Disney and infantilism

[fpb]

There can be no doubt that FANTASIA is one of the most beautiful movies ever done. At the same time, one visual image in the central "Sorcerer's Apprentice" episode struck me intensely. The movie was produced in 1940, when the world war - begun in 1935 in Africa, in 1937 in East Asia, in in 1939 in Europe - was lapping dangerously at the shores of the United States. Well, the repeated images of those murderous enchanted brooms marching in line, violently lit in a very strong contrast of light and shadow, brought forcibly to my mind the idea of armies on the march. I certainly don't say that Disney or his employees intended "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" for an allegory of contemporary politics; its point, if any, is far more general and quite timeless. But I don't think there is any doubt that the images they used carried those overtones. Such images at such a time could not but carry a very strong message of concern and danger - real, immediate danger, fear that was a daily affair. World War Two is history to us; it was a direct concern in their lives to them.

So how does Disney resolve this frightening image of the violence then seizing the world, of the wave of destruction which is lapping even at Mickey Mouse's calm suburban America? Why, Daddy comes home. The Sorcerer had simply been gone a while; he comes back, takes in, in an instant, what had happened, and puts an end to it with no more than three dramatic gesture. And to complete the parallel with the life and mind of a child, Mickey does Bambi eyes at him to try and charm his way out of a well-deserved punishment, and gets his bottom warmed for his pains. A splendid sequence; but a sequence that expresses, to my mind, nothing so much as a desire to regress from the difficulties and fears of the contemporary adult world into a safe, familiar world where Daddy takes care of everything - even if Daddy takes care of spanking your botty, too.

This is in effect infantilism, an attempt to transform the real world into a nursery. Several years earlier, Disney had been guilty, in another masterpiece (THE THREE LITTLE PIGS) of a distortion nearly as bad and even more heartless. This cartoon is indubitably about the great depression, and, unlike that FANTASIA scene, nobody can doubt that the point is conscious and deliberate. Not only is "to have the wolf at your door" an ancient expression for being dangerously in debt or poor, but the wise pig insists on the concept. If you build your house of bricks, you'll be safe and not be sorry when the wolf comes to your door. The problem with the other two pigs is that they could not be bothered to build their houses solidly enough first, before running off to have fun. Now this is not really a very good account of what went wrong with US and international economy in the late twenties, but it is particularly bad when you realize that it is aimed not at the societal leadership but at the common man. There is no evidence whatever that the average American of the twenties had been any less hard-working or any more of a wastrel than that of any other time; and to suggest that the catastrophe was caused by improvidence is not only wrong, it is positively insulting. It is a slap in the face of all those Americans who, throughout the twenties, had effectively worked, saved and invested - done the real-life equivalent of building their house of brick - only to see their life savings destroyed by the collapse of the whole banking system. The Great Depression actually punished saving and sensible investment, rewarding those who had either stuffed their dollars in their mattresses or spent them as they made them. To preach, in 1934 or so, the virtues of thrift and hard work, as a panacea to "keep the wolf away from your door," is utterly beside the point.

It may be that the Great Depression was Disney's original sin. He did very well out of it, and naturally did not want to look too hard into what had caused it. It was only because of the Depression that he was able to hire hundreds of the best artists in America when word went round that one man in Burbank was in fact hiring. People came from all the forty-eight states, and Disney could pick the best. And mind you, he was a good employer, paid well, rewarded effort and talent, and made people feel as though they were part of something important. Certainly nobody in Hollywood at the time could be remotely so certain that what they were doing would go down in history, as those who took part in, say, the creation of SNOW-WHITE. But, at the same time, he had taken advantage of something that had ruined his countrymen. I wonder whether he was running away from this.

So there you have it. A great artist, indubitably; but also a dangerous infantilist, whose view is time and time again over-simplified and damaging. How do we look at him?

Comments

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Both "The Three Little Pigs" and "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (original by Goethe) predate the Great Depression, as do their morals. The former seems to emphasize the value of doing the job right instead of slacking off, while the latter is a cautionary tale of patience and not exceeding the limits of your training. Lucian wrote something similar as well.

Hence, do we know with reasonable certainty that Disney intended The Sorcerer's Apprentice to make everyone feel coddled by a daddy figure? All cartoons of the time would have been intended as some sort of psychological escapism from the problems of the real world, many of which would have been portrayed in news programs just prior in the theater. But does emotional respite equate to infantilism?

Likewise, do we know that Disney meant for the Three Little Pigs cartoon to be a reprimand against people who were poor for their laziness? Or was it instead a call for people to work hard even in the midst of the Depression? Or was it just a (sanitized) version of a fairy tale?

