Читать книгу A Sense-of-Wonderful Century - Gary Westfahl - Страница 8
Оглавление3. COMING OF AGE IN FANTASYLAND: THE SELF-PARENTING CHILD IN WALT DISNEY ANIMATED FILMS
(with Lynne Lundquist)
In recent studies of children’s literature, it has become commonplace to assert that a work is “subversive” in one way or another, so this once-alarming claim may have lost all capacity to shock or surprise—unless, perhaps, the charge is aimed at a body of works which are universally regarded as extremely conservative and conventional in every way: the traditional Walt Disney animated films, which dominated family entertainment from the 1930s to the early twenty-first century.
Indeed, if one wants entertainment that affirms “traditional family values,” there would seem to be no better place to look than Disney, since no other company has so vigorously promoted itself as a purveyor of wholesome, family-oriented movies. Yet if we examine the most well-known and popular of its films—the full-length animated features—we discover one curious feature: in these films purportedly about family values, there are no families—at least in the way that they are typically defined: a mother and father, often accompanied by siblings, grandparents, or other relatives, who both nurture and control their children. Instead, in these films, we find children who are separated or estranged from their families, or children living in various types of shattered or dysfunctional families. And this in itself suggests that these apparently innocuous and unthreatening films may conceal a troubling and subversive subtext.6
Examining first the major human characters in these animated films, we notice numerous orphans, or children who lack parents: Pinocchio (1939), magically brought to life by the Blue Fairy without genuine parents; Peter Pan (1953), of course; Arthur in The Sword in the Stone (1963); Mowgli in The Jungle Book (1966); Penny in The Rescuers (1976); Taran in The Black Cauldron (1984); Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid (1989); Aladdin (1992); and Tarzan (1999).
Next, there are children with single parents. Strangely—a point to study later—there is only one child with a single mother, Cody in The Rescuers Down Under (1990), though two adaptations of famous fairy tales, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Cinderella (1950), feature daughters with single stepmothers. And there are boys or young men with single fathers—Prince Charming in Cinderella and Prince Phillip in Sleeping Beauty (1958); boys with single foster fathers—such as Pinocchio and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996); and daughters with single fathers—such as Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Belle in Beauty and the Beast (1991), Princess Jasmine in Aladdin, Pocahantas (1995), and Mulan (1998).
Finally, there are children with parents who appear distant or uninvolved. The parents of Wendy, John, and Michael of Peter Pan seem loving and devoted, but they do regularly leave their children in the care of a dog, and they leave the children unprotected and go out on an evening when a visit from a mysterious stranger seems imminent. Alice in Wonderland (1951) has a normal set of parents, we assume, but they are not observed; instead, we only see Alice being supervised by an older sister. The parents of Princess Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty, agree to let three fairies take their infant daughter and raise her until the age of sixteen, so they are voluntarily not part of her young life. And the parents of the girl in Oliver and Company (1988) have gone on an extended trip—something they do habitually—leaving her in the care of servants.7
Confronted with this pattern of absent or broken families, one could respond with two ameliorative explanations. First would be that Disney writers and animators are simply controlled by their source materials, which often stipulate unusual situations, so the reason for these odd families must be sought in the original texts, not the film adaptations. In some cases, this is surely true, and it is hard to imagine, for example, how one might adapt Cinderella, Peter Pan, or Tarzan so as to provide the title characters with a normal set of parents. But in other cases the explanation will not hold: a few films, like Oliver and Company and The Rescuers Down Under, are basically original creations,8 while in other films, the source materials do not demand an unusual family structure. The story of “Sleeping Beauty” does not state that the princess grew up away from her parents, and neither Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” nor the histories of Pocahantas stipulate that the heroine lacks a mother. Most strikingly, while all other versions of the Aladdin story include Aladdin’s mother as an active character, the Disney version removes her from the scene; far from being forced to rely on a story about an orphan, here the animators contradicted their source material and deliberately made their protagonist an orphan. Also, there are any number of familiar fairy tales with more conventional families—including “Rumpelstiltskin,” “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” “The Princess and the Pea,” and “King Thrushbeard”—that the Disney company has scrupulously avoided, as if there were some desire to avoid depicting normal families.
