Disney

The new and thoroughly adult-oriented miniseries Pam & Tommy tells the tale of the relationship between the musician Tommy Lee and the actress Pamela Anderson. It is interspersed with the narrative of the notorious theft and subsequent internet leak of their Nineties sex tape that has occupied a near-iconic place in popular culture ever since it occurred twenty-five years ago. Pam & Tommy was initially announced as a James Franco project in 2018, for him to both direct and star as Lee, but Franco’s current status as persona non grata saw him replaced by Sebastian Stan.

C’mon, guys: you know how Natasha Romanoff feels about having red in her ledger. Marvel's long-awaited Black Widow movie finally arrived in theaters in July. But the excitement of the release has been sullied by bad blood — and bad debts. Scarlett Johansson, who gave 10 years of her life to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Avengers saga before getting a film of her own, sued Disney for breach of contract after they released Black Widow in the ‘Premier Access’ category on the Disney+ streaming service on the same day it hit theaters. According to Johansson and her reps, her Black Widow contract guaranteed an exclusive theatrical release.

Raya and the Last Dragon has everything you might want nowadays from a major Disney film — feisty kick-ass heroine, non-white representation, a narrative that isn’t hung up on romance — but no one involved appears to have asked themselves: do we have an interesting story? Do we have any fresh ideas? Is it fun? This may please very small kiddies who don’t know any better, and there are plenty of them about, but Raya’s not a classic in the making. It’s gorgeously depicted, needless to say, but disappointingly unanimated in all other ways. While this film may please small kiddies, remember: they are not to be trusted.

Lost boys, lost women, lost civilisations, lost causes — the romantic ring of the word ‘lost’ is media gold. So when the British Museum announced last autumn that it had acquired 103 ‘lost’ drawings by Hokusai, one was tempted to take it with a large pinch of salt. How do 103 drawings by Japan’s most famous artist simply disappear? The answer is, surprisingly easily. Hokusai’s works have never commanded the sorts of prices a draughtsman of his calibre would be expected to fetch, not even in Japan. His art was designed to be affordable: in his day, you could buy a print of ‘The Great Wave’ for the price of a double portion of noodles — and still stretch, if you were lucky, to a side order of ‘A High Wind of Yeijiri’.

What’s ancient, slow-moving and leaves a trail of crap in its wake? No, not Britain’s royal family; the African elephant. The two are easily confused. The royals never forget and are an endangered species that mates in captivity. Elephants are leathery, photogenic and likely to inspire misplaced sentiment. No wonder Meghan Markle’s first venture as Hollywood royalty should be as voiceover artiste for Elephant, a Disney documentary about elephants in Botswana. But this, like Meghan’s in-laws, is as rich, white and privileged as it gets.The plot of Elephant is the usual cheap anthropomorphism. Gaia the indomitable matriarch must lead her herd hundreds of miles across the Kalahari Desert to a lush green paradise.

The Disney brand has long been known as the animated version of white colonialism. This was made predominantly clear when the first feature-length Disney movie was released, entitled Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As if the main character’s name didn’t make it obvious enough, rumors that Walt Disney was a Nazi have been abound on the Internet ever since the rise of Starbucks and the invention of the MacBook Pro, and have plagued his legacy. Perhaps labeling him a National Socialist without physical proof at the whims of woke hipster sociology students is a bit of a stretch, but there were undeniably characteristics of Nazism in Disney’s politics, which are noticeably woven into his animated works.

Only in retrospect does 1999 appear to be the last imaginative year of mainstream American cinema. From Cruel Intentions to Being John Malkovich, American Beauty to American Pie, The Sixth Sense to Eyes Wide Shut, Election to Magnolia, and Fight Club to The Matrix, it was, as Esquire magazine put it, 'the last great year in movies.' In the year 2039, if anybody is able to tear themselves away from insect burgers and the lurid projections of VR pleasuredomes long enough to reflect on the movies of 2019, what will they have to rhapsodize about? They will look back and see a cultural landscape monopolized by one company: Disney.