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.
It’s fine or even good to break the laws of physics but not in a fictional world that is generally bound by those laws. Magical stories are good; stories set in our word that casually disregard physics to be cute are not. Alice in Wonderland is explicitly not this world. Up is very in this world but with the idiotic and unexplained idea that a house can be floated with balloons. This sort of lazy thinking is the real imaginative fetter. Again monsters and dragons are real or semi real, they have internal consistency. Bing bong is just a nonsense creature made up by adults who don’t know what children’s imaginations are really like. It’s a confection of fluffy nonsense not actual imagination.
I should think Alice in Wonderland is indeed set in our world. Rabbit holes are very real, as are mirrors. What happens after she falls down or walks through is completely imaginary and breaks the laws we know. I haven't seen the movie you refer to, but really, is a house flying with the help of balloons all that different from a dirigible?
Alice is explicitly set outside our world, the text makes that clear. She passes through a portal, for one thing, as in Narnia etc. Oh yes it’s very different from a dirigible. Helium balloons cannot float a house out of its foundations and it’s silly to pretend otherwise without making a fantasy world. Even then. Realism and fantasy are both measured by the integrity of the world creation. Disney etc is given a free pass on this because we have philistine standards about art for children.
Reading it as a child, I certainly never took the rabbit hole or, for that matter, the mirror, to be a portal. To be honest, AIW drove me crazy when I was young, because it didn't make sense to me and there was nothing to indicate it was fantastical. I didn't have the same problem with, for instance, Goldilocks or the Musicians of Brehmen Town. Even as a fantasy, what happens in AIW doesn't make sense. Using a bird for a croquet mallet, for instance. My dreams are more coherent than that. But I do agree that realism and fatasy are both measured by the integrity of the world creation.
It’s one of my favourites. I hugely recommend “The Annotated Alice” which explains how Lewis used maths in the story. Fascinating.
Portal thing works just like narnia and others --- she crosses over into an entirely different world. She falls so slowly she has time to pick up jars etc on the way down with strange substances in. And she isn’t hurt when she lands. Talking rabbit with a watch is pretty fantastical!
You're analyzing it as an adult and as an adult I can agree with what you say. But as a child, I found it completely frustrating. Perhaps if I'd read it first as an adult, I could have appreciated the irony and commentary in it, but alas! I now have to overcome that childish antipathy..
This belongs on r/unpopularopinion. I had a viscerally negative reaction to this. Dunno whether that says more about me or the topic.
There is, of course, immense value in learning that is disguised as play. My parents had me playing educational video games up until middle school - I spent countless hours having a blast “gaming” as I did multiplication problems and learned world geography and history.
That said... what kind of crotchety bullshit is this? It seems unreasonably, unnecessarily toxic for no reason whatsoever.
Reactionary is precisely the correct term. Puritanical, as well. The idea that all activities should have ‘moral purpose’ is insane. It is actively harmful to a significant portion of the population. Lots of people like doing fun things because they are fun. Which is a more than good enough reason for doing them.
This type of worldview instills guilt and shame into children who are raised to think that everything they do must be optimized for a specific end goal.
That is an impossible standard. Your kids, your grandkids, nieces and nephews, neighbors kids, etc.... at least a few of the children in your life are going to find this point of view wildly against their inherent nature. They will do one of two things. Either they will rebel against everything you stand for - including all of the truly good, wise, and moral things you have to offer. Or, they will try to live up to your vision, and live their entire lives beating themselves up inside for failing to meet such a standard.
There is a place for whimsy and wonder in this world. This viewpoint is actively hostile to creativity.
Again, reactionary is a perfect word, because this is the classic reactionary mistake. Reactionaries cannot distinguish between things that they don’t like and things that are bad, or things that are not for them and things that are not for anybody, or things that are outside morality and things that are immoral.
You will note that my children do in fact watch the movies which I think are no good, otherwise how would I have written about them. I didn’t say everything should have a moral purpose, I implied, as I may have written elsewhere, that all art *does* have a moral purpose: it’s unavoidable. Nor do I argue against fun, play as learning, video games, etc etc
I agree about Ghibli movies being exceptionally good kids movies, but what's wrong with houses flying if it makes sense in that specific story? What's wrong with Paddington flying on a kite (and defying the laws of physics)? What's wrong with Mary Poppins jumping into paintings? These movies clearly don't have a realistic tone, you have to find the reality behind the magic because it's form. It's there to enhance the "moral" part, the arc. (I personally don't believe in moral examples neither in chilren's movies nor in any other movies)
As far as I'm concerned, if the characters, plot, theme etc. work cohesively and the house floating or the rainbow rocket trolley have a meaning inside the movie's world, it is a good movie.
And perhaps Up or Inside Out are not good movies (I don't really remember them), but I don't think it is because of that. Paddington has plenty of fantasy, is enjoyed by children and adults alike and I don't think you can argue it is a bad movie. (I don't want to sound categoric, I just feel very strongly about this subject)
Love this. I was just reviewing My Neighbour Totoro yesterday and you say much of what I adored about the movie. I wish I had gotten on to Studio Ghibli when my boys were young.
