And good-bye to the working week.

First off, Overthinking It bids farewell to two older icons of the entertainment industry: Jennifer Jones, star of The Song of Bernadette and Duel in the Sun (in the 40s and 50s) and Roy Disney, part owner of the empire of that name. Disney breathed new life into the company’s animation division, helping create gems like Beauty and the Beast and disappointments like Fantasia 2000. Actors who won Oscars for playing saints and pioneers of 2-D animation: they probably weren’t going to like the 21st century much anyway.

Not to take sides on religions, but name the last Oscar-nominated nun.

Second, the Golden Globe nominations were announced earlier this week. Up in the Air sits atop the pile with six nominations. Avatar, The Blind Side, Inglourious Basterds and a dozen movies you’ve never seen nor heard of are also up for awards. House is going up against Season 3 of Mad Men for Best Drama. That guy punching that girl on Jersey Shore? Apparently not dramatic enough.

Question: The Golden Globes have no problem giving comedies their own category (this year’s nominees: (500) Days of Summer, The Hangover, It’s Complicated and Julie and Julia). Why won’t the Oscars?

Nominated for both It's Complicated and Julie & Julia, Meryl Streep is competing against herself this year.

Finally, holy #$%# there’s a new Iron Man 2 trailer and it looks awesome.

Remember when this guy was a believable love interest for Kim Basinger?

Question: are you excited, really excited, or really really excited for Iron Man 2?

And of course, anything else you want to discuss in the comments. This is YOUR … Open Thread.

These cows almost killed Disney.

It was only five years ago that Disney ran up the white flag and did the unthinkable: it shuttered its 2D animation facilities. This is the Walt Freaking Disney Company: they invented animated movies as we know them. But a series of flops (Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range) at the same time as Pixar churned out a string of instant classics was too much for the Mouse House. They decided that the public clearly wanted computer animation, and that’s what Disney was going to give them.

Except that didn’t work either. 2005’s Chicken Little didn’t even make back its budget domestically. So in 2006, Disney took the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em route, purchasing Pixar for $7.4 billion (which actually seems like a steal to me). The Pixar people were suddenly in charge of Walt Disney Animation… and the first thing they did was get the 2D animation department back up and running.

John Lasseter and Co. were betting that audiences hadn’t stayed away from Home on the Range because it was 2D. They had stayed away because:

a) It was lame, but more importantly…

b) a trio of sassy cows wasn’t what audiences wanted to see from Disney.

Anyone who’s been around a little girl in the last twenty years knows that the old Disney films still resonate, maybe even more than the new Pixar stuff. In 2009, the Disney Princess line of merchandise netted over $4 billion for the company. In a way, the continuing popularity of those 2D films is what enabled Disney to buy Pixar.

So when they set out to make The Princess and the Frog, they had a tricky task: produce something that recreated what people loved about the old Disney movies (especially the early-90s triumvirate of Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin), but also something creative enough to get consumers back into the habit of reflexively going to Disney movies. It’s sort of like making a Bond movie–you need to stick to the formula, but also keep it fresh.

So how did they do it? Well, let’s go to the chart. (And by the way, bigtime Princess and the Frog spoilers begin now.)

As a follow-up to Lee and Sheely’s excellent Think/Counterthink on the Miley Cyrus track “Party in the U.S.A.,” this edition of Musical Talmud wades into the shin-deep puddle of pop that ebbs and flows in the general area of the Jonas Brothers — the sunny shoal of music that feels comfortably warm until you realize it is the kiddie pool, at which point it becomes gross and creepy.

Listeners to the podcast (and other people who make the quixotic choice of hearing me talk) know that I have my money on a dog in the Disney Channel Music fight — although she is a young girl and it’s not a nice or appropriate thing to call girls dogs. And no, I don’t have inappropriate designs on her. But I like her music and think she has a bright future.

Today in Musical Talmud, we discuss “Get Back,” the first single off the first solo album (which came out last year) by the talented singer and, in the time-honored and resurgent American tradition of pop stars who rise to stardom from movie musicals (talk about the new Great Depression!), not-especially-great-actress Demi Lovato.

And yes, she actually wrote it.

What is keeping Ariel upright?

Unless you have hung out with a little girl during the past ten years, you may not be aware of the Disney Princess phenomenon. Sure, Disney’s had princesses for years, and generations of girls have wanted to be them. But it wasn’t until 2001 that the company got around to creating an official Disney Princess brand, selling apparel, toys, videos and pretty much everything else that they could slap a picture of a princess onto. The New York Times reported that there are 25,000 products in all, and the franchise grosses over $3 billion a year. And that article is three years old.

