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Abstract :
[en] As part of celebrating its centennial, Disney released Wish (Buck & Veerasunthorn, 2023), its self-acknowledged first original fairy tale. Building on the legacy of Disney’s previous animated feature films, Wish is packed with intertextual references. These references, so-called Easter eggs, assume the form of playful winks at characters, scenes, backgrounds, or dialogue lines borrowed from the studio’s canon. However, these Easter eggs also serve more concrete purposes in propping up the film’s storyline and characterization. A similar use of Easter Eggs, with a more ironic twist, can be observed in Akiva Schaffer’s 2022 Chip’n Dale Rescue Rangers. I have argued that this recourse to references to the Disney legacy can be conceived of as structural elements making these movies transtextual in nature, i.e., relying on references that can be observed at all levels of Gérard Genette’s model of intertextual relations. Two characters are of particular interest in this respect. Arguing with Peter Schneider that “the villain is the key to [a] movie” (Johnston & Thomas, 1993, p.21) in the sense that only a worthy villain can help animators ensure that all other characters will rise to the same level, I would like to argue that King Magnifico in Wish and Sweet Pete in Rescue Rangers can be read as architextual archvillains. While they embody Disney archvillains in their characterization and design, their behaviours are directly grounded in what one could call Disney architextual storylines. Where Sweet Pete, an animation criminal mastermind, commits the supreme crime of physically transforming cartoon characters with his bootlegging machine, King Magnifico perpetrates the irreconcilable act of hubris by spiriting away his subjects’ true heart wishes.