In Up the setting is the normal world but with once egregious breach of the rules of physics. Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky are clearly set in very different worlds. I’m not against fantasy—quite the opposite—the integrity of the world relies on consistency. What Pixar got wrong was to casually break the rules for purposes for whimsy.
Older children’s writers like Tolkien and Lewis were keen to follow your and Coleridge’s line that imagination is an echo in the finite mind of the infinite act of creation - ie consonant with reality - to be contrasted with ‘fancy’, which is unicorn hippos!
Suspension of disbelief isn’t a bad skill to learn, though - and houses floating on balloons is a good example of this. Otherwise, how will children make sense of the unrealities of the ‘adult’ world - you know, like Trump becoming president, Kavanaugh and Thomas still sitting on the Supreme Court, Boris Johnson being ... well, just Boris Johnson!
I actually have a (Japanese) student writing about this. I don’t think you’d be surprised that her explanation is the very different attitudes in child-rearing culture from the West. (Also, that even a modernized Shinto worldview or relationship with spirits/magic is closer to what we might think of in the West as a pagan moral ambiguity, different in a large degree from how Christianity co-opted European pagan traditions in a more saccharine way -> which you can already see happening in Hans Christian Andersen.)
I reckon no one wants to buy a pile of merch when the film is intellectually satisfying in and of itself. I think kids pester for merch when there's *something* there and they are trying to catch hold of it in the best way they know. So rubbish films with good characters and jokes to mollify the parents with the wallets are deliberate!
There's an excellent chapter by Timothy Laurie titled 'Becoming-Animal Is a Trap for Humans: Deleuze and Guattari in Madagascar' (In Roffe and Stark's 'Deleuze and the Non/Human, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) that touches on a lot of these same themes. Especially the heteronormative and anthropocentric way the animals in Disney/Pixar/et al films are used.
Would you say, a la Coleridge, that children's movies have a tendency to be fanciful as opposed to truly imaginative?
That’s more or less it yeh
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.
It’s fine or even good to break the laws of physics but not in a fictional world that is generally bound by those laws. Magical stories are good; stories set in our word that casually disregard physics to be cute are not. Alice in Wonderland is explicitly not this world. Up is very in this world but with the idiotic and unexplained idea that a house can be floated with balloons. This sort of lazy thinking is the real imaginative fetter. Again monsters and dragons are real or semi real, they have internal consistency. Bing bong is just a nonsense creature made up by adults who don’t know what children’s imaginations are really like. It’s a confection of fluffy nonsense not actual imagination.
I should think Alice in Wonderland is indeed set in our world. Rabbit holes are very real, as are mirrors. What happens after she falls down or walks through is completely imaginary and breaks the laws we know. I haven't seen the movie you refer to, but really, is a house flying with the help of balloons all that different from a dirigible?
Alice is explicitly set outside our world, the text makes that clear. She passes through a portal, for one thing, as in Narnia etc. Oh yes it’s very different from a dirigible. Helium balloons cannot float a house out of its foundations and it’s silly to pretend otherwise without making a fantasy world. Even then. Realism and fantasy are both measured by the integrity of the world creation. Disney etc is given a free pass on this because we have philistine standards about art for children.
Reading it as a child, I certainly never took the rabbit hole or, for that matter, the mirror, to be a portal. To be honest, AIW drove me crazy when I was young, because it didn't make sense to me and there was nothing to indicate it was fantastical. I didn't have the same problem with, for instance, Goldilocks or the Musicians of Brehmen Town. Even as a fantasy, what happens in AIW doesn't make sense. Using a bird for a croquet mallet, for instance. My dreams are more coherent than that. But I do agree that realism and fatasy are both measured by the integrity of the world creation.
It’s one of my favourites. I hugely recommend “The Annotated Alice” which explains how Lewis used maths in the story. Fascinating.
Portal thing works just like narnia and others --- she crosses over into an entirely different world. She falls so slowly she has time to pick up jars etc on the way down with strange substances in. And she isn’t hurt when she lands. Talking rabbit with a watch is pretty fantastical!
You're analyzing it as an adult and as an adult I can agree with what you say. But as a child, I found it completely frustrating. Perhaps if I'd read it first as an adult, I could have appreciated the irony and commentary in it, but alas! I now have to overcome that childish antipathy..
This belongs on r/unpopularopinion. I had a viscerally negative reaction to this. Dunno whether that says more about me or the topic.
There is, of course, immense value in learning that is disguised as play. My parents had me playing educational video games up until middle school - I spent countless hours having a blast “gaming” as I did multiplication problems and learned world geography and history.
That said... what kind of crotchety bullshit is this? It seems unreasonably, unnecessarily toxic for no reason whatsoever.
Reactionary is precisely the correct term. Puritanical, as well. The idea that all activities should have ‘moral purpose’ is insane. It is actively harmful to a significant portion of the population. Lots of people like doing fun things because they are fun. Which is a more than good enough reason for doing them.