I tend to be wary of projecting intended meanings onto art without some sort of evidence beyond personal interpretation, which often varies from viewer to viewer. (An example is "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", which has had no end of film critics analyzing what the director's message was, even when the director, main actor, and even the original author himself said it was just for entertainment.)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Tsk tsk. Disney's Three Little Pigs definitely is nothing like the Grimm brothers', in which the two stupid pigs are eaten and the smart pig ends up eating the wolf. Not, of course, that Disney would ever have conceived any such treatment; but the fact is that that particular Grimm tale - there are others that are widely different - is really about animals, and pigs are omnivorous. The same reason why Disney murdered Kipling's Jungle Book: Kipling's characters really are animals, not ersatzes for human behaviour. Kaa is not wicked, even though at one point he is within an inch of eating both Baloo and Bagheera; that is just what he does as a snake. Disney's Kaa, on the other hand, is the kind of human being that other humans call a snake in the grass. And so on. So, for a start, one thing is certain: Disney is ALWAYS about human behaviour. His animals are nothing more than animal masks. And come on, let us be serious: in the year of the Lord 1933, after the two successive economic catastrophes of 1929 and 1931, who on Earth could possibly speak as though "when the wolf comes to your door" was a distant and hypothetical notion? The wolf was at the door of most Americans then and there; indeed, of most human beings who had in any way to do with the money economy across the world. In a situation like that, when every spectator is likely to be worried about whether his home will be repossessed and whether his job is safe, to tell people to their face that the people who had the wolf at their door and had been incapable of resisting said wolf had only themselves to blame means to blame the victims. I don't see how anyone can argue otherwise. Disney wasn't living on the Moon, any more than the rest of Broadway and Hollywood were. Every movie of the time, if you pay attention, is full of hints of the ongoing disaster, even the most supposedly escapistic. What do you think Fred and Ginger (and Irving Berlin) meant by this:

"There may be trouble ahead... Before the fiddlers have fled, before they ask us to pay the bill, and while we still have a chance..." Positively ominous words. It makes as much sense to imagine that they refer to anything vague and general, as to think the same of Disney's wolf at the door.

As for The Sorcerer's Apprentice, sure it comes from a poem by Goethe. But the realization is purely Disney, in the film which Disney intended as the peak of his own career as an artist if not as a businessman; and it never has been truer than in his case, that "everything Miss X eats becomes Miss X". The Disney version of Pinocchio is never revived or shown in Italy, because it is so distant from the universally beloved Italian children's classic. And in this case too the genius of Goethe is as relevant to Disney's short as that of Kipling to The Jungle Book, of Carlo Collodi to Pinocchio, of PL Travers to Mary Poppins. PL Travers hated what he had done with her Mary Poppins and was never reconciled to the film to the very end of her life - she got the chance to tell Disney to his face; Kipling, Goethe and Collodi did not, they were dead already. Disney ALWAYS went against the original author's wishes; it's an absolute regularity. We must speak of Disney's work, period. And my argument is that, unlike the evident case of The Three Little Pigs, the emotional content of the Fantasia scene is not consciously intended. It is a function of the images that occurred to Disney and to his team of geniuses, and the more significant for that.

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

I indicated the stories were "sanitized" for a reason: it is undeniable that Disney modified the original tales, often to make them less violent (why do so many of these fairy tales involve one side eating the other...?), among other things.

Yet interpretations of them vary. Kelton Cobb's "The Blackwell Guide to Theology and Popular Culture" (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) interprets "Three Little Pigs" as "battling urban industrialism with the ideals of agrarian and rural values...and is seen as a possible mobilizing force in American society that may have catalyzed demands for solutions to the Depression such as the New Deal." He also notes that "Whose afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" became a theme song for people trying to overcome the Depression, offering an interpretation of industriousness as a cure for the economic hard times as opposed to sloth as its cause. A populist like disney may very well have been more likely to blame the banks than the workers or at least farmers, after all. On the other hand, a 'survival of the fittest' motif has also been suggested which would be closer to the interpreation you put forth.

As for "sorcerer's apprentice", it should be noted that Disney's face was used as a model for the sorcerer himself. Such self insertion might suggest Disney's own feelings of paternalism over his company, or perhaps the audience, or even just Mickey Mouse (who, it could be argued, might have been a projection or persona of Disney himself in some ways).

Which of these interpretations is correct? They, including yours, make sense in some way given the film and its zeitgeist. I'm not about to speculate, though, since we cannot know for sure without testimony from those personally involved.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Not all interpretations are of equal value. Kelton Cobb sounds like he had a bee in his bonnet about rural America. Of course the pigs and the wolf are all dressed in obviously rural outfits, but there is no counterpart, nothing whatever to signify the urban; if you mean the Big Bad Wolf, he, with those sloppy trousers held up by a buttoned strip of cloth, is even more rural than the clever pig, with his workman's overall that would look well in a factory. In other words, utter nonsense; and as for rural values serving as a rallying cry for the New Deal, I don't believe Disney even supported Roosevelt. He was certainly a very black sheep in the pinkish Hollywood herd, giving scandal by being the only moviemaker to welcome the visiting Leni Riefenstahl after the scandal of Kristallnacht, opposing unionization to the point of internal warfare, and leading the anti-Communist pack after 1948. Some New Dealer!

Mickey Mouse notoriously was a projection of Disney, much more so, in fact, than heroes generally are of their creators. (CS Lewis absolutely denied that Ransom had anything to do with himself, and claimed to have based him on someone else, and he is hardly the only case.) Until very late in the day, Disney was the only person allowed to do his voice-overs, and that is his voice you hear at the end of the episode when Mickey compliments Stokowski. As for Disney being also the model for the sorcerer, I might suggest that this is more a comment of the other animators on the boss?

[blue-sky-day.livejournal.com]

As for "sorcerer's apprentice", it should be noted that Disney's face was used as a model for the sorcerer himself.

Not only that, but the sorcerer's official name was "Yesnid," which is pretty transparent.