Disney Has A Problem With Depicting Power
Image; Pixar Planet
The sci-fi short Smash and Grab (2019) is not one of Disney’s most well-known works. It came out in 2019 alongside other shorts such as Kitbull and Out, collectively called Sparkshorts, a program within Pixar that allegedly allows its members to take creative risks with techniques and narratives that would have a hard sell as a feature film.
This particular short is about a duo of robot laborers revolting from their assigned positions — one could argue from their class — to make a break for freedom. Smash and Grab has a rather radical message considering that the company hosting it is an entity as conservative as Disney. Consequently, it immediately caught my attention when I streamed it on Disney Plus. Robot laborers revolting would normally be the plot of a horror tale, not a feel-good buddy story.
However, how these two robots go about achieving this brief revolt says something pretty fundamental about how Disney perceives social change — mainly that it’s something that an individual or a group of individuals can enact on their own. All it takes to revolt against the establishment is for one or two people to decide to do so.
This theory of politics is naive, and it's prevalent throughout Disney’s entire filmography. We see this message come up time and time again, not simply in older works, but more recent ones as well. It’s an implicit value that deserves scrutiny not just in this work but in all others that reflect it.
Smash and Grab is only eight minutes long, but it manages to pack a lot into such a short amount of time. We have two robots, which I will be calling Smash and Grab, respectively. They are chained inside a train compartment, forced to mine a glowing, cyan ore. The two robots are not allowed to touch one another. The cord that powers them is positioned in a way that makes physical interaction impossible. They are stuck inside a repetitive loop as Smash breaks apart the ore and gives it to Grab to place it inside some sort of smelter.
Smash eventually realizes that the ore they are mining gets refined into a dark blue power source for a group of robotic beings living in floating mega structures above the clouds. It’s a pretty on-the-nose narrative for what could be seen as a class struggle. Robots like Smash and Grab, under the threat of violence, mine the resources those in the literal upper class enjoy. They put in all the work, and as far as we can tell, the upper class enjoys the products of that labor.
Smash pretty quickly deduces that this is the same power source used to power them via a cord. Smash breaks free of this constraint to track down one of these mobile power sources and returns with two so that Grab can run away with them. This breakout results in a brief chase scene as flying drones with machine guns fire at the two fleeing robots. Smash and Grab are forced to use a technique they learned while goofing off on the job to disable the drones. They succeed but not without both getting badly injured. The short ends with the two chained together as they walk into the sunset towards one of the planets towering megastructures.
There is a lot here, and it's surprising how much of a class-based commentary can be read in a Disney property, period.
Yet while the text definitely could support this reading, it’s not the only one you can take from it. Smash and Grab director Brian Larsen allegedly wrote this work while in a creative rut, saying: “It was during a time when I felt tethered to things that I couldn’t fully crack at that moment in time in my life, things I couldn’t quite accomplish. Doing SparkShorts allowed me to break free, and it fulfilled me.”
And so you could also view the workers in Smash and Grab from the lens of someone eager to escape the monotony of routine. The repetitive nature of the two robots conveys an emotional reality more than it is grounded in a material analysis of class struggle. They are cogs in a machine wanting to work on more fulfilling endeavors, something we see in how the two turn their job of processing ore into a game.
This lens makes more practical sense because the “freedom” Smash and Grab have won for themselves by the end of the short film isn’t very practical. They are injured and alone in a desert wasteland, attached to a dwindling power source, and walking towards a building housed by the people responsible for their enslavement. That walk into the sunset isn’t forever. They are either on the road to becoming outlaws or headed towards their deaths. This Catch-22 is because Smash and Grab have not freed themselves permanently from the system that enslaved them. It’s, at best, a reprieve.
To be permanently freed, these robots would need an ongoing supply of energy — one they would have to most likely, wrangle from the people controlling the machinegun drones — which would involve systemic reform. The two would have to form a resistance, maybe even a violent one, with the other workers of this world against the people and institutions currently oppressing them.
However, the creative forces behind this short don’t want to get into that murky territory. And that’s fine. No one is required to tell the story of how revolutions happen. This project happened on a tight deadline, and director Larsen probably didn’t have the time to expand on the story any more than they did here.
Still, as we shall soon see, this issue I have cited pops up in more places than this one short. It’s a trend. Disney creators consistently bring up complex power dynamics in their works and then refuse to look at the systemic issues surrounding them.
One example very close to Smash and Grab is the movie WALL-E (2008) — a sci-fi epic about a trash-collecting robot of the same name trying to save his love interest EVE from a tyrannical AI named AUTO. The pilot AI doesn’t want the pair to inform humanity that plant life can grow on Earth again due to an old order from the company Buy-N-Large’s last president. They resort to jettisoning the proof (e.g., a plant) into the void of space as well as declaring EVE and WALL-E outlaws. AUTO is the big bad of the film, and much of the climax is spent by our pair trying to get the last vestiges of humanity to resist him.
Humanity in this movie is depicted as “lazy” and fat. They are so immobile that they live their entire lives in floating hover chairs, drinking most of their food from plastic cups. Anti-fatness is used to signal to the viewer that humanity has become docile. We are meant to view their enslavement to Buy-N-Large as a series of personal choices made by consumers. The moment people start to get more active (e.g., splashing in pools, unplugging from their virtual identities, taking an interest in Earth, etc.), the entire system comes crashing down. The human passenger's revolt against AUTO and decide to head back to Earth to begin rebuilding anew. The last few minutes show human passengers taking their first steps on the now fertile soil.
In reality, things would be a bit more complicated on the Axiom spaceship. Most of the passengers had been indoctrinated from childhood to place trust in this corporation from birth. “B is for Buy-N-large. Your very best friend,” we see a robot teacher lecture to a group of toddlers. The idea that a system can just be reformed through a series of quick individual actions, when most people are thoroughly invested in said system, disregards the effort and time political organizing takes. It also ignores all the disproportionate blame that lies with the institutions responsible for causing this mess — in this case, the Walmart-like corporation Buy-N-Large.
“Just get rid of the big bad, and we then have ourselves a revolution,” the movie seems to argue.
WALL-E is not the only film to rely on the trope of the big bad being responsible for all of society's ills. The movie Maleficent 2: Mistress of Evil (2019) is all about how the evil Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer) uses her position to turn her people against the dark fairy Maleficent. As the narrator says at the beginning of the film: “…it was Maleficent's love which broke that very same curse. But that detail was somehow mysteriously forgotten. For as the tale was told over and again throughout the kingdom, Maleficent became the villain once more.”
The evil queen then wages a secret war against the fey folk, employing her son's marriage to Maleficient’s daughter Aurora (Elle Fanning) as a trap to attempt to massacre the fey. Despite Ingrith needing many accomplices to put forth this campaign, we are expected to believe that she is solely responsible for this plan and the speciesism underpinning it. The King and Prince Phillip are utterly clueless to her machinations, and once Ingrith is dealt with, relationships with Fey and humans resume almost immediately. “Ulstead will never attack the Moors again,” Phillip proclaims after the climactic battle in the film.
All that it takes to end years, possibly centuries of speciesism, is removing one bad person, and even this person does not despise the fey out of some widespread cultural bias. Ingrith hates the fey folk because she blames them for not assisting her people during one particularly harsh winter. Her hatred is contextual rather than cultural — that initial trauma shaping her thinking so much that she rejects any ideas of equality between humans and fey as foolhardy. We are told that tensions between humans and fey exist (the dark fey claim they have been hunted for centuries), but once Ingrith is removed, those alleged barriers don’t seem to matter a whole lot.
We also see this trope of oversimplifying racism (in this case, metaphorical racism) in the Pixar-Disney film Luca (2021), where the main characters manage to integrate sea monsters and humans in a single evening. This happens in a town that has glorified the hunting of sea monsters for centuries. The town square is littered with statues and mosaics of humans killing sea monsters, and a single sighting prompts the town's fishermen to form raiding parties to hunt them.
