April Update: Creating the Hercules critique

Hey gang!

Birthday Hangover’s over, so let’s get to business. 

This month I was reasonably proud of- after getting the sly video done, I was determined to ensure you guys continued to get enough content to match the quota of at least one video for every month, with Sly being much more of a March project. It also felt really fulfilling to at least touch on the subject of Spyro, in a way that allowed me to talk about it without taking too much time away from other videos, and I think that's set a new precedent for making Beyond Words. I feel really confident about getting that kind of content out to you faster, allowing me to keep the channel alive relatively easily while also providing enough time for the bigger edited videos. I'm debating what could come next between now and the next vid, we'll see what grabs my fancy as we go. 

After a few bumps in the road involving copyright blocks, I was happy to see the Hercules video finally made it out to you guys. It’s something i’ve actually been sitting on conceptually since I started the channel in its current form- and was just never sure if there was a right time to take such a big risk. With the sub count having grown I figured that was a big enough sample of people to test the waters and, so far, it seems to have done fine!

Originally it was just going to be a short video, where I talked about the films creative decisions, and was actually much more focused on talking through the frankly bizarre criticisms levelled in the Disneycember video created by Doug Walker. Their decision to use Gospel music was the key point, and the entire first section was devoted to that concept and why it absolutely fit a lot of the final creative decisions that brought the movie together. I also wanted to just discuss the film generally, why it was worth defending, but it always came across as an attack rather than a genuinely insightful piece of work. I kept a draft in the background for about 2 years.

I had also been really keen on discussing musicals after leaving the subject up in the air at the end of my Frozen critique. I wanted to talk about so many things, so many topics within that medium, and had no idea how to approach it all without feeling overwhelmed. Every year I would look into the idea and feel like I wasn’t ready to get involved yet. As time went on I thought about developing some concepts for videos that would tackle it, but it seemed to all be a long road to being heard or gaining interest- if I made a sondheim video, would anyone care, and would be too much of a steep road conceptually for people to get into compared to my other stuff? Hell, can I really talk about musicals when I’m not very good at defining music theory? I felt pretty discouraged from taking on that kind of duty, and again, let that run in the background of my mind as I made other videos. 

During that time, I never stopped researching and being interested in the history of the Disney company. Re-visiting a documentary I liked very much, Waking Sleeping Beauty, eventually lead to me going down a couple rabbit holes where I learnt more and more about the wonderful Howard Ashman. I had always been a fan of his without knowing it, finally becoming aware of him in secondary school and then becoming fully engrossed in his history just before college. His ideas matched a lot of world-views I was already in alignment with, and they began to shape the way I articulated some of my points in ways other people could understand- especially concerning theatre. 

Last year, in planning a critique for another Disney musical, I had hunted down a copy of the waking sleeping beauty DVD, featuring the full first fifteen minutes or so of Howards Lecture (earlier that year I had seen the second half, on the Little Mermaid blu-ray). That was a real revelation- I had only seen snippets of this lecture before and had only through hearsay sort of imagined how the rest might sound. The most validating thing was to watch it, and see many things I had believed in spelled out clearly and loudly, some of which you saw in the video. It emboldened my to go further and make that a vocal part of my ethos in approaching the subject. 

It also, finally, got me thinking about theatre in connection with animation properly. Well, my original argument had involved how Gospel was rooted in the art of greek theatre. What I hadn’t really considered was the obvious path right under my nose- from the greeks, to theatre generally, to animation. I realised that I could talk about all these things I’d wanted to- animation, theatre, musicals- in a streamlined way because Hercules dealt with them all, right back to the beginning of theatre, in a way the others don’t. It only made sense to bring up Howard, it only made sense to talk about the history of musicals, and everything I liked about the medium seemed to fit within the movies conceit without seeming like an excuse to talk about them just cause it happened to be a musical. Hercules being about greek theatre changed the entire structure, and allowed me to split it into A and B parts- history of the musical and then style of the musical. Finding that one clip at D23 where the directors discussed Howards influence on the piece- something i’d long felt might have been oddly possible- sealed the deal.

I’m very pleased with the shape of the video, even if I think there’s a lot I didn’t get to justify as well as I would have liked. The music part of the video, which friends who write music have told me is fine, I’d love to improve on greatly in the future. There’s stuff going on in there that with a musical terminology I’d like to pin down better, but I knew I needed to persevere and just use my own brain to see from the audience reaction if I was inherently barking up the wrong tree. I also believed that, because it was really a discussion on the drama of Hercules and its heritage, that I could make the music about that, and could use it as a springboard. I don’t think the Disney musicals, by design, are overly complex or difficult to translate into analytical discussion, they’re known by everyone the world over. Hercules, serving as a great introduction to, as I put it, the distillation of western theatrical culture to that point, clicked for me as a chance to put that whole approach I had to the medium in on place. 

also i hope the joke are funneee 

Anyway, I do plan to visit musicals again- in a series I’ve had as a patreon goal for a while now, and seeing the patron count increase after this to make that happen is nothing short of humbling. Thank you so much, patrons new and recent (My patreons not quite old enough to call you all old patrons yet!) for making this step that much more possible. I’m going back to work on the second Sly video, and once that’s done I have another boy I plan to shake things up with, in an attempt to fulfil my plans partially hinted at in my 10k special. Then i’m onto Sly 3. It could all change, and I’ll let you know here if it does. 

I also would like to mention a small change to my goals- I removed my original 300 dollar goal for a crash analysis because I feel like I threw that out there without much thought. There’s a lot of video projects I have planned already and the musical series is the only one I want to focus on between normal videos if I get the funding, I don’t want to put too much else on my plate or i’ll probably stress myself out and get nothing done. We seem to be on a good path so far, and I hope the new video makes up for the lack of videos in February and March. Let me know if you have any feedback or questions pertinent to any of this and I’ll be sure to address them ASAP. 

Take care all, and I’ll be back with you in the not so distant future!

-B-Mask