A second explanation would be that these absent or shattered families are presented to evoke a sense of pathos, so young characters quickly earn the audience’s sympathy because they lack normal parents. Again, there is some truth in this response; but again, it is not wholly satisfactory, for there are other devices for separating children from parents—misunderstandings, accidents, or criminal activities—involving no permanent disruption of the family unit. But the characteristic strategy of Disney animated films is final or injurious separation. How funny would Home Alone (1990) have been if Kevin’s parents had died, or if his parents had deliberately left him alone? However, such permanent or willful parental absence is exactly the sort of situation that often confronts a child at the start of a Disney film.
We are driven, then, to this hypothesis: that the preferred premise for writers and animators who create these films is the destroyed or shattered family, and the characteristic problem confronting their young characters is the need to compensate for their irremediable lack of one or both of their parents.
Children and young people in Disney animated films employ two strategies to replace their absent or inadequate families. The first could be described as a reconciliation with nature: without nurturing support from parents, the young person turns to the natural world, to sympathetic and often anthropomorphic animals who can provide that support. Thus, after fleeing through a stormy forest, Snow White is surrounded by forest animals who comfort her. When the Blue Fairy brings Pinocchio to life, she appoints an insect named Jiminy Cricket to serve as his mentor and companion. Arthur of The Sword in the Stone, when he travels to London, is supervised by a talking owl. Mowgli of The Jungle Book is raised by wolves and later guided by a bear and a panther, just as Tarzan is raised by apes. Penny of The Rescuers is helped by two mice, Bernard and Miss Bianca, from the Rescue Aid Society. King Triton of The Little Mermaid at one time appoints the crab Sebastian to serve as his daughter’s guardian. Cody of The Rescuers Down Under bonds with a mighty mother eagle, and is later rescued by Bernard and Miss Bianca.9 (Other animals in Disney films also provide support, though they are admittedly more like friends than parents: Princess Aurora of Sleeping Beauty frolics with some forest animals; the girl in Oliver and Company turns to the kitten Oliver for companionship; Ariel, The Little Mermaid, has a flounder and seagull as her friends; Aladdin has a pet monkey, Abu, while Princess Jasmine has a protective pet tiger named Rajah; Pocahantas has a rambunctious pet raccoon; and Mulan is assisted by a small dragon.)
The other strategy is to seek out or find a surrogate parent—a friendly adult, typically a magical being who can provide the support and guidance of a parent. Snow White finds the Seven Dwarfs to protect her from the Queen, Pinocchio is adopted by the woodcutter Geppetto, and Cinderella finds a Fairy Godmother. Peter Pan enjoys the help of the adult Tinker Bell, who saves him from the scheme of Captain Hook. Aurora of Sleeping Beauty is raised by motherly fairies. Arthur of The Sword in the Stone is taken in by Merlin the Magician; Taran in The Black Cauldron finds a sorcerer to serve as a father figure; Aladdin stumbles upon a friendly genie to help him woo Princess Jasmine; and Pocahantas obtains advice and guidance from an ancient talking tree, Mother Willow.
All of these developments might serve as a transitional stage, a way to temporarily help children deal with an unpleasant situation until their normal family can be restored, or until a new normal family can be created. And the films where human characters are subordinate to animal characters—like The Rescuers, Oliver and Company, and The Rescuers Down Under—may move to this kind of conclusion: after being helped by Bernard and Miss Bianca, Penny is adopted by two loving parents; after the crisis provoked by her pet cat, the girl in Oliver and Company is reunited with her parents; and although Cody in The Rescuers Down Under is last seen as the triumphant master of his natural realm, riding the mighty eagle to America, we assume he will soon be reunited with his mother.
However, in other Disney animated films, something different happens: the children’s mentors do not give way to true parents and do not retain the role of surrogate parents. Instead there occurs a role reversal: while animals and magical adults first appear in parental roles, the children later assume parental roles, with the animals and adults recast as their children. In effect, children manage to construct their own families, with themselves as parents.
The pattern is twice enacted in the first Disney animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When they first appear, the forest animals comfort Snow White when she is sadly crying in the forest; but after she wakes up and becomes a little more cheerful, she takes charge of the animals and issues commands as they clean up the dwarfs’ cottage. Similarly, Snow White initially appeals to the dwarfs for protection against the Queen; then she begins to act like their mother—cooking their meals, scolding them to wash their hands before eating, and kissing them goodbye as they go off to work.
The ostensible child who functions as a parent is also seen in the second Disney animated film, Pinocchio. Although Jiminy is assigned to be Pinocchio’s conscience, the puppet-boy completely ignores him, never asks for advice, and goes where he pleases, leaving the cricket to literally and figuratively play the role of Pinocchio’s follower throughout the film. Pinocchio twice disobeys Geppetto by not going to school and instead joining Stromboli’s puppet show and visiting Pleasure Island. Even at the end of the film, when Pinocchio has apparently reformed, he is still willful and disobedient: without asking permission or explaining himself, he sets fire to Geppetto’s boat so as to provoke the whale Monstro to sneeze; and later, when the drowning Geppetto tells Pinocchio to leave him and save himself, the boy disobeys him and rescues the woodcutter. From the beginning to the end of the film, Pinocchio is completely in control of his own actions, and Jiminy Cricket and Geppetto are little more than his puppets.
Similar role reversals occur in other animated films. Despite their careful parenting, the fairies in Sleeping Beauty cannot prevent Aurora from falling in love with a handsome stranger. Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther of The Jungle Book are powerless to keep Mowgli from doing what he wants; Ariel does what she pleases, despite the advice of her aquatic friends; Aladdin soon learns how to manipulate and control his genie; and Pocahantas becomes an assertive voice for peace in her tribe. The most extreme case is The Sword in the Stone: when young Arthur announces that he is going to London against Merlin’s wishes, the magician angrily vanishes, abandoning his parental role and leaving Arthur completely in control of his own actions; the owl Archimedes tries to replace Merlin as tutor and guide but remains subordinate to Arthur; and Arthur then pulls the sword from the stone and becomes King of England—making himself the ultimate parental figure.
A variation of the pattern is seen in Cinderella and Peter Pan. Here, the child is first seen already in a position of dominance; that is, while Cinderella may have initially turned to the household animals to console her in her times of unhappiness, like Snow White, by the time the movie begins she has established herself as their parent, feeding, dressing, and fussing over them. Similarly, Peter Pan was no doubt a rather helpless figure when he first came to Neverland, but at the start of the film, he is the leader of the Lost Boys and master of Tinker Bell. In these films, the crucial action is a crisis which temporarily returns the child-parent to the status of a child, so that animals and magical beings must temporarily resume the role of parents: so when Cinderella is reduced to despair because she has no dress for the ball, the mice and birds come to her rescue by crafting a beautiful dress for her; and when Peter Pan naïvely opens the deadly present from Captain Hook, Tinker Bell rushes to save him, like a good mother. However, when the crisis passes, Cinderella and Peter Pan return to their parental roles; indeed, it is interesting that in the one major change from J. M. Barrie’s original story, the Disney version of Peter Pan has the Lost Boys stay behind with Peter in Neverland, so that he can remain a dominant parental figure.
Far from affirming “traditional family values,” then, these animated films directly argue against those values. Their message is that parents are not in fact an important element in childhood: children can prosper without true parents or effective parents; and when they encounter parent-like figures, they can learn how to dominate and control those potential surrogate parents. In effect, children in Disney animated films create their own families and make themselves the parents of those families.
Some may not accept that these classic and beloved films are a functional assault on American family values; but the true test of a model is how well it explains otherwise puzzling aspects of its subject. And we can employ this model to propose solutions to a few problems raised by the Disney animated films.
The first problem has been alluded to: the peculiar and conspicuous absence of mothers in these films. This is crucial, for while fathers were once traditionally allowed to periodically leave the home or be absent for extended periods, the established role of the mother was to always be at home, nurturing the children and keeping the family functioning as a unit. Thus, removing the mother rather than the father—the usual preference in the films—is the strongest device for attacking the family. Yet these films rarely lack a strong female figure. However, a key transformation occurs: the mother figure is recast as a powerful villainess.
The transformation is transparent in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella, where the evil woman is a step-mother, not a true mother, but other films have domineering, malevolent women who are less obviously mothers in disguise—the Red Queen of Alice in Wonderland, the fairy Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, Madame Mim in The Sword in the Stone, Madame Medusa in The Rescuers, and Ursula in The Little Mermaid. Watching boys and girls without mothers struggling to free themselves from the evil machinations of powerful older women, we witness an enactment of children struggling to free themselves from their families, as personified by the figures who most strongly hold those families together, the mothers. In contrast, early Disney films featured relatively few male villains, with the prominent exceptions of Stromboli and the Coachman in Pinocchio and Captain Hook in Peter Pan, who in that film, as in the play, is a version of the children’s father, Mr. Darling (on stage, the same actor plays both roles, and in the Disney film, Hans Conreid provided the voice for both roles).
