What the collage shows
The picture resembles a group portrait of princesses from the cartoon Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018): the heroines are huddled closely together, and one in the foreground reaches out with a camera, as if for a selfie. Snow White with her red bow and apple, Rapunzel with very long blonde hair, Jasmine in turquoise, Ariel with scarlet hair, and a girl in a golden crown are recognizable. Bodies, hairstyles, and outfits remain cartoonish.
Only the faces change: each heroine has the same face, adult and male, some with a beard or stubble, with various grimaces from a happy smile to bulging eyes. The faces are set onto necks without any adjustment of proportions, so the result is an eerie mix of a cartoon body and a “living” face. Who assembled this particular montage cannot be determined from the picture.
What is known about the trend
Russian publications wrote about this in the last days of November 2019: on Twitter, users took frames of Disney princesses and “corrected” their facial features, removed bright cosmetics, and made the heroines look like ordinary people. The works were often accompanied by a confident comment like “I just sat down and redid the faces.” Who made the very first redo and exactly when cannot be reliably established, so it is better not to attribute the trend to a single author.
Then the usual mechanism kicked in: a serious undertaking was quickly picked up by jokers. If a character's face can be redrawn “on inspiration,” then it can be done either very badly or very strangely. This is how parodic redos emerged, and this collage is one of them.
Why the joke works
The main engine of the joke is the tone of the caption. A short “I just sat down and redid” sounds as if it is about a trifle, about coffee poured in five minutes. In reality, under such a caption people post a result that cannot be missed and cannot fail to be discussed. The modesty of the formula clashes with the scale of the absurdity.
The second layer is the argument about “realism.” The original undertaking was based on the idea that cartoon faces should be made more lifelike. The parody fulfills this requirement literally: the face is indeed “living,” but combined with a princess's body it makes the cartoon look scarier. The joke does not attack people who did serious redos; it shows the limit of the idea itself: the more “realistic,” the stranger.
Examples for your own caption
“I just sat down and redid the faces. Now everyone in the family has the same one.” It fits a family photo in which everyone came out identically. It's funny because the “redo” becomes a cliché.
“Sat down and redid the faces in the work chat: now everyone is equally pleased.” A caption for a collage with one face for everyone. The contrast between “pleased” and the bulging eyes in the picture makes the joke.
“I just sat down and redid the faces, and they still stare into the camera like it's a deadline.” An example where the caption continues the picture's thought: the characters' tense gazes get a mundane explanation.
“I just sat down and redid the faces. Well, not exactly sat: I fell onto the couch and opened the photo editor.” A caption that deflates the pathos of the “master.”
How to use the template
It is best to build the caption on a self-assured, everyday tone: a short “sat down and did,” followed by a detail that shows the scale of the mismatch. The calmer the phrase, the stronger the contrast with the picture.
Another move works too: post this image in reply to someone's overly smooth, “polished” result, be it a perfect design, an edited photo, or an excessively “improved” logo. Don't caption the picture with someone's real name: the joke is about redoing cartoon faces, not about real people.
