The giant mouse in the corner

In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, I was trawling Facebook for a while in search of new cohorts, when I came across a page entitled the "anti-Disney Channel", which momentarily had me clapping my hands with glee.  I hate the Disney Channel with a fiery passion.  Their programming is dull and insipid, they're grossly manipulative of their target demographic, and when they show one of the old classics they put commercial breaks in the middle of big musical numbers (or change the lyrics to the opening song of Aladdin).  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

What I was hoping for was spirited and lively debate about how the Disney Channel fails to uphold dearly departed Walt's vision, perhaps some analysis of where the company went wrong, and some hearty villifying of the nightmare that is Hannah Montana (not Miley Cyrus: I may find the girl vapid but I've nothing against her personally - I'm talking about the nightmarishly prolific Hannah Montana franchise).  What I found instead were gems such as this:

Darth Mullette Disney made a disgrace out of awe adored Narnia novie which was original produced by a British film productions. I said, "WHAT!" When they allowed the girl too kiss the guy in Prince Caspian. I was overwhelemed by their lengthy battles. Alright, Cmon! we know whose going to win anyway.

15 April at 16:29

Or this lovely little number:

Gabry NinetySeven I am Gabriele I'm from Italy and I hate with all my soul Disney because I
have see his awful subliminal message.

30 March at 04:48

Or, in reference to the aforementioned Miss Cyrus:

Âññïë Bíllîé Gòméz Káúlítz Disney is approving of its child stars being abused and allowing Miley to pose somewhat nude.

21 March at 09:52

And my personal favourite:

Darth Mullette: "" Disney Made a disgrace of almost all the Narnia movie: Meanings where supposed to show the image of Christ. How defiled it was.

15 April at 16:31

I promised myself going into this I wouldn't make fun of people's names or mothers, but really, Darth Mullette?  If Star Wars were set in the Earth eighties?  "Back to the very far future or really distant past - Lucas never made it clear"?  Anyway, claws back in.


It's not my style to go storming into a forum like a cat-shaped troll and beat everyone over the head with a club that says "You Are All Idiots" - after all, opinion is opinion and no matter how vehemently I disagree I should at least respect that it comes from somewhere.  But I have to admit, I was tempted to bring out the YAAI club here.  I'm all for hating the Disney Channel, but right now I'm forced to admit that loving the good ol' DC bugs me considerably less than hating it for all the wrong reasons.  And with that in mind, I thought I'd use the pearls of wisdom above as a springboard to address the giant mouse in the corner, and explain why I so thoroughly despise the Walt Disney Company.

Let me get one thing straight.  In its heyday, the Disney Company changed the face of animation, and I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing.  It's impossible to imagine the landscape of animation without Disney in it, because Walt was there in almost the earliest days of the industry, and as soon as animation became a fully-fledged industry, Disney was there to start working on its monopoly.

Disney gained that early monopoly for good reason: it - and specifically Walt, at the beginning - was the very best as what it did.  Walt was a master storyteller, with a sense of pacing and narrative that few others in the industry could match.  He effortlessly tapped into the psyche of the children of the '30s, '40s and '50s, telling (or mostly retelling, because Disney stole material even more than Shakespeare did...wow, I missed an opportunity in my last post) stories that enthralled both children and their parents for decades.  A talented artist himself, Walt also surrounded himself with the greatest talent of the age, dedicating sometimes months of production time to education and training.  Every animator entering Walt's studio was thoroughly trained in "The Disney Way", giving Disney's works a cohesiveness that was lacking in the work of its contemporaries.  The vast majority of Disney's animated works, from the twenties through the mid-nineties (with a slump in the late seventies/early eighties) is stunning.  Even a handful of the live-action movies are extremely enjoyable: Newsies is a personal favourite of mine, and who doesn't cry watching Old Yeller?


I don't hate Disney's movies.  Well, not all of them.  Many of them I love.  To date, The Lion King ties with Grave of the Fireflies for the only two animated movies that have ever brought me to tears, and I'm not a movie crier.  The level of technical innovation that went into Bambi and Snow White is just astounding.  The world of animation would be a far sorrier place without Disney in it.  But here's the thing.  Disney was good.  Disney was brilliant.  Disney was the best at what it did, and Disney reaped ample reward for being so damn good.  But Disney was not perfect.


Walt recognised early on that animation speaks to children.  Bright colours and exaggerated movement are better at holding short attention spans (this was especially true in the early days of colour), and animation's having no need to conform to the rules of the physical world made it an ideal medium for fairy tales and children's stories.  Remember, we're talking the thirties here: special effects for live-action films were still in their infancy.  Now, I'm not sure whether this was smart marketing or personal principles, or a combination of the two, but, recognising how appropriate an audience children were, Walt went to extreme lengths to keep that audience happy, and thus began the process I like to call "Disneyfication".  Endings were altered.  Adult themes were removed.  The version of Pinocchio that made it to theatres might be shocking to an audience today (children smoking and drinking, not to mention being turned into donkeys and shipped off to the salt mines), but I challenge anyone who hasn't already to go read the book and then tell me Disney didn't tone it down one heck of a lot.  Sure, Bambi's mother dies, but almost every woodland creature in the original novel gets violently mutilated and killed.


By Cinderella in 1950, even these minor concessions to adult themes in the source material were gone.  Animators would occasionally try to slip one by the master, drawing in a single frame of something lewd somewhere that would be invisible to the naked eye at twenty-four frames per second, but Walt had an eagle eye and always caught it.  A chance miss of a blurrytopless woman in a frame or two of The Rescuers had copies being recalled in bulk from the shelves when the picture was discovered.  Walt went to extraordinary lengths to keep every production one hundred per cent child-friendly, and by the time he died in 1966, the Walt Disney Company had the family demographic in the palm of its hand.


Disney wasn't the only company working in animation from the thirties to the seventies, but it was the biggest and it was the best.  Occasional attempts at more adult animation from other studios, like Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat, tended either to fail dramatically, or, like the aforementioned Fritz, to be unexpected and unrepeated flukes.  Anyone not trying (and, unfortunately, largely failing) to break Disney's mould, was tryingto copy Disney's success.  Disney's immensely popular Silly Symphonies series spawned the rival Merrie Melodies from Warner, Color Rhapsodies from Columbia, Happy Harmonies from MGM and Looney Tunes, also from Warner.  There may have been others.  The Disney musical became the template for animated features.  Studios don't like taking risks, so, seeing Disney's success in its chosen market, the other studios decided to go where the money was, and followed right along into almost exclusive production of children's movies.  By the seventies, American animation had been firmly compartmentalised as a children's medium.


Why is that the first of the three big reasons I hate Disney?  Well, I've droned on far too long for now, so I'll give you the answer next time.  Until then, this is Copyright Cat, signing off.