Is there a single Disney animated movie that stands up to scrutiny

Here are spoilers for the Aladdin...1992.



-If Jaffar has a magic staff that can make the sultan do whatever he wants, why not just make him relinquish power or make Jasimine marry him.
-If animals can enter the Cave of Wonders why not send Inyago

Etc

I am going to put forth that Snow White has the least hidden cringe and the fewest plot holes of Disney animated features because it has the fewest moving parts. Kissing a comatose woman is more than a little disturbing but I think unlike the prince in Sleeping Beauty, the prince knew he was performing a medical rescusciation.

Maybe Bambi was relatively free of plot holes but I don't even remember how it ended. I remember Bambi's mother's death traumatized all the chidlren of generation X then there was some cute antics, then a forest fire, then everyone fine.

Anyway, once we narrow down the dozens of Disney movies to one short list of eight or fewer top tier movies, maybe we can do a poll.

 

Indirectly.

But by scrutiny I don't mean scrutiny in terms of artistic merit, I mean in terms of fridge logic and fridge horror. Is there a single Disney movie that if you think about what the details that you aren't horrified or offended.


For instance. The Little Mermaid. The Prince never questioned that a random voice in the swamp told him the mute girl is named Ariel. You know that some of the fish of Atlantica eat other fish yet they are horrified when humans eat fish. Do they have a upper class of fish that get to sing with the mermaids and a slave/livestock class that live below them or do they make the first sing before they eat them.

Assuming all the fish are vegetarians, how is Arial going to cope with her new home on land. Prince Eric's kingdom is coastal. Do you which coastal nation in history depended on fishing....ALL OF THEM. Arial either needs to accept was is essentially cannibalism or Eric's kingdom needs to starve. Eric's parents are okay with him hooking up some random mute girl he found? You know Arial demonstrated that she could read and write English when she siged Urusula's contract. She could have solved all her problems by writing out what she needed Eric to do without her crab friend's creepy seronade. Nevermind how foolhardy it is for two sixteen year olds to make a lifelong comitment to someone they just met, Arial didn't know what the word "street" is. She spent most of her life with a fish's lower half. I guarantee you she doesn't know how human reproduction works. Their honeymoon night is going to be horrifying.

The straight to video Little Mermaid prequel had the king arbritarily ban all music before Arial talked him out of it. The animated series has similar things to do that. Basically without Arial in the picture, King Posiedon is a horrible tyrant. How they are going to last now. Notice that all those mermaids sang about how great it was to be his daughters. Did they do that everyday or was it his birthday or something? Why does he have a umpteen daughters and zero sons? Did he eat his sons like the Titan Kronos. Why does he dote on Arial above all the others, how fair is that? Why did Arial sign the contract with Ursula when there was an entire garden of tortured souls and Urusula sang about how she was a treacherous witch? At the end of the movie he used his trident to cure all the people Ursula cursed. Why didn't he do that earlier? He is the worst king and the worst father ever.


All that being said, I think The Little Mermaid was a good movie artistically speaking...

 

Come on, attacking The Little Mermaid is like..... shooting fish in a barrel! (Pun fully intended)
All valid points. And there are lots and lots more, especially if you expand from those two tropes a bit more and include other points of critique, such as the movie being horribly sexist for example.


As for other movies: many of the beloved ones are just... terrible if you look at them closely.
For someone who knows the original stories the movies are based on they become even worse at times, possibly because the changes Disney made to the story create the plot holes that weren't there in the original story.

@pendrake yes.
Or just Google them, tvtropes is usually among the first hits. Because it is awesome.

Edit: for reference:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeHorror

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic

 

I meant to say every coastal nation in history depended on fishing. Oops.

I also forgot that other people haven't spent tens of hours on tvtropes.

I think I've been posting too much on Lustria-Online lately. Memes, a story, media comentary, my RPG world, memes again.

My apartment could use cleaning...among other unfinished tasks.

 

Well, YMMV but for me the message "a girl should be good looking but silent, and she doesn't have to be clever nor good for anything" isn't acceptable. And that's basically the message in a lot of movies.
I am not letting my daughter watch those movies, because those are not suitable roll models for today's society. And they are aimed at children too young to understand.
So I decide that she will not watch them.

Oh and btw, you are probably wrong. There were most likely people offended by that back then. They just got way less press coverage. The Little Mermaid for example was released in 1989, the big feminist movement exists since the 1960s (at least. Actually earlier but let's not be too strict).

 

Hmmm nice link but I had hoped for more real plot holes.

As for your thought about everything having potential to be criticized if you just look hard enough: yes.
That is a big thing these days. People act like a movie or two that aren't good ruin everyone's life.
And everyone thinks he's a movie critic. That's one reason why I hate going to the movies with people. Many think that unless they criticize the heck out of the movie they are not cool. It is allowed to like or dislike things about a movie and still be overall happy with it. It is also allowed to talk about the good things in movies.
And people should finally stop saying "this scene ruins <insert movie, franchise etc.>".


I'll just leave this here, I think it fits the OP in parts.
Granted, it is a 50s movie. But yeah...

 

Peter Pan is racist and sexism and had some dark sexual and murderous overtones but it's relatively free of plotholes.

Sci-Fi Channel made a straight to movie version of Peter Pan that smoothed out the rough edges of Peter Pan plotwise.

Can you be a pirate without any one to rob? They really have no incentive to war against the Lost Boys and the Indians (every Native American I've met doesn't the term "Indian" so I don't see a reason to sweep the term under the rug though if you truly want to be polite, learn their tribal idenity and refer to them by that rather than lumping them in with all Native Americans. I grew up across the street from a family of Meskwaki).

The thing is, except for Peter Pan, no one is able to leave Neverland and no one gets older, new babies are not born. The various factions fight mostly because they there is nothing else they can do and the monotony of life in Neverland is driving everyone a more than a little mad.

 

For me Peter Pan fits the fridge horror category.

Think about it: the boys in Neverland are basically trapped in an alternate universe in which they can never grow up and have a family, just eternal war.
Peter Pan himself is horribly creepy to me.

 

Hmmm, we need two categories.

Fewest plotholes.

Sunniest story (no fridge horror)

 

Hmmm fewest plot holes....
Maybe Aristocats is a candidate. From the top of my head I don't recognize any glaring plot holes.

Or Jungle Book. Because there cannot be plot holes if there is no plot to begin with.
Don't get me wrong, I like the movie, but when I watch it now it looks like scenes randomly stitched together not making a whole lot of sense.