Comment on Cultural impact

• TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  As someone who hasn’t watched FernGully (but should), I’m increasingly skeptical of these types of “plagiarism” comparisons between movies. Lindsay Ellis recently broke down the “Aladdin was stolen” narrative and compellingly showed “it’s complicated”, and more obviously, YMS five years ago fucking eviscerated the then-popular argument that The Lion King was a ripoff of Kimba the White Lion.

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  • okwhateverdude@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I saw both. Avatar is a marvel of VFX, but the story is definitely ferngully.

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    • Tonava@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I haven’t seen ferngully so I can’t comment on that, but at it’s basic level the plot of Avatar is so generic and bland you can take any story where a character representing the viewers culture interacts with some native, a more natural setting inhabiting people, and find multiple similarities

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  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    As someone who had FernGully on VHS, there are marked similarities, though it’s not exactly 1-to-1. The main conflict is resource extraction, although instead of a gung-ho colonel we get Tim Curry as literal pollution. The protagonist gets transformed to fit in with the locals, but it’s an accident by one of the locals instead of deliberate choice. Instead of a cranky Sigourney Weaver, we get a spastic Robin Williams as a bat.

    Overall, Avatar is closer to FernGully than to a lot of other going-native movies. Environmental conservation is the driving theme of both films.

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  • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Was Kimba also based on Hamlet or something? As far as I’m concerned that plotline is in the public domain. Or is it just using lions to tell the story that was supposedly stolen?

    Also, how could Aladdin be “stolen” when it obviously takes direct inspiration from several stories in 1001 Arabian Nights? Are people claiming that it was stolen from some other story that was inspired by the same book?

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    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      • The accusation for Aladdin is complicated and is based on *The Thief and the Cobbler.
      • On the other hand, your instincts are entirely right about The Lion King, and when I say “YMS eviscerated it”, I mean that it’s the most comically ridiculous accusation of plagiarism you could possibly come up with. This is genuinely worth 147 minutes of your time, and it’s one of the funniest videos I’ve ever watched.

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      • FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        And now people are accusing the upcoming Disney movie Hexed of being a ripoff of Owl House because apparently Owl House invented the idea of a hero being transported to a magical world.

        I understand Owl House fans are mad that Disney canceled the show prematurely and made the ending rushed. I agree that Disney shouldn’t have done that. But I’m not going to fault Disney for making another story where a character is transported to a magical world. Heck, Disney did it decades ago with Alice in Wonderland and with Peter Pan. They also did it with the Chronickes of Narnia and there are many more examples, both Disney and non-Disney

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      • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I see. From wikipedia:

        In 1973, a promotional booklet was released with a public announcement by Williams about the status of his project:

        Nasrudin was found to be too verbal and not suitable for animation, therefore Nasrudin as a character and the Nasrudin stories were dropped as a project. However, the many years work spent on painstaking research into the beauty of Oriental art has been retained. Loosely based on elements in the Arabian Nights stories, an entirely new and original film is now the main project of the Williams Studio. Therefore any publicity references to the old character of Nasrudin are now obsolete.

        So it seems the Thief and the Cobbler was based in part on the Arabian Nights, and the original plot was also from Arab folklore.

        So in other words, Aladdin is merely based on the same work of classic literature, which I believe is public domain. So allegations of plagiarism are foolish, unless all references to Arab folklore are now off the table too.

        One of the comments summarizes it best: “Damn, can’t believe kimba invented Africa, and real life just ripped them off like that.”

        That’s pretty funny. I might watch the video another day. From your comment I gather enough to conclude that the main premise of the accusation is “Shakespeare told by animals,” and I concur that that’s laughable.

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    • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      The Aladdin bit is that there was another project in the Disney pipeline by a famed director that also had a lot of Arabian aesthetics, and I think a lot of the people upset are bitter that the other one just didn’t turn out very well.

      You should watch the Lindsay Ellis video, it’s pretty good.

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      • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        TIL that the Arabian aesthetic can only be one person’s intellectual property /s

        And yeah, I just read about The Thief and the Cobbler. The reason it didn’t turn out well was because it was in production for 40 years, changed plots/themes/characters multiple times, was started and finished by different producers, and there was a falling out early on with the owners of the original story it was supposed to be based on.

        So that had nothing to do with Aladdin incidentally also borrowing themes and tropes from 1001 Arabian Nights.

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• ol_capt_joe@piefed.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Or dances with wolves

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• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Interesting.

  I’d bet it’s an example of coincidental convergence. Take the median/average of the tropes for that premise, and I can see writers coming up with a similar story.

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