HOLLYWOOD, CA – Walt Disney Pictures has announced their latest project, The Bear Minimum, an animated coming-of-age movie that breaks the stereotypes they spent years reinforcing because it is now profitable to do so.
“We’ve known forever that stereotypes in media have real-life consequences, like low self esteem in minority groups and the normalization of racist behaviour,” said Disney exec Murray Peters, “but when we learned that they’re also harmful for our bottom line, we knew we had to make this project!”
The studio, whose early successes use an animation style derived from minstrel shows, is thrilled to announce that the film will be lead by a character named Mia Mahabir, a dorky Caribbean-Canadian tween who isn’t a conventional lead character, according to the conventions that Walt Disney Pictures is built on.
Mia, the diverse face of The Bear Minimum who spends 90% of the movie in the body of a koala, is joined by a cast of other subversive characters: Black characters who don’t just exist to sing about how they enjoy slavery, Indigenous characters who don’t just exist to teach their white colonizers about nature, and queer people who exist.
“From the loud and proud bigotry of the Disney Golden Age to the slew of microaggressions that marr the Disney Renaissance”, explained Dan Smith, the white executive who elected not to give the film an American theatrical release, “I am eager to distance myself from Disney’s history of cishet white male supremacy despite successfully building a career because of it”.
Fans were shocked by The Bear Minimum’s trailer, released as a distraction tactic following Disney’s support of a bill that bans trans people from getting Christmas presents, which showed a sequence where the characters travel to the Middle East and not a single person sings about cutting off body parts as corporal punishment.
“The important thing is to not repeat the mistakes of the past”, continued Smith, who then clarified that Mia will still have a gay best friend because, “hey, let’s not go too crazy on the updates now, and also can we remove the word ‘gay’ from this article?”.
At press time, the film was already nominated for every award, greenlit for a direct-to-DVD sequel, and all of the diverse cast were removed from the movie’s posters in order to boost sales overseas.