Yet an odd shift has occurred in recent Disney animated films, which also poses a problem: except for The Little Mermaid, these films focus on powerful male villains, warped transformations of the father figure: the Horned King in The Black Cauldron, Bill Sykes in Oliver and Company, McHeath in The Rescuers Down Under, Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, the Grand Vizier of Aladdin, the English colonialist of Pocahantas, Frollo of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hades in Hercules (1997),10 and the Hun Shan Yu in Mulan. Having relied on villainous women in previous films, why has the Walt Disney company suddenly shifted, in the last ten years, to an emphasis on villainous men?
Our answer is this: in recent times, the idealized image of the family has radically changed. Modern fathers are not supposed to be distant or absent, leaving mothers to care for and unite the family; instead, fathers are supposed to be intimately involved in all aspects of family life, participating as an equal in nurturing children and maintaining the family. So, at the very moment when the father has assumed a new prominence as an avatar of practicing family values, Disney animated films give new prominence to the evil, domineering male villain. This cannot be coincidental; rather, it must represent a recognition that a modern attack on family values must focus on the father as well as on the mother.
Our model may also offer some insight regarding what must be regarded as the strangest and most problematic of the Disney animated films, Alice in Wonderland. Based on a popular children’s classic, the film featured, as most critics would agree, many colorful and entertaining characters, some brilliantly creative animation, and a soundtrack filled with memorable songs. Thus, Alice in Wonderland should have been highly successful. However, it is widely viewed as Disney’s most spectacular failure: it was one of the few animated features that lost money on its initial release, the first such film to be shown on television (as early as 1954), and one of the few films that was never re-released to theaters. The question we must ask is: what’s wrong with this movie?
While other explanations have been offered, our model provides an answer: overly constrained by very familiar source material, Disney writers and animators could not make Alice in Wonderland fit the pattern of the family-creating, self-parenting child, so the film lacked appeal both to its creators and to its audiences.
At the start of the film, we see Alice as a young girl who wishes to follow in the footsteps of other Disney children. The first song she sings, “In a World of My Own,” may be the purest expression of the impulse that drives these independent youths:
Cats and rabbits
Would reside in fancy little houses
And be dressed in shoes and fancy trousers
In a world of my own.
All the flowers
Would have very extra-special powers;
I would sit and talk to them for hours
When I’m lonely in a world of my own....
I would listen to a babbling brook
And hear a song that I could understand.
I keep hoping it could be that way,
because my world would be a Wonderland.11
Like other Disney children, Alice is ready to abandon her family, at least temporarily, to establish rapport with anthropomorphic animals (and even plants) and to make herself a parent in her own world.
Unfortunately, Alice cannot accomplish these goals. She tries to establish sympathetic contact with the natural world, but the animals she encounters—the White Rabbit, the talking flowers, the caterpillar, and the Cheshire Cat—are either hostile or enigmatic. She encounters adults who might serve as surrogate parents—Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Mad Hatter, and the Red Queen—but these people are also unhelpful and sometimes maddening. Unable to dominate these animals or magical adults, or even to connect with them, Alice cannot begin to construct her own family with herself as a parent; and, late in the film, at a time when other Disney children have established themselves as the centers of their own families, we see Alice sitting alone in the forest, crying her heart out, in a scene not found in Carroll’s books which is an exact analogue to the forest scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As she cries, various baffling creatures surround her and cry sympathetic tears. But, as was not the case with Snow White, the creatures do not approach her, and Alice cannot parent them. Instead, they vanish, and she must travel by herself to another unsettling adventure. Unable to commune with or control her Wonderland, Alice must ultimately retreat, returning to her old life under the guidance of her older sister and finding, reassuringly, that her Wonderland was only a dream.
