Word: disneyisms
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This week's example: Pocahontas, the handsome, deeply felt, even more deeply reverent animated musical from the Walt Disney Co. In retelling and retooling the 17th century encounter between the Powhatan princess and English Captain John Smith, the film takes the American Indians' self-image at face value. These are men of probity, women of dignity, curators of the land, weavers of white magic. Their standoff with the white man is one of eco-heroes vs. strip miners, defenders of an idyllic homeland against greedy invaders...
...John Smith -- with whom she did not have a romance (though she did marry an Englishman and move to London). "I wish they would take the name Pocahontas off that movie," Shirley "Little Dove" Custalow McGowan, a storyteller of the Powhatan nation and for a time a Disney consultant on the picture, told the Washington Post. On the other side, Russell Means, the Wounded Knee insurgent who provided the voice of Chief Powhatan, said, "It is the finest film ever done in Hollywood on the Native American experience...
...takes the side of every available underdog: the working-class English sailors fighting the avaricious aristocrat, the Indian conservators over the white predators, the female spirit of conciliation over the male itch to resolve every dispute by going to war. Boldly eco-liberal, Pocahontas even pokes fun at the Disney Co.'s recent attempt to buy Virginia land and build a historical theme park, Disney's America, not far from Jamestown. "With all ya got in ya, boys,/ Dig up Virginia, boys!" sings Ratcliffe, as his toadying manservant sculpts exotic animal topiary of the sort found at every Disney park...
...problem. For instance, he criticized two Warner movies -- Natural Born Killers (a box-office success) and True Romance (a flop), both based on stories by Quentin Tarantino -- but ignored Tarantino's critically acclaimed but equally violent Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, both released by Miramax, a division of Walt Disney Co. Disney also owns Hollywood Records, whose performers include such controversial rappers as Prince Akeem...
Amid the latest hoo-ha and brouhaha about toxic culture, a media maven is led to wonder: Has Bob Dole ever read his kids a fairy tale? Or sung a nursery rhyme? Or seen a classic Disney cartoon? In Hansel and Gretel, Jack and Jill, Bambi and Dumbo, the obsessive themes are death and dismemberment. These graphic horror stories tell toddlers that life is a dark forest where parents get killed and kids get eaten. As purveyors of Dole's "nightmares of depravity," Warner Bros. ain't a patch on the Grimm Bros...