Yet the main characters Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), who are sea monsters, bypass centuries of ingrained hatred by winning the local Triathlon and publically rebuffing the film’s antagonist. There are some lingering animosities, but these resentments are mollified from a stern look of one buff fisherman whom the pair befriended earlier in the movie. The integration of humans and sea monsters didn’t require laws and political organization to overcome, but warm, endearing conversations and the removal of the villain. “It’s over, the reign of terror. It’s over,” one character says of the antagonist being humiliated, which happens around the same time the town begrudgingly accepts our main characters.
The status quo is seldom challenged in Disney films, except in the most superficial ways, and worse, it is sometimes actively reinforced. For example, take the 2019 live-action remake of the animated movie Aladdin. The character Jasmine (Naomi Scott) is portrayed as a fiercely independent woman campaigning for social justice. Early on, there is a scene where she gives several children pieces of bread from a merchant’s stall. Enraged, the merchant asks her to pay for the items she stole. She refuses, telling him that their need is greater. “Those children were hungry,” she responds indignantly.
Jasmine, however, doesn’t spend her vast financial and political power as a princess fighting for redistributed policies. Her political power is spent campaigning to be named the first female Sultan — a position most likely built upon depriving those very children of the resources they need to eat. She could give some of her food or riches to feed those children, but instead, she takes it from a merchant. She expresses no qualms with the monarchy she wants to rule (and maybe placing that power into more decentralized hands). The film positions her ascendency to leadership as a chance for change when we see no indication that it will be different for the people beneath her.
Instead, the movie sidesteps this dilemma to focus on the villain, the Grand Vizier Jafar (Marwan Kenzari), who briefly becomes the Sultan after wishing for it from a genie. We are meant to think his leadership is wrong because he is duplicitous and wants to invade a neighboring kingdom, but he is merely using the power of his office. Sultans have absolute power in this world. They can change the kingdom's laws on a whim, and as the Sultan, Jafar can pretty much do whatever he wants. Just as Jasmine can do whatever she wants as Sultan by the time the film ends. We are given no material reason for why his leadership would be worse for the citizens of Agrabah, many of which were living in poverty before his short rule even started.
After Jafar’s defeat, Jasmine’s ascendancy to the throne is portrayed as a good thing. Yet, other than the gender change, the power dynamic between the royalty and the peasantry remains unaltered. Jasmine's one adjustment to the laws involves allowing Aladdin to marry her. It’s all about her and has nothing to do with her citizens' poverty or property rights.
Throughout these examples, characters make overtures to changing systems without actually changing them. The blame is not laid at the company Buy-N-large in WALL-E, the monarchy in Aladdin or Maleficent II, or the nameless citizens in the floating cities of Smash and Grab, but instead remains in the realm of individual actors and choices.
Disney films seem to be deeply confused about how power works. They often have characters fighting to individually free themselves from systems of oppression without recognizing that it takes collective action to dismantle them. They also introduce serious issues like racism and sexism without diving into the complexities that make those problems worth discussing.
Again, I don’t think Disney is required to tell stories of political change. They could remain in the realm of compelling emotional arcs and hero’s journeys. It’s a niche they are very good at (see Frozen, Moana, etc.), and they are by no means required to tell stories that focus on overcoming discrimination or fighting against oppression.
Yet, if they want to enter the realm of politics (as they increasingly seem wont to do), then I think their theory of political change should make sense. Because right now, they are creating films and shows with the aesthetic of political change and revolution, without putting in the effort to have anything coherent to say beyond looks.
We need stories that focus on what happens after characters decide to resist. I want to know what happens after the robots walk into the sunset at the end of Smash and Grab. Do they die in the desert? Do they have to continually raid the train system, braving death each time from far superior forces until one day they break down? Or most optimistically of all, do they organize with the other workers on the train system to create freedom for more than just themselves?
Disney is so dead set on creating the aesthetic of political change that they never examine what that means for their characters or worlds. Political change always comes swiftly and suddenly in a film’s closing moments. Even more so than the sci-fi ships and magic carpets, that’s probably the most unbelievable elements in their stories thus far.