I started watching the Walt Disney Company’s 1996 animated adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame at YouTube in the wake of April’s Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral disaster, and I found characters that led me to investigate other Disney movies. I not only found Disney villains that I can imagine associating with Donald Trump, I also found some Disney heroines — including some members of the Disney Princess lineup — that I can imagine myself joining up with in a battle against Trump.
Examples of Disney Heroines I can imagine myself joining up with are listed below:
One could call Esmeralda — who some have called for Disney to add back to the Princess lineup in the wake of the Paris Cathedral disaster — a civil rights activist who was centuries ahead of her time. There was the “Festival of Fools” sequence in Hunchback of Notre Dame in which Claude Frollo — one of the biggest scumbags in the Mouse House, if not the biggest — just sits there while a crowd throws things at a tied-down Quasimodo. At the one-minute-seventeen-second mark in the clip embedded below, everything suddenly goes quiet and the “camera” turns to show Esmeralda walking up the steps to the platform. Esmeralda stops the cruelty, frees Quasimodo, and then publicly humiliates Frollo by lecturing him in front of the crowd about his mistreatment of Quasimodo and gypsies in what appears to be a lesson in Martin Luther King, Jr-style civil disobedience.
The 1995 film Pocahontas has the title character, a Native American girl named Pocahontas — who’s been made an official member of the Disney Princess lineup despite not being shown on-screen as a royal — working to prevent racial violence, especially when she stops Chief Powhatan from executing Smith after running through a forest in the “Savages” sequence. And the irony there is beyond sickening, as we’ve all seen our national embarrassment of a president try to turn the character’s name into a racial slur against Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass).
And my investigation of Walt Disney Company movies has so far yielded two more Disney villains I can see associating with Donald Trump.
The 1991 film Beauty and the Beast depicts Gaston as a man who sees women as trophies. At around the two-minute-six-second mark in the clip embedded below, Gaston sends Monsieur D’Arque to take Maurice to an insane asylum for the purpose of blackmailing Belle into being Gaston’s wife. Belle attempts to derail Gaston’s scheme to lock Maurice in the insane asylum by confronting the crowd with the evidence of the Beast’s existence, only to have Gaston incite the crowd to murder the Beast.
The 1994 film The Lion King’s “Be Prepared” sequence, which shows Scar and an the hyenas singing about their regicide plot against Mufasa and Simba, sort of reminds me of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell colluding with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election.
As Walter Cronkite would say, that’s the way it is.