I don’t understand what’s Jewish about mother gothel… she has a typical Disney face doesn’t she? Is it the curly hair..? I mean her nose and everything else seem normal?
I’m sorry, I’m just trying to figure it out, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.
dark curly hair – long hooked nose – darker complexion than the blond blue eyed heroine 9and really the rest of the cast – portrayed as greedy and evil.
Lisa Edelstein is Jewish. As are Idina Menzel and Amy Winehouse, both of whom I have seen compared in looks to Gothel. Gothel’s design is a pretty clear caricature of ethnically Jewish women.
This is a pretty good contrast between Rapunzel and Gothel. Rapunzel has the “typical Disney face”:
Here’s a more close up look at her features.
The hooked nose becomes even more pronounced as she becomes “eviler.”
If you wanted to claim that there was noting out of the ordinary for Disney animation when it came to Gothel’s features, you would have to find at least one Disney princess or heroine with similar characteristics (long hooked nose and dark curly hair, etc).
But here is what we have is –
small noses that turn up at the end:
wide, flatter noses (though cheers to Disney for not putting button noses on their characters of color, although Esmerelda’s clothing design deserves another essay on Rromani stereotypes and there are some major issues with Pocahontas as well)
And then a few misc noses (again, props for Jasmine’s nose not being a button):
Apart from just the design of Gothel, there’s also the whole: “obviously ‘other’ (read Jewish) woman kidnaps the pretty blonde (read: gentile) kid to use her for ritualistic/magical purposes”
Like that right there on top ofthe aesthetic Jewish-coding is what pushed the antisemitic caricature over the top for me. It harkens back to antisemitic blood libel that claimed that Jews stole gentile children for all manner of nefarious reasons. Even when Gothel is in “mother” role to Rapunzel, she’s is shown as nagging and passive aggressive, both antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish women.
There is no one thing that makes her an antisemitic caricature, but the design, plus the storyline she plays out, plus her characterization cement the overall character as antisemitic.
Jew-coding a villain is not in itself always antisemitic when there are also Jewish coded heroes. Rapunzel does not have that.
Having a villain steal a baby for magical/ritualistic reasons is not always antisemitic as long as the villain is not Jew-coded. Rapunzel fails this as well.
Having a nagging and passive aggressive mother character is not antisemitic provided that she is not, again, coded as Jewish. Rapunzel fails once again.
Hope this helps.
EDIT: @ariminak pointed out that some of my wording made it sound like Gothel’s features only stereotypically caricatured Ashkenazi women when in fact that is not the case. I changed the language to remove that phrasing and make it clear that any ethnically Jewish women can be affected by this type of aesthetic trope. If you reblogged the old version, could you please delete it and reblog this one instead.
Spread this version so people recognize that this stuff harms all Jewish women.
We put Broadway’s Hamilton creator to the test, asking him to sing a song from the classic 1989 animated musical [The Little Mermaid]. Miranda broke right into his own version of Kiss the Girl.
We had to stop him after a while.
“Sometimes I would quote a section of The Little Mermaid’s score and (the directors of Moana) were like, ‘How do you know our movie?’ Because I’ve seen it a ba-jillion times,“ he says.
Miranda is slated to work on a live-action version of Little Mermaid with iconic songwriter Alan Menken. But don’t hold your breath, the deal is still being worked out.
“So I don’t know what my role is on that,” says Miranda. “I don’t know whether it’s working on music or being kind of a music supervisor, I just kind of have the biggest fanboy hat on right now.”
Do you know what movie was a really great movie when it came to representation? Well, I’ll tell you.
The Emperor’s New Groove.
Yeah, I’m serious.
Every single character was POC:
One of the main characters was a supportive, gentle, and loving husband/father at a time when the absentee/jerk dad was popular:
Plus there’s the awesome body-types! And speaking of bodies, all of the female characters have different designs:
And Chicha (Pacha’s wife) destroys the trope of the typical nagging housewife and is both extremely supportive and extremely hilarious:
And the main female villain is hilarious:
There’s no romance at all. Instead, the “love” that’s formed is a platonic, familial, one. Can you say ‘found families’? Because I can’t say it nearly enough. Found family morals are the best!
Also this scene:
In conclusion, this movie was great, its sequel was great, its series was great, and it’s a shame that tumblr only remembers it as the movie where the POC main character (bitch which one?) turns into an animal.
We can talk about that goddamn shitty movie Maleficent till the cows come home, go on and on about how stupid it is to make such a simply evil but awesome villain the martyr for no goddamn reason.
But you know what I want?
I want a spinoff of the Beauty and the Beast about the one who cursed Adam (the beast,) the Enchantress.
Because this bitch
This fucking bitch, is possibly as evil, maybe even more evil and sadistic than Maleficent.
The Enchantress cursed the prince because he failed a test, he was unkind to her because she presented herself as an ugly old hag. She turned him into a werewolf minotaur hybrid (fucking cool I’ll give her that,) because he was rude to her and didn’t want her rose.
So she cursed him, along with every single one of his servants. What did his servants have to do with any of this? Why are they being punished?
Not only that, but this stood out to me when I watched the movie again. When the spell is broken, all of the monstrous statues and art pieces transform into graceful, beautiful ones, I’m assuming that’s what they looked like before.
So this enchantress not only cursed him and his servants (oh and his fucking DOG DID I MENTION THAT) she took away every beautiful thing he had, replacing them with things like goblins, dragons, ghouls and other monsters, just to remind him what he was and what she had done to him, and he would have to look at them every single day.
I’m going to rightfully assume she provided the magic mirror as well, all of the magic in the movie stems from her, the mirror most likely came from her. His only window to the outside world is a handheld mirror, so he can fucking look at himself.
But you know what the kicker is?
If we take these two lines into consideration
“The rose, which was truly an enchanted rose, which would bloom until his 21st year” ~Narrator
“Ten years we’ve been rusting…” ~ Lumiere
We can reasonably deduce that the Enchantress cursed the prince when he was eleven years old.
I want this filthy green bitch publicly exposed.
Not only did she curse an 11 year old, she cursed an 11 year old PRINCE in the middle of a dark night who refused a stranger shelter because, get this, I’m 20 and if some weird old lady showed up at my door in the middle of he night and was like Yo Can I Sleep Here i would probably just close and lock my door because!!!!
Who is she!!!! I don’t know her!!!! What if she tried to kill me or stole everything!!
This boy is a prince living in a palace of luxury and he was probably given the “don’t talk to strangers” talk by his (dead??) royal parents!! Or at least Mrs. Potts!! He was probably like this lady’s gonna steal our silverware and candle sticks in the middle of the night and all she’s giving me is a rose that was probably picked from our own garden?? Bye lady.
According to the animators for Flynn, he’s meant to be 26 years old, thus making him 8 years older than Rapunzel, who is 18 in the film – the largest age gap between any other Disney couple.
Kida’s 8,800-ish with Milo’s 32, that’s… an 8,768 year age gap?
o
Everyone forgets about Atlantis and it makes me sad. That movie is a masterpiece!
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