While Disney usually screams fun, happiness and everything that is joyous in the world, they had a little off-brand wobble on Twitter earlier this week with a seriously dark tweet.
In amongst the posts about matching the Disney song to the film stills quiz and "photos of dogs at Disneyland that will make your day" (side note: remind us to read that later), fans noticed an uncomfortably twisted – and also vaguely hilarious – meme about Pinocchio:
Yes indeed, your eyes are not deceiving you. That is a joke about being entirely dead inside, featuring Pinocchio, the child who is not a real boy. From the official Disney Twitter account.
"When someone compliments you, but you're dead inside," the caption read, along with a GIF of a spell failing to make Pinocchio into a real boy. Disney added: "Makes no difference who you are."
We have so many things to say about this. And so, too, did Twitter:
Disney quickly deleted the tweet, but not before it had gone viral and received an uncharacteristically large amount of engagement.
If Disney was dead inside, we'd dread to think what was in store for the rest of us.
Dusty Baxter-Wright is an award-winning journalist and the Entertainment Editor at Cosmopolitan, having previously worked at Sugarscape. She was named one of PPA’s 30 Under 30 for her work covering pop culture, careers, interiors and travel, and oversees the site’s Entertainment and Lifestyle strategy across print, digital and video. As a journalist for the best part of a decade, she has interviewed everyone from Louis Theroux and Channing Tatum to Margot Robbie and Ncuti Gatwa, while she has also spoken on Times Radio and BBC Radio. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram here.
