A Sense-of-Wonderful Century. Gary Westfahl
effects. As Kingsley Amis notes while discussing devotees of science fiction in New Maps of Hell (1960), “to feel that what one is doing is the most important thing in the world is not necessarily undignified, and indeed is perhaps more rather than less likely to lead to good work being done.”5 One danger to editors of an encyclopedia of animated movies would be a nascent inferiority complex, the feeling that one is analyzing movies which have never been taken seriously and may not deserve to be taken seriously; and such thoughts might subconsciously weaken one’s determination to do one’s very best work. But grand reference books require editors with grand ambitions who fervently wish to present grand claims about their subject matter. Therefore, to be a truly superior reference work, an encyclopedia of animated movies might fruitfully and energetically maintain that it is a book devoted to the best, and to the most significant, movies of them all.
4. See Aristotle, Poetics, translated by S. H. Butcher, introduction by Frank Fergusson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), passim.
5. Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 52.
3. 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