Is it any wonder I get so animated?
THEY call themselves ‘Disney’ these days, but before Star Wars and Marvel superheroes filled the multiplexes, families used to go to the pictures to see a Walt Disney film.
For some reason (surprisingly they never asked my advice about rebranding) they dropped the first name of the man who created the company in the 1930s!
What sort of Mickey Mouse organisation would do that?
Up to the early 1990s, Walt Disney films usually came out for the summer holidays or at Christmas and were mostly live-action adventures or re-releases of favourites like Peter Pan or Cinderella.
As cartoon features took so long to make, audiences often waited two or three years for a new one, making them major events.
But now Disney, often in conjunction with Pixar, releases several animation films each year and has its own TV channel, which mixes new films and TV series with animation classics.
And it’s some of these classics that “two people with too much time on their hands” reckon “give out the wrong messages to modern children”.
Have they no idea what ‘modern children’ have access to on the internet?
Two American ‘theme park reviewers’ have criticised Disneyland’s new Snow White ride which ends with a variation on the kiss Prince Charming gives to the ‘sleeping’ Snow White.
In their words, “he kisses her without her consent, while she’s asleep, which cannot possibly be true love if only one person knows it’s happening,” adding, “haven’t we already agreed that consent in early Disney movies is a major issue? “Teaching kids that kissing, when it hasn’t been established if both parties are willing to engage, is not OK?” Which makes me wonder if they’ve actually seen the film or read the original fairy story – because at the end, Snow
White isn’t ‘sleeping’.
Having munched on a poisoned apple, she’s lying stone dead in a glass coffin that’s (obviously) free of condensation from her breath!
So, she couldn’t possibly have given consent for the kiss, which, incidentally, brought her back to life. Besides – it’s not real life. It’s a cartoon . . . of a fairy story!
Is it any wonder I get so animated?