AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Divine drag queen ursula movies3/18/2024 Throughout the film’s promotion, McCarthy has touted her love of the artform as inspiration, telling Deadline that she wants to give Divine her due. Now, with Melissa McCarthy’s live-action take hitting screens, the lasting impact of Ursula’s drag origins are as clear as ever. And I said, Howard, is it alright if I steal those? He said, I was hoping you would.” The result is a brilliant performance from Carroll, informed by Ashman’s own take on the character. “I stole ‘ innit’ from Howard,” Carroll confesses, referring to Ursula’s iconic remark. It was from that performance that some of Ursula’s most famous lines were born. But Minkoff, who would later go on to co-direct The Lion King, drew a much more voluptuous take on the character based on the drag queen Divine, who dominated counterculture as a fixture of John Waters’s filmography. And what to do with a character who is so fully formed in the original, there can seem little room for reinterpretation? Such a challenge is posed with The Little Mermaid’s Ursula-a character who not only occupies prime position as one of the most thrillingly evil Disney characters, but who brings with her a lesser known history directly related to the rich and colorful drag tradition.Īccording to animator Rob Minkoff, Ursula was originally described in the script as a Joan Collins–like figure, resulting in character designs that depicted a thin, bony woman with lionfish- or manta ray–inspired features. But such revisions, as seen in the current iteration of The Little Mermaid, also pose a challenge: The new mechanisms-look at those hyper-realistic CGI animals-run the risk of falling ironically flat when juxtaposed against the elegant creations of the original. That’s trying to claim it and that’s fine, if that’s what they wanna do, but don’t put people down because they’re not what they want it to be.” King concluded, “A makeup artist or makeup designer could design makeup they don’t have to have an attachment to the nature of what they’re doing.There are many reasons-beyond the lack of original IP-for a studio to reinvent a classic film: updating it to better reflect our diverse world, introducing it to a whole new audience, invoking the nostalgia of those who love the original. Why can’t I do as good a job as a queer makeup artist?” He added, “That’s ridiculous. Of the criticism that a queer person should have been hired in his place, King said, “I find that very offensive. King responded to the backlash in an interview with Insider, calling it “ridiculous” and claiming that Ursula’s final look in the live-action film was not based on drag performances. Drag Race contestant Kerri Colby added, “ absolutely why we should hire up-and-coming queer artists with a pulse on the present and a vision for the future more often.” In the original 1989 animated movie, Ursula’s design was inspired by drag queen Divine. “We said Ursula was inspired by a drag queen we didn’t mean one who had only been doing it for 3 months,” wrote drag queen Sierra La Puerta. Back in May, Walt Disney Studios posted a behind-the-scenes video of Peter King doing McCarthy’s makeup for the role on Twitter. The makeup artist who helped Melissa McCarthy transform into Ursula for T he Little Mermaid live-action remake responded to the criticism that the job should have gone to a queer artist.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |