Parents don't smell a rat at Disney
Parents don't smell a rat at Disney
By William Langley
Filed: 28/07/2002
(The Sunday Telegraph) -- A few days after September 11, President George W Bush, with a rattled nation to reassure, spotted the obvious straw to clutch at: "Get on down to Disneyland with your families," he said. Given that the park was closed, and there were no flights anyway, Bush took a pasting for this piece of advice, but I could see he was thinking clearly. Walt's magic would make everything all right.
It isn't hard to guess where Dr Rowan Williams, the 52-year-old, Disney-bashing new Archbishop of Canterbury, would have directed the anxious masses. But filling empty churches is his job, and you have to hope his talent for it exceeds his understanding of the meaning of Disney.
In a book regurgitated by The Times last week, Dr Williams argued - reasonably enough - that children are more susceptible to commercial exploitation than they used to be. But he singled out the Disney Corporation for having taken the techniques of parting kiddies from their money (actually, their parents' money) "to an unprecedented pitch of professionalism". He's a decent man, and if that is what he thinks, fine. Here's what I think.
Those of us with small children to raise live under a permanent barrage of mind-rotting, sub-educative dross, from which - for the most part - Disney's products provide small outposts of relief. In an age when even switching on the television is tantamount to cultural terrorism against your own offspring, you can slip a Disney video in the slot and sit back with something approaching a clear conscience.
And guess what? The children love these films! Oh, there are other things to watch in our house, but it's Peter Pan, The Sword in the Stone, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio and, more recently, the brilliantly innovative Toy Story films, that the children are drawn back to.
Now two particular consequences arise from Disney's rare ability to supply entertainment of this quality. One is that parents tend to form a special bond of trust with the company. The other is that they get royally soaked for doing so. Absolutely nothing Disney produces comes cheap; not the videos, not the theme parks, certainly not the toys and spin-offs.
Dr Williams, perhaps reflecting the parochial rigour of his Welsh roots, seems to think there is something immoral in the company's vigorous marketing of its talents, but - speaking as one of the soaked - I struggle to see why. No one still thinks that Disney consists of a couple of chaps with knobbly pipes and sleeveless cardigans, sketching fairies on drawing boards. It is a global mega-corporation with a furious hunger for profits and expansion. Mickey Mouse may be its public face, but "Give us the money or Bambi gets it" ought to be its motto.
Is there any real alternative to paying up? As a father and an occasional realist, I try to look at it this way; most children are bored some of the time. The rest are bored all the time. They say you are only young once, but they don't say how boring it's going to be.
If an available antidote to boredom comes with such desirable extras as positive messaging and a touch of moral guidance it is practically priceless. And Disney is very good at doing this. Take Cinderella; the first thing she does in the film - immediately upon waking up - is to make her bed. How much is an example like that worth?
Or consider if you will the costly heedlessness of Snow White, even after Doc the dwarf warned her: "The old Queen's a sly one - so beware of strangers."
Every parent drills the "beware of strangers" line into their children and we are still afraid that they don't take enough notice. But they might notice what happens to Snow White when a stranger - the evil Queen in disguise - slips her a poisoned apple. At the core of every Disney animated feature is the story of good's triumph over evil. And if it costs too much - well, I can think of worse rip-offs.
Perhaps Disney doesn't get it entirely right. The Jungle Book's a romp, with wonderful songs, but it's a travesty of Kipling. In the book, Mowgli, raised by the wolves, grows into the noble savage, transcending the animal universe and fulfilling his destiny by killing Shere Khan, the tiger.
"Brothers, that was a dog's death," he coldly tells the wolves. The merely rascally Shere Khan of the film not only survives but gives the impression of being ready to join his old adversary after the show for a rogan josh and a pint of Kingfisher.
Does this matter? It did to me until I found my seven-year-old with his face buried deep in Kipling's original text. "This is way scarier," he panted. And it was, but I doubt if he'd have got so far so soon without Disney.
Uncle Walt used to say: "I don't make movies for children, I make them for the child in everyone." He did, and it's just as well when you have to watch them as often as I do.
In attacking the Disney corporation, Rowan Williams, a social liberal and an outspoken advocate of gay and lesbian rights who has knowingly ordained a practising homosexual, would appear to be keeping some unlikely company. In the United States the corporation's noisiest critics have been religious conservatives, many of whom were outraged by Disney's decision, five years ago, to give equal pension and medical benefits to homosexual employees.
Since then several prominent conservative Christian groups have specialised in finding evidence of unwholesome and sacrilegious content in Disney films; the American Life League which is based in Virginia claimed that Ariel's wedding ceremony in The Little Mermaid showed the officiating bishop sporting a prominent erection, while the American Family Association of Washington, DC spotted in The Lion King a cluster of stars that appeared to blaze the message S-E-X across the darkened African skies.
In confining his criticism to Disney's voracious appetite for profits, Dr Williams is on slightly less shaky ground. The popular American novelist Carl Hiaasen recently wrote an enraged anti-Disney treatise - Team Rodent - which made much the same point. In fact, it made it considerably better than Dr Williams did, though in terms the Archbishop might shy away from. "If anything is more irresistible than Jesus," proclaimed Hiaasen, "it's Mickey."
Hiaasen's point was that Disney had gone beyond its mission to reflect its audience's values and was now imposing its own values on those audiences. Left unmolested, he warned, it would seek to turn the whole world into a vast, sanitised, de-sexed entertainment zone. To such secular critics, everyone who buys a piece of Disney is throwing away a piece of the future.
But isn't the alternative future already here? Isn't it legalised marijuana, and Big Brother on the television, and the collapse of civility? Take that as a package if you want to, but my money's on the mouse.
