they made them 'correct'.

"thus they all march and dance like a Jazz Funeral across the streets to the Cathedral to stop the wedding" - I bet that took ages to make work right.

"The “zombie invasion” soon becomes a reunion of lost loved ones." - Awwwwww

"She kicks him someplace painful just below camera" - heh heh heh

"“Achilles, it is I…your mother." - mention of the father probably gets the usual critics in a frenzy.

"and made $242 million against our $72 million budget." - that is a decent take considering Star Wars!

"The soundtrack won a Grammy and sold Platinum, and even led to a brief spike in popularity for Dixieland Jazz." - ITTL me brought it def.

"Antoine in particular grew up considering Florida “Home”, and developed an obsession with alligators by age five" - heh smart kid.

Excellent chapter there @Geekhis Khan - really liked his movie.

 

[Ogrebear]

"Roy also wondered if they were stretching the definition of “Princess” too far" - take the money Roy, don't stress too much.

"Associate Director George Lucas even walked out of a meeting after Gold floated the idea of Disney just merging with Lucasfilm" - not very bright suggestion Stanley.

“It’ll be a cold day in hell before I sell Star Wars to Disney!” George angrily told Jim." - Damm right!

"The Fantastic Four had come in fourth, breaking $400 million (officially $444.4 million" - some dodgy accounting going on there one thinks!

"the LA Rams only just breaking even when Disney-exclusive merchandise was included," - hey they are not loss making at least!

"Jim assured them that Moonves’s actions were unbecoming of the Disney name and created massive legal risk," - the Weasels would tell them the same thing!

“It’s bullshit,” Bernie told Jim after the contentious meeting." - I agree with Bernie!

"New technologies in high-speed internet beyond the old 5.56 kbps telephone modem were showing promise," - Oh, back in the day heh? Does not seem that long ago to me....

"which made Walt Disney World practically an independent polity within the State of Florida." - well that's an impressive deal indeed.

"were effectively being leased to fossil fuel companies as “carbon offsets” under a provision in the Green Growth Act" - can see Jim putting a stop to that one!

"but he had to ask himself, am I changing Disney for the better, or is it changing me for the worse?" - I bet every CEO has asked them

"Lilian Bounds Disney suffered a minor stroke caused in part, the doctors said, by the stress and emotion of the day." - wishing her well.

"After a brief hospital stay, she returned to her West Hollywood home with a full-time nurse to care for her as she recovered." - hopefully full time care permanently too.

"Farley thanking Maria and John Henson for saving his life and thanking Jesus for saving his soul helped diffuse some of the energy" - hope Farley recovers, and no one targets John for this.

Nice end of year round up there @Geekhis Khan - I suspect 1998 is going to be a roller coaster!

 

[Pokemon Master]

I suspect 1998 is going to be a roller coaster!

After all, it was the same year the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell in a Cell, plummeting 16 feet through an announcer's table.

 

[Nathanoraptor]

This sounds brilliant!

Hopefully this will help Jim in the power struggle against Peltz

It will - this is, surprisingly, a big game-changer.

The issue is that Disney has gone from a big fish in a tiny pond to a normal fish in a big pond. Other studios have dipped their beaks in the feature animation game - whilst UA's the main one, you've also got Columbia/Hanna-Barbera (in partnership with Bluth Productions), Fox/Filmation, and Warner Brothers all trying to get into that game.... some much more successfully than others.

Poet and the Dragon being the most successful Disney Animated Canon film since Hiawatha is at least the first step towards negating the argument that Disney are out of touch with audience tastes or that they can't keep up in an increasingly competitive environment.

This strengthens Jim's position considerably - now Heart of Ice just needs to make bank. (No pressure...)

 

[Daibhid C]

Chapter 20: So, I Married a Dragon…
A Guest Post for the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Andreas Deja

This sounds fantastic.

And here’s one of those moments where Real Life came in. Originally, we were going with the usual sappy, happy sunshine and cute music montage with Happiness Eternal as they Fall in Love. But hearing from Terrell about the ongoing drama in his personal life (albeit the typical minor and pedestrian “you annoy the one you love” stuff rather than anything relationship-threatening) I insisted that we add some unhappy moments for our couple, some hard-times Yin to balance the happy-times Yang. So, in addition to sharing an accidental hand-touch or Perfect Moment with Birds and Carp by the pond, we’d have him say something (soundless behind the montage) and her get angry and dump a bowl of rice on his head. Or him freaking out because she straightened up his messy room and now his things are out of order. We wanted those little complications to add verisimilitude to the relationship. It was something that I learned from Miyazaki-san.

I love this. More films should do this. (And no, "The characters outright hate each other until they realise they're in love" is not the same thing.)

The film was a labor of literal love, and thankfully, it did well.

Yes! Take that, Shepherds!

Some didn’t quite like the portrayal of King Yan, who though fearsome isn’t necessarily “evil” per se, just an unpleasant but necessary part of the wheel of life

So, ITTL, I guess the trope about how death gods are generally portrayed as villains even when this isn't the case in the original myths would be "Everyone Hates Yan"?

(I notice you even gave him blue flames...)

 

[Denliner]

Art like life has its ups and downs. This was an “up”. We managed to be a success both artistically and financially with The Poet and the Dragon. They managed to love us in China, perhaps because we didn’t try to tell their own Legends back to them but instead gave them an original American story inspired by Chinese culture. Some didn’t quite like the portrayal of King Yan, who though fearsome isn’t necessarily “evil” per se, just an unpleasant but necessary part of the wheel of life (though apparently some took it as a subtle poke against Buddhism). I hear that some hardliners in the government didn’t approve of our antiauthoritarian and pro-self-actualizing themes, but the majority, including the ruling moderates, simply saw it as a standard “Taoism vs. Confucianism” narrative, like has been told in China for literal centuries.

And while we didn’t make this film for China, I’m glad that they got something out of it. In the end, we have different lives and different values, but if we remember that we’re all one family in the end despite our differences, then perhaps we can all live and love.

I'm surprised no one noticed that Disney inadvertently followed the same steps that made Kung Fu Panda so popular in China. If there's a film that will most likely save Jim Henson from the recent stock takeover, it's probably this one. It's gonna put the Chinese Box Office into notice as well, so that's something to look out for in the future.

What a lovely surprise. I see a worthy replacement for Mulan. Nice to see Na Wen got in too.

I agree, but it's a shame that the ITTL situation made it far less likely for Mulan to be produced as a movie. It almost feels icky that it was shot down because of that.

 

[Migrant_Coconut]

(raises hand) Am I invisible in the first post?!?

Seriously though, this is great news for Disney... let's just hope this doesn't lead to an early wave of self-censorship from the rest of Hollywood.

 

[Denliner]

(raises hand) Am I invisible in the first post?!?

I was referring to the Kung Fu Panda bit, lmao. It even sparked discussion among Chinese people as to why Westerners could create a film that celebrates Chinese culture that was more enthusiastic and authentic than the Chinese themselves. While I don't think it's going to spark the same discussion ITTL, inevitably there will be a film from the West that's going to start that discussion.

Seriously though, this is great news for Disney... let's just hope this doesn't lead to an early wave of self-censorship from the rest of Hollywood.

What do you mean? As in a decline of LGBTQ representation or appeasement towards Chinese audiences?