The odd thing is that Alice in Wonderland is also the one Disney film that offers a traditional message: “there’s no place like home.” To stay happy, Alice must remain at home, in what we presume is a normal family; if she goes away from home, she will only get in trouble, find no worthwhile friends, and feel lost and confused. This is, presumably, the messages that parents would want their children to hear; and it is surprising to find it only in a Disney movie that most critics and viewers despise.
Throughout the twentieth century, children have become more independent and more rebellious in dealing with their parents, and one posited explanation has always been the baleful influence of disreputable literature. There have been vigorous crusades to keep children away from pulp magazines, comic books, violent cartoons, and video games, all seen as causes of undesirable childhood or adolescent behavior. And during all these periods of alarm, Disney animated films were cast as wholesome, desirable alternatives to these despised examples of children’s subliterature. We suggest here that these films have in fact conveyed a subversive message of their own; and parents who insist upon blaming outside influences for their children’s bad conduct now have a new, and surprising, candidate for their concern and condemnation.12
6. In revisiting this essay, originally written in 1993 and updated in 1999, we have elected to avoid discussion of the Disney animated films of the last decade, which have increasingly featured computer-generated animation and often project a more sophisticated ambiance than the more traditional films that are considered here. However, we can note briefly that some of these more recent animated films, particularly The Princess and the Frog (2009) and Tangled (2010), do have definite resonances with their earlier counterparts discussed here.
7. Because we are interested in how the movies affect young viewers, we consider only human characters; animals, no matter how anthropomorphic, are unlikely to be influential role models. Yet animal characters do display irregular family structures: Dumbo (1941) has no father and is separated from his mother; Bambi (1942) loses his mother and sees his father only sporadically; The Aristocats (1970) are a single mother cat and her kittens; The Great Mouse Detective (1986) helps a little girl mouse find her single father; the cat in Oliver and Company is an orphan; and the eagle in The Rescuers Down Under is a single mother. These movies differ, though, in that the animal frequently not only marry—a typical conclusion in many Disney films—but also go on to have children and establish their own normal families, as in Lady and the Tramp (1955), 101 Dalmatians (1961), and The Lion King (1994).
8. Although Oliver and Company is derived, very loosely, from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838).
9. A variation in this pattern occurs in two films featuring artificial structures: Beauty and the Beast, largely set in the Beast’s mansion, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, largely set in a cathedral. Here the protagonist establishes rapport not with creatures from the natural world but man-made objects from the civilized world—a talking candlestick, clock, teapot, cup, and wardrobe for Belle, and three statues of gargoyles for Quasimodo.
10. Though this film does violate the pattern noted here in one key respect: the goddess Hera, formerly portrayed as Hercules’s vengeful, antagonistic stepmother, is recast as a loving mother, making this one case where Disney animators altered source material to strengthen a maternal relationship. Perhaps this was done to differentiate the film from the television series then on the air, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-1999), wherein an offstage Hera is a recurring villainess, or perhaps someone else complained about the absence of sympathetic mothers in Disney films, engendering this response.
11. Bob Hilliard, lyrics, Sammy Fain, music, “In a World of My Own” [song], Alice in Wonderland (Disney, 1950).
12. Some may argue these films are not truly “subversive”: all children like pretending to be parents, so films appeal to that desire by depicting children who pretend to be parents, and what’s subversive about that? However, just as children playing house must eventually return to their roles as children, films with youths acting as adults usually end with the characters returned to their previous status. In the Disney live-action film Pollyanna (1960), for example, young Hayley Mills first lords it over grumpy and confused adults, cheering them up and dispensing exactly the right advice to help them solve their problems. But at the end of the film, her aunt forbids her to attend a local fair, reminding everyone of her subordinate position; and when she attempts to defy her aunt by climbing out a window, she experiences a near-fatal fall. Again a vulnerable child, she recovers to learn that her aunt will now marry a suitor, providing her with a normal set of parents. As noted, animated films like The Rescuers and Oliver and Company also unite children with parents as the conclusion, and other live-action Disney films with animation—Song of the South (1946), Mary Poppins (1964), and Pete’s Dragon (1977)—similarly end with once-rambunctious children again supervised by parents. Only the animated films lack such humbling or restorative endings; the child becomes not a temporary parent, but a permanent parent. (Eric S. Rabkin suggested in conversation that audiences may find it easier to observe drastic role reversals involving animated characters, while they prefer more traditional resolutions in films that, while still fantastic, do feature live actors portraying children.)
