Aladdin: Aladdin wishes to become a prince. The genie gives him a hundred camels and a hundred servants loaded with gold. First of all, that's not technically granting his wish. That's making him nobility, not royalty. But the bigger problem is... from where did those hundred servants come? There are two possibilities. Firstly, that Genie, when it was requested of him, indentured a hundred random people. No regard for their previous life, no concern for the fact that they were now demoted to nothing but carrying one guy's gold. That's pretty screwed up. The second and even more troubling possibility is that the Genie created these people out of thin air. What kind of existence would that be? Would they be human, and if so what does that say about the nature of humanity? If the wish were to be undone, what would happen to them? Would they vanish into thin air, effectively mass murder, or would they be released into a world where they have no home and no origin?
Beauty and the Beast: A similar problem: there are way too many servants in that castle. The curse lasted ten years (until the Prince's twenty-first birthday), and there were at least, I'm going to say, 200 dishes, feather dusters, etc. in the "Be Our Guest" musical number. So that means an eleven-year-old was in charge of 200 people. That's not responsible. On top of that, the Beast seems to be the most unhappy with the transformation. Excuse me, but you got off pretty easily, sir.
"Don't look at me, I'm a monster!"
"Suck it up, a-hole, I'm a candle!"
The Little Mermaid: The heartwarming story of a girl who wants something, gets it via the easiest route despite being warned about the risks involved, foists responsibility for those risks onto the person, her father, who warned her about them, and ends up getting everything she wanted without growing or developing.
Snow White: Why aren't all fourteen-year-olds married to date-raping near-strangers?
Mulan: At the end, Mulan turns down the position in the Emperor's court to live a domestic life. In the sequel, she teaches young girls martial arts. Fair enough. Mulan was based on an existing Chinese myth, and that's what happened in said myth. Except no, not fair enough. This is Disney. The original version matters about as much to them as the physics of combustibility matter to Michael Bay. If Ariel is allowed to live, Claude Frollo is allowed to be a judge instead of a priest, and Pocahontas is... well, everything about Pocahontas, then you can make some slight adjustments to the Mulan myth to give her a more proactive ending.
Cinderella: Technically, my complaint is about Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. Terra insisted "You have to work hard to achieve your goals." After visiting Castle of Dreams, he says "Maybe sometimes it's enough just to dream." That's right, Cinderella is so passive she actually gets someone to backtrack morally.
Tarzan and Brother Bear: Why, Phil Collins, why?
The Disney Corporation: Unlike many adults, I do not believe Disney is an evil corporation. The thing is they market themselves as the moral pillar of all humanity, but they are still a corporation, and they do what corporations do; their job is to make money. This discrepancy is what people tend to interpret as "evil".
I do, however, strongly disapprove of the copyright laws they have pushed through, such that a copyright now lasts for seventy years after the death of the creator. There's no need for that. Copyrights were intended to protect the creator from theft for a limited amount of time. I won't much care if people are taking money from me after I'm dead and unable to, say, use said money, much less seventy years afterward. I would like it if something that was released during my childhood would be in the public domain during my lifetime, rather than fifty years after I die (that's being optimistic, I don't take good care of myself). It would also be slightly more palatable if Disney didn't get every single movie it makes from the public domain it seems to be trying so hard to kill. E.g. Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, the music from Fantasia, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood, Oliver Twist, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Hamlet, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan, Tarzan, Treasure Island, Chicken Little, The Princess and the Frog, Rapunzel, Winnie the Pooh. Fun fact: if the copyright laws now in place were around during the publication of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, or Tarzan, Disney would not legally have been allowed to create films based on them because of the laws they themselves recently passed. That's my beef with them.
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