There’s a lot of be disturbed about here. Some of the older Disney films are pretty retrograde to begin with—Sleeping Beauty meets the prince on her 16th birthday, and marries him pretty much the next day. The newer heroines are better role models, but in the context of the Disney Princess brand, they’re presented as pretty little flowers, not women of action.  And I don’t need to point out that all of them make Nicole Richie look fat.

But I’m not going to discuss the feminist implications of this marketing juggernaut. (If that’s what you want, the Times article above does a good job.) Instead, look at this photo of the Princess lineup. Four of the girls are princesses by birth (Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine, Snow White, and Ariel). One of them marries a prince to become a princess (Cinderella).

That leaves Belle, who I’m not sure really qualifies.

Matthew Wrather hosts as he, Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and John Perich reveal their favorite animated movies, give advice to a college student, debate tokenism and ethnic stereotyping, and think back to the good old days of Sesame Street.

In this episode, we also lay out a challenge for your mom.

Tell us what you think! Email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401. If you haven’t yet, take the very short survey! And… spread the overthinking by forwarding this episode to a friend.

Download Episode 48 (MP3)

The 1980’s may have been morning in America, but children’s animation was full of nightmares. There was The Secret of NIMH (1982), in which a mother mouse struggles desperately to save her babies from drowning in the mud as they cry out in terror. There was The Black Cauldron (1985), which was so dark that Jeffery Katzenberg was afraid it would get a PG-13 rating, and made animators remove scenes like this. There was The Land Before Time (1988), which begins with the main character’s mother getting killed by a T-Rex.

But there’s dark, and there’s The Brave Little Toaster (1987). This movie is twisted.

A John Lasseter sketch, from back when he wanted to make a computer-animated Brave Little Toaster.

In some ways, Toaster was a dry run for Toy Story. It’s about inanimate objects that talk and move when people aren’t around, and their fierce love for a little boy. Both movies center on the objects’ struggle to be reunited with their owners. In both movies, the objects obsess over becoming lost, broken, or unwanted.

These similarities may be more than a coincidence. In the early 80’s a Disney junior animator named John Lasseter had the crazy idea of making a computer-generated feature. Years later, he recalled:

A friend of mine had told me about a 40-page novella called “The Brave Little Toaster,” by Thomas Disch. I’ve always loved animating inanimate objects, and this story had a lot of that. Tom Willhite liked the idea, too, and got us the rights to the story so we could pitch it to the animation studio along with our test clip.

That pitch went so poorly that Lasseter was fired ten minutes later. (But don’t feel too bad for John–he runs Walt Disney Animation now.)

The Brave Little Toaster became a traditional 2-D feature in 1987. The story is about a vacuum cleaner, a radio, a lamp,  an electric blanket, and of course, a toaster. They live in a cabin in the woods, which hasn’t been visited in years. Everyday the appliances wait, broken-hearted, for their beloved “master” to return for them. It is pretty much the saddest thing ever.

Video after the jump.

Loyal readers will remember Mlawski’s post from a few months back about the brouhaha surrounding Disney’s upcoming Princess and the Frog.  Well, there’s a teaser trailer now.

So far I’m not seeing anything offensive to African Americans, although I guess the firefly character might end up being pretty DEEPLY offensive to Cajun people.  Anyway, it’ll be fun to see how it pans out.  Stay tuned for further developments.

I find the animation style more interesting than any of the political correctness issues.  This is, after all, the first traditionally animated Disney movie since they claimed to have gotten out of the game following 2004’s Home on the Range.  It seems to me like they’ve made a conscious effort to play up the kind of thing that 2D animation does better than CGI.  I’m thinking particularly of the close-up shot of the frog where its lips distort into an enormous pucker.  That would look weird as heck in CGI, am I right?  (The Incredibles’ Elastigirl was very much a special effect).  But in 2D animation, it blends right in.

Last night, I sat down and watched Enchanted, the 2007 Disney movie in which a cartoon princess played by Amy Adams falls through a portal into real-world Manhattan. Eventually, she comes to accept being “real,” while love interest Patrick Dempsey learns a valuable lesson about opening his heart to the magic of a child’s smile, or some such shit.

This is another one for the “I’m surprised how much I liked this” file. Well, I’m not all that surprised – the thing got fantastic reviews when it came out, and I’m kind of a sucker for fairy tales. Even so, Enchanted had a LOT going against it…