Kay:
Hello, there dear listener and welcome back to the Kay & Shi Show. We have a really fun week for you this week because we’re talking about some unlikely inspirational sources.
Shi:
If you’re anything like us, and we know you’re part of our cosmic kin, so you likely share this, but when you start to get really into motivational material, personal growth, and development, self-help, whatever you want to call it. When you get into this material, just like anything else you start to notice it in unlikely places and so this week we’re going to talk about some of the weird and wacky places that we found mentorship and inspiration.
Kay:
First up on our unlikely inspirational source series is the source of Disney movies.
Shi:
We love a good Disney movie. We’re obviously Disney fans. We make no qualms about that but many draw inspiration from Disney movies and I think it’s a little bit of low-hanging fruit. You might be thinking, “Well, of course, Disney movies are supposed to be inspirational,” but I’m here to tell you, we get really into the lessons in Disney movies, especially as Disney’s come through its, let’s just call it woke phase here in the last especially 10 years, 15 years here, where we start to see more empowerment messages. We see much less emphasis on the romantic storyline. We see far more female and diverse characters being brought forward and so Disney is obviously making this shift towards more inspiration, motivational, empowerment material, but it might go deeper than you’ve realized. And I think our quintessential example of this is the movie franchise of “Frozen” but particularly the movie of “Frozen II.”
Kay:
Well, “Frozen” in general, I think kind of really brought this idea of inspirational Disney movies to the forefront and we can look back at all kinds of inspirational Disney movies from the past. We think about the ones through the nineties. We’ve got “The Little Mermaid.” We have “Aladdin,” we have “Lion King” that’s got lots of inspirational sources, but with “Frozen I” they did something that no one had ever seen before, which was created the idea of true love being that of love between family members, the true love of sisters. It makes me want to cry just literally talking about it because I love my sister so much. But “Frozen II” brought forth a lot of inspiration within it because Elsa at the very beginning of the movie hears a call that no one else can hear, a call from within that creates an unexpected journey for her which when she reaches the journey, she has to dive deep within her own self, her own memory, to the point where she almost dies and then emerges as something brand new. Now, if that metamorphosis doesn’t reflect maybe a difficult journey you’ve taken in your life, I don’t know what will.
Shi:
I think audience is everywhere when that moment in “Frozen I” happens and we realize that the true love story isn’t about a romantic couple, but about family members was so just paradigm-shifting and so needed. Obviously, as sisters, we celebrated a movie and a story like that, and then “Frozen II” taking, I think that same embracing of an empowerment message and building a storyline around the family relationship and the support and the dysfunction and the ultimate loyalty and connection and then the metaphor of Elsa’s journey into her own self, her own self-discovery, but needing that support of the family and not being able to fully metamorphize until all of the pieces are there is just beautiful. And we could go on and on about it but that’s the lowest of low-hanging fruit when it comes to the Disney movies.
We love to look at the other princesses too, maybe some of the more traditional ones, and see what can we learn from them? What mentorship do we get from “Cinderella”? A classic 1950s film full of some 1950s ideology and those kinds of things. But even there, we see a character like Cinderella embracing kindness, embracing patience, valuing hard work, being genuine and authentic and this is something that we legitimately talk about between us. It’s not like us saying this for the first time. We talk about the merits of the princesses and love to kind of dive in. Belle’s love of reading. “Beauty and the Beast” came out when I was seven and I was a humongous reader and getting to relate on that level was really inspirational to me as a kid. And I’m so glad they’ve just taken that and continued to magnify that for girls of this generation and beyond, as we see movies like “Tangled,” like “Frozen,” like “Moana” coming forward that are much more dimensional and much more empowering.
Kay:
We love Disney movies of all kinds and whether you are an old Disney movie fan, a new Disney movie fan, what we know is that these movies have an educational basis. In fact, you might not know this, but Disney was contracted, Walt himself, Mr. Disney, was contracted to create military videos for instructing people back in World War II on ways that they can fly planes, create bombs, all kinds of things in World War II and so the very basis of what they do over at Disney was rooted inside teaching people lessons. So, they created formulas for doing just that with the old movies and the new movies, reflecting their educational roots and we love that about Disney. So, unlikely inspirational sources this week here on the Kay & Shi Show. Next up, we’re going to talk about road trips.
