Descendants: The Rise of Red

Fairytales in film date back to the late 19th century. The first notable adaptation was Georges Méliès’ 1899 silent film “Cinderella,” but Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937 established Disney as a dominant force in fairytale filmmaking. Over the decades, fairytales have been continuously adapted and reimagined in various genres and styles, reflecting cultural shifts and advancements in film technology. The Descendants franchise, beginning with 2015’s “Descendants,” took the genre in a new direction, mashing up the children of many of Disney’s most famous fairytales into a singular kingdom.

Descendants: The Rise of Red

Descendants: The Rise of Red follows Red, the daughter of the Queen of Hearts, and Chloe, Cinderella’s daughter. When Red’s mother incites a coup against Auradon, Red and Chloe travel back in time to stop a pivotal event that turned the Queen of Hearts evil.

                   

PARENTAL NOTES In Descendants: The Rise of Red

G Money

• The filmmakers do an excellent job of couching even the more tense situations in appropriately G-rated dressings.

Messaging

• While the show is far from pushing any dogma, it does spend some time, including an entire musical number, espousing the wrong-think that there is no such thing as objective truth, particularly the concepts of good and bad. Instead, everything in life is shades of gray, and they even go so far as to say that the ends justify the means as long as you listen to your heart and are trying to help a loved one.
  • This is a pervasive and pernicious ideology in today’s society and is at the heart of much of the steady decline in the mental health and happiness of today’s youth. I dinged the Suitability score hardest for this.
• The usual “just be yourself” or “you should be accepted for who you are” tripe infects 90% of youth programming today is fairly prevalent. Never mind that all of the villains are “just being themselves.”

WOKE REPORT

A Whole New World… of Diversity

• Aladin and Jasmin are the only non-villains who haven’t been race-swapped from their original white Disney character versions. I wonder why?
  • It’s true that we only see the children of some of the Disney classics, but their offspring make a fairly definitive case that, were we ever to see them, they, too, would no longer resemble their original versions.
• The only white people are extras and villains with one line.
  • The exceptions are Merlin, who has perhaps three lines and is a scatterbrained eccentric of no consequence, and 50% of The Queen of Hearts, whose younger self is played by a white girl who somehow grows up to be a latina.

Messaging

• The aforementioned eschewing of objective truth (see PARENTAL NOTES above) is deeply within the provenance of the wokesters. It’s how they do things like justify the trans movement and equate denying that a man can be a woman with genocide.