Controversial Changes Made In Disney Live-Action Remakes

On paper, it seemed like a foolproof idea. Take Maleficent, arguably pop culture's most enduring symbol of pure female evil, unbridled and all-consuming in her sheer vindictive pettiness, and twist our understanding of her on its head, thereby calling into question our culture's normative rulebook about what constitutes an "evil woman."

But alas, not everyone agreed with the results. Many critics felt that the choice to "humanize" Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) robbed the character of the bold power and autonomy that made her so iconic in the first place. Plus, the particular way in which "Maleficent" reframes her story was found by some to be reductive and even regressive.

In the film, Maleficent is depicted as a valorous protector turned bitter and vengeful when former lover Stefan (Sharlto Copley) drugs her and cuts off her wings to become king. Maleficent's curse upon Aurora (Elle Fanning) thus becomes an ironic payback to Stefan for destroying her faith in love. In this way, the film inadvertently declares that, at the end of the day, all the Mistress of Evil's rage and cynicism comes from abuse and betrayal suffered at the hands of an ex-boyfriend. As if that representational side-grade from mad witch to woman scorned weren't enough, the film's replacement of Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather with a trio of bumbling, incompetent pixies robs "Sleeping Beauty" of its most progressive gender element.

"The Jungle Book" became notable among Disney live-action remakes not only for its sheer technological advancement — Jon Favreau's "The Lion King" three years later likely wouldn't exist without it — but for being a surprisingly strong film in its own right. Because the original was much older than films like "The Little Mermaid" or "Beauty and the Beast," Favreau and screenwriter Justin Marks had more leeway to play with the story elements without being constantly beholden to nostalgia. And, while the film isn't an all-out revisionist take like "Maleficent," it still manages to subvert the original in at least one big way.

Instead of ending with Mowgli (Neel Sethi) bidding farewell to Baloo (Bill Murray) and Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) and making his way to the man-village like in the animated version, 2016's "The Jungle Book" concludes with an epilogue that shows Mowgli continuing to live in the jungle, still part of the wolf pack and still hanging out with Bagheera and Baloo. That new ending is such a rug pull on expectations that it arrives almost like a jumpscare. It also prompted all manner of discussions about whether it was more or less faithful to the spirit and themes of Rudyard Kipling's book, which has it both ways by having Mowgli move between the jungle and the village throughout his adolescence. There's also the question of whether faithfulness to a text so steeped in colonialist thinking should even be an aim to begin with.

At this point, Disney has patted itself on the back so many times for so many different bare-minimum gay representation "firsts" that the phrase "Disney's first gay character" has become a literal Internet meme. But, out of all the instances of Disney seemingly expecting queer viewers to thank it for breadcrumbs of visibility and acknowledgment, the LeFou debacle still stands out as particularly absurd.

The 1991 "Beauty and the Beast" was arguably the magnum opus of gay geniuses like lyricist Howard Ashman — who passed away shortly before the film's release — and villain supervising animator Andreas Deja. It's inextricably a part of queer pop culture history. So it made sense for the remake to be the site of the studio's first-ever introduction of an explicitly LGBTQ+ character. But, out of all the characters who could have been gay, was it really much of a step forward to go with LeFou (Josh Gad), the pathetic doormat henchman of the wicked Gaston (Luke Evans)?

For many queer viewers, the answer wasn't so much a "No" as a sneering, disbelieving chuckle. LeFou, Disney? Really? How much of a win for representation is it, actually, to have your entire studio history's single gay character be a laughable minion smitten with a handsome man to the point of doing his evil bidding? That the "confirmation" of LeFou's sexuality came in the form of an inconsequential blink-and-you'll-miss-it dance with a random man at a ball only made the whole thing more farcical. To the company's credit, Disney has gotten better about queer representation since then. Maybe Internet mockery works when it comes to giant corporations!

Orientalism is a uniquely prickly and far-reaching topic in media analysis, and out of the countless artworks and stories that have contributed to constructing the West's stereotypical image of Asian cultures, Disney's "Aladdin" is a particularly crucial case study. An adaptation of a controversial, centuries-old tale whose popularization in Europe and the United States mirrors the very way in which Orientalism developed throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the 1992 Disney film is chock-full of exoticism, stereotypes, and racist reductions of Arabs into seething aggressive men and silent, oversexualized women.

The Guy Ritchie-directed 2019 remake attempted to fix all that — and increase the film's global box office potential — by doing away with harmful stereotypes and turning the film's made-up setting of Agrabah from a caricature into a respectful and agreeable celebration of "Arabia." But, in the process, it fell right into what many commentators saw as a different form of Orientalism — one in which the Middle East gets sapped of all specificity or texture, scrubbed of "controversial" elements, including Islam, which got a few passing references in the animated film but goes utterly unmentioned in the remake, and ultimately flattened into a fantastical, amusement-park version of itself, with boundaries of acceptability dictated by Western tastes. 

The fact that the film liberally conflates Middle Eastern culture and Indian culture as though interchangeable, staging Bollywood-cribbing musical numbers and casting British Indian actress Naomi Scott as Jasmine, didn't help its case much either.

The whole wave of Disney live-action remakes has largely been driven by nostalgia. With every new remake announcement, expectations for how individual elements of each film will turn out in live action are born anew. Disney itself has encouraged audiences to expect reiteration and full faithfulness, with marketing focused on shot recreations. In a sense, there was never room in the Disney remake pipeline for something like Niki Caro's "Mulan," and the film's ultimate commercial failure bears that out.

Unlike every other live-action remake before or after it (thus far), the 2020 "Mulan" is pretty much an entirely different film from the 1998 original. Gone are the musical numbers, the cute animal sidekicks, the Huns, and the romance plot. Instead, Disney opted to look back to the Chinese folktale of Hua Mulan itself and adapt it as a more "serious" epic adventure film with only passing similarities to the animated version. 

All in all, the finished product is arguably one of the few Disney remakes that can stand fully on its own as a film, as opposed to being an echo of past hits. But that didn't stop it from being roundly rejected by Western audiences who craved something closer to the "Mulan" they knew and loved — nor by Chinese audiences, who hadn't been exactly waiting with bated breath for Disney to give them a marginally more faithful, yet still entirely Disneyfied rendition of their own folklore.

Across the live-action remakes, there have been several instances of Disney altering the lyrics to old hits in its catalog. But none stirred as much controversy as the changes made to "Poor Unfortunate Souls" in the 2023 remake of "The Little Mermaid."

There was no shortage of music-based controversy surrounding this particular movie, from the omission of "Les Poissons" to the overwhelmingly negative audience and critical reception to the new number "The Scuttlebutt." But the decision to remove the entire verse in which Ursula makes a case for voicelessness as the ultimate way to please men, allegedly to avoid sending a regressive message to young girls, stung the most for fans of the original film.

After all, Ursula (Melissa McCarthy) is completely and unambiguously evil — an amoral superpowered villain who's never remotely depicted as a source of wisdom or insight. Not only that, but even if her opinions did hold any credence, she's just saying whatever she needs to say to persuade Ariel (Halle Bailey), not voicing some firmly-held belief. By removing the verse, in fact, Disney threw away a pretty valuable satirical insight — the inevitable endgame of an absolutist "ruffle no feathers" policy.