The Illustrious Ya ([info]putti_plush) wrote,
@ 2009-01-26 14:25:00
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Current mood: amused
Current music:Frollo "Hellfire"

High Priest of Stardust: Disneyfied!
I've been reading "Notre-Dame de Paris." I loves me some Victor Hugo. And I regret to admit that I'm turning into one of those creepy Frollo fans. He's a wonderfully complex, sympathetic, and tragic character. And Disney... uh... turned him into a Nazi (kill the gypsies!). Good going, guys. Okay, okay, Disney DID keep his sense of inner conflict, but they also jettisoned most of what made him sympathetic in the book. Disney also cut out his LOUT of a younger brother.
The most embarrassing part about my newly kindled love for Frollo is that he reminds of Sakura in the "good but strange guy, assured of his own virtue/coolness/alchemy, who gets tragically destroyed by his own pent-up misery which turns him to sin/drugs/alchemy" way. Not that my mental image of Frollo has long black hair and alabaster skin or anything. No, as Hugo clearly illustrated in lithograph in my picture-can-has edition, Frollo has SHORT black hair and alabaster skin, like 2002 Sakura. *crossarms* Only Frollo doesn't get a Zigzo, which is a shame.

So, I've been writing "The High Priest of Stardust" for a while now, and it hit me that if it got turned into a Disney Movie, something very similar would happen! They'd make a villain out of Sakura Sunflower, despite the fact that I was actually THIS close to making the book all about Sunflower as a tragic antihero! I stopped myself short of self-indulgence, although he-she-it still remains a somewhat Sue-y character. Also, a book all about a shoggoth black builder would be REALLY offputting to a human audience... or any audience for that matter. Hard to connect with, yanno?

So lessee... how would it all work out? And just how many musical numbers would there be?
Disney's "Xutswi Sen" is the story of a boy (haha no hermaphrodites here) who finds out that he is a space-bee. Along with his spunky friends, he tries to get back to space where he belongs, building a rocket. But the evil Black Builder and his corrupt policemen seek to keep him from lift-off so they can uhhh... eat him or something. In the novel, the bad guys (such as they could be called that) are actually trying to HELP Xutswi go into outerspace so that they can use him to awaken their super-powers. But that's way too complex for Disney.
So I guess Wakara gets turned into a girl... which would make him happy... because he has to be the main love interest. And Kat will definitely merge with Ffeef (xutswi's pet salawa) to become the cute talking animal sidekick. And Cute gets turned into a girl too so you can have a useless love triangle, and of course Teomi (cute's love interest) gets cut completely. Because all black builders are now Always Chaotic Evil. And Xutswi will get a personality replacement, because no Disney Hero is allowed to be a misanthropic (in that he hates/patronizes/eats humans), scholarly, somewhat socially inept programmer. Oh, and no other mi-go space-bees allowed; unlike in the book he can't have sex for species procreation yet still love Wakara. Maybe they'll turn Wakara into a late-blooming lady space-bee. And lastly, Nug and Nyarlathotep get complimentary brain-removal so that they can be bumbling villain henchmen. :/




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[info]raikoala
2009-01-27 08:32 am UTC (link)
Sweety, you can't ask Disney to have deep, complex characters - it's not what they are making movies for.

If you want to see a really deep, complex and layered represantation of the book, I suggest looking into the French musical "Notre Dame de Paris" by Richard Cocciante (or so) and Luc Plamodon (I might have spelled both names wrong)

To bad you can't read the German novel "In the Shadows of Notre Dame" that uses the same story, but puts a Medieval alchemistical conspiracy at the center of all this, instead of a love conflict.


I wished I had time to progress even a LITTLE on my book. >_

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[info]putti_plush
2009-01-27 02:16 pm UTC (link)
OH, you mean the wonderful musical that I just finished watching on youtub? DELISHUS.

And that german novel sounds intriguing.

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[info]raikoala
2009-01-27 03:11 pm UTC (link)
Yes. I have it on DVD and have yet to meet anyone who dislikes it.

I checked amazon Germany and USA and it seems there's no translation of this book yet. Sad... about ten years ago or so a friend and I started translating with the intention of selling it to an American publisher (she was British). We were just about to ask permission from the German published for this endeavor... but we lost contact.

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[info]putti_plush
2009-01-27 05:22 pm UTC (link)
DANG! That would have been so excellent if you could have gotten that contract T_T Plus, I bet it'd sell really well in America because of all that Dan Brown hubub. Only, I'm betteing that it's WAAAAY better than Dan Brown.

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[info]raikoala
2009-01-27 05:37 pm UTC (link)
It's been years since I read it, but it was really intriguing.

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