This type of worldview instills guilt and shame into children who are raised to think that everything they do must be optimized for a specific end goal.
That is an impossible standard. Your kids, your grandkids, nieces and nephews, neighbors kids, etc.... at least a few of the children in your life are going to find this point of view wildly against their inherent nature. They will do one of two things. Either they will rebel against everything you stand for - including all of the truly good, wise, and moral things you have to offer. Or, they will try to live up to your vision, and live their entire lives beating themselves up inside for failing to meet such a standard.
There is a place for whimsy and wonder in this world. This viewpoint is actively hostile to creativity.
Again, reactionary is a perfect word, because this is the classic reactionary mistake. Reactionaries cannot distinguish between things that they don’t like and things that are bad, or things that are not for them and things that are not for anybody, or things that are outside morality and things that are immoral.
You will note that my children do in fact watch the movies which I think are no good, otherwise how would I have written about them. I didn’t say everything should have a moral purpose, I implied, as I may have written elsewhere, that all art *does* have a moral purpose: it’s unavoidable. Nor do I argue against fun, play as learning, video games, etc etc
Well. I certainly agree about the Ghibli team; beautiful and exceptional! My all time fav Ghibli is "The Princess Kaguya"--what a stunning film!
I agree about Ghibli movies being exceptionally good kids movies, but what's wrong with houses flying if it makes sense in that specific story? What's wrong with Paddington flying on a kite (and defying the laws of physics)? What's wrong with Mary Poppins jumping into paintings? These movies clearly don't have a realistic tone, you have to find the reality behind the magic because it's form. It's there to enhance the "moral" part, the arc. (I personally don't believe in moral examples neither in chilren's movies nor in any other movies)
As far as I'm concerned, if the characters, plot, theme etc. work cohesively and the house floating or the rainbow rocket trolley have a meaning inside the movie's world, it is a good movie.
And perhaps Up or Inside Out are not good movies (I don't really remember them), but I don't think it is because of that. Paddington has plenty of fantasy, is enjoyed by children and adults alike and I don't think you can argue it is a bad movie. (I don't want to sound categoric, I just feel very strongly about this subject)
Houses don’t float on balloons and it’s silly to pretend they do without introducing some sort of magic whereas Mary Poppins uses magical elements.
Okay, I understand.
Can I ask what your favourite Ghibli movies are?
Totoro, Ponyo, Howl, Kiki, Castle in the Sky--but we love so many of them!
Love this. I was just reviewing My Neighbour Totoro yesterday and you say much of what I adored about the movie. I wish I had gotten on to Studio Ghibli when my boys were young.
They’ll come back to it. Totoro is for all ages!
I'm not sure a floating house is particularly less realistic than a house with legs or a floating island. Did we watch the same Ghibli?
In Up the setting is the normal world but with once egregious breach of the rules of physics. Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky are clearly set in very different worlds. I’m not against fantasy—quite the opposite—the integrity of the world relies on consistency. What Pixar got wrong was to casually break the rules for purposes for whimsy.
Reactionary that I am, really enjoyed this Henry!
Older children’s writers like Tolkien and Lewis were keen to follow your and Coleridge’s line that imagination is an echo in the finite mind of the infinite act of creation - ie consonant with reality - to be contrasted with ‘fancy’, which is unicorn hippos!
Yes they should teach Coleridge in film school!
Suspension of disbelief isn’t a bad skill to learn, though - and houses floating on balloons is a good example of this. Otherwise, how will children make sense of the unrealities of the ‘adult’ world - you know, like Trump becoming president, Kavanaugh and Thomas still sitting on the Supreme Court, Boris Johnson being ... well, just Boris Johnson!
Suspension of disbelief applies very well to Ghibli. It’s to do with the use of the fantastical not the idiotic.
Fantastic idiocy?
Fantastic=phantasmagoria, spiritual, ghostly etc.
Idiocy=floating a house on balloons.
I actually have a (Japanese) student writing about this. I don’t think you’d be surprised that her explanation is the very different attitudes in child-rearing culture from the West. (Also, that even a modernized Shinto worldview or relationship with spirits/magic is closer to what we might think of in the West as a pagan moral ambiguity, different in a large degree from how Christianity co-opted European pagan traditions in a more saccharine way -> which you can already see happening in Hans Christian Andersen.)
I would love to read her work!
I reckon no one wants to buy a pile of merch when the film is intellectually satisfying in and of itself. I think kids pester for merch when there's *something* there and they are trying to catch hold of it in the best way they know. So rubbish films with good characters and jokes to mollify the parents with the wallets are deliberate!
You can buy totoro toys
It's not like the Marvel Industrial Complex though!
There's an excellent chapter by Timothy Laurie titled 'Becoming-Animal Is a Trap for Humans: Deleuze and Guattari in Madagascar' (In Roffe and Stark's 'Deleuze and the Non/Human, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) that touches on a lot of these same themes. Especially the heteronormative and anthropocentric way the animals in Disney/Pixar/et al films are used.
Excellent I shall have to read it thank you!