Against Disney
Mostly, when we watch a movie, my children and I watch Studio Ghibli. The animation style is superior and the stories are excellent, but what I want to rant about today are the moral failings of children’s films. Yes, this is grouchy, reactionary stuff.
The standard in most children’s films is not set by children but by adults. Even pretty good films like Monsters Inc are full of jokes, references, etc. that are only there to keep the adults from being bored. This means the children are not really able to understand a lot of the movie. This adult-based perspective is why there is so much corny stuff in children’s movies. The imaginary friend in InsideOut is a candyfloss elephant with a Cheshire Cat tail called BingBong who likes having fun in imagination land. You know what most children have as an imaginary friend? Some child with a standard name. My children have Hamid and Fred. They mostly use them to cheat at card games.
This confection of whimsy is a second-rate, sentimental affront to the notion of childhood imagination. It comes from ideas about creativity that seem to prize exuberance and weirdness over making stuff. There is something high-status about being in an uncreative role but praising and prizing creativity. To be a lawyer is high-status; to be a lawyer who one day wants to make pottery, own a rare book store, or finally write your novel is higher-status. (Yes Toni Morrison said there’s a book in everyone, but Fran Leibowitz clarified that she didn’t mean for you to write it.)
This shallow view of creativity is imposed onto children, and made all cute and fancy—like the house in Up that gets carried away by balloons to a land of mountains and invented birds where everything that happens repeatedly denies the basic laws of physics. This is the equivalent of the creative department in an advertising agency all wearing shoes with zips on. It’s the sort of nonsense that made David Ogilvy hate the word creative.
Studio Ghibli never patronises children like this. Their protagonists scrub floors, earn money, become self-reliant, take risks, help their adults, strike bargains, do useful work, go on adventures, build flying machines. When they interact with magic, it is with the world of legend, myth, or fantasy magic. When they are not in a magical world, they operate in a manner that is plausible. Yes there is the usual movie-land level of dodging bullets, but no houses float with balloons. There is no sense that creativity means abandoning the usual constraints of the world or whimsically conglomerating loads of colourful stuff and giving it a silly name.
This matters because the bad sort of children’s movies set a poor moral example. Life is not a quest where you meet a candyfloss elephant and rescue the day with his rainbow rocket trolley. Floors need to be scrubbed. Singing emotional Disney songs with a goofy elk is not empowering. Empowering is leaving home at thirteen to spend a year training as a witch, establishing a small delivery business, and rescuing your friend from danger, while helping an old lady cook a pie.
In Studio Ghibli the line between good and evil is difficult to navigate, the cursed three act structure is often abandoned, sadness is not shied away from, and creativity is known for what is really is—creating, making, doing the work. The rest is noise, patronising, candyfloss, bing bong noise.
Would you say, a la Coleridge, that children's movies have a tendency to be fanciful as opposed to truly imaginative?
Disney movies seem to be syrrupy sweet and unrealistic in that sense, IMHO. But I can't agree totally with what you say. The cartoons I used to watch as a child (I'm over 70 now) were full of adult humour and violated basic laws of physics. Remember Wile E Coyote running off a cliff and standing in mid-air until he realized he was doing so, and only then falling? As for imaginary friends, one of my kids had a pet monster and later an imaginary dragon. It would be a terrible shame if imagination were fettered by physical laws as we know them. The stories we grew up on certainly weren't circumscribed that way (e.g. Alice in Wonderland, Ali Baba, the Grimm stories.) And we had enough scrubbing floors in real life. We didn't need it in entertainment. If you want children to understand you have to work to get what you want, make their allowance dependant on chores. Don't expect movies to give them their moral training. That's for parents to do. Don't fetter their imaginations. Without imagining what seems to violate the physical laws we know, we'd still be waiting for someone to invent a round thing that rotates so we don't have to drag heavy loads. Every forward leap we've made is because someone imagined something everyone else said was impossible.