Word: disneyized
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Later, when Disney started to make animated features, the best of them unpretentiously, perhaps unconsciously touched the great mythic themes: they were tales of loss and of quests, and even their most comic moments were haunted by weird and frightening figments of untrammeled imaginations...
...amusement parks. They are clean, bright, and-to some specialists-models of sensible urban design. But their rides and electronic puppet shows are plasticized, sanitized pseudo experiences, pedestrian reductions of fantasies and adventures. They boggle the mind without stimulating it. The same is true of latter-day Disney movies, often set either in a small-town America entirely detached from what is left of that old reality or in a scrubbed-up version of a turn-of-the-century world that feeds the nation's nostalgia for what it fondly-if erroneously-believes were simpler, better times. Setting aside...
They cannot articulate it, but children do know when they are presented with inauthentic experiences, when the scary stuff is not really scary and the funny stuff is not really funny. One has only to compare reactions to recent Disney releases with the delicious shudders and joyful yelps with which another generation greeted Snow White or Pinocchio to see how the studio's work has declined-and how willingly parents settle for anything it cares to hand them...
...steady competition from other entertainment entrepreneurs and no serious, sustained criticism from an intellectual community that has its eye on what it thinks are loftier matters (there was a time when figures like Edmund Wilson and Mark Van Doren did not consider it beneath them to comment on Disney creations). Partly it is because the general audience has allowed itself to believe that the acceptable range for family fare is a narrow one, encompassing cuddly animals, bland costume pictures enlivened by painfully obvious song-and-dance numbers, and not much else The enthusiastic reception for the older, gutsier Disney features...
...Disney's rural dream fades further and further from living memory, as each succeeding generation of children grows more sophisticated in its tastes, it seems likely that the Disney organization will gradually have to change the formulas for its line of plastics. That would be no bad thing, for it has always seemed a shame that this magnificent machinery, with its enormous potential for excitement and won der, should confine itself to the middle and lower cultural ranges. It would be delightful to see it run risky and frisky - the way it did when everyone called its founder "Walt...