Come-hither lions and sleazy owls: when Disney classics are difficult
Iremember, right at the start of the coronavirus lockdown, thinking that Disney+ would be a godsend. Finally, I thought, some quality. I could spend all this newfound time with my children soaking up Disney’s huge archive of old animated features. We could watch some of the most important movies ever made, and we could do it together. The first film I saw at the cinema was The Jungle Book, with my dad. It was a gift from my father, and now Disney+ was letting me give it to my children in turn. It was beautiful.
Except last week we watched The Jungle Book, and it turns out that my memory of the film was much better than the film itself. I’d forgotten the end, where Mowgli is essentially led back to his village by his own boner after catching a glimpse of an absurdly sexualised 10-year-old girl.
A similar thing happens in Bambi. Now, Bambi is a film with plenty of problems – it’s painfully slow, and the famous scene of his mum getting killed is brushed off within seconds – but I’d forgotten the bit where Bambi returns to the forest as an adolescent and a creepy owl basically tells him: “Well, you’re probably going to want to start humping things now.”
Pinocchio loses its nostalgic sheen almost immediately, when you realise that Geppetto’s clocks variously depict a man trying to murder a bird, a man attempting to decapitate a turkey, an alcoholic person and a woman beating her own child. Even The Lion King has a shot of Nala lying on her back and giving Simba a saucy look. Say what you like about Jon Favreau’s remake, but it’s probably quite a good thing that photorealistic lions aren’t able to contort their faces into expressions of total sexual availability.
I’m mentioning this because the results of a survey commissioned by OnBuy.com suggest that other parents are also starting to notice how dated some of the Disney classics are. Inspired by the news that a casting couch gag had been removed from Toy Story 2 in the wake of #MeToo, it quizzed parents about which Disney films they now deem inappropriate.
The survey has some interesting results. Beauty and the Beast makes the list, possibly because it’s a textbook manual for coercive control. So does The Aristocats and Peter Pan, probably thanks to the respective depiction of Asians and Native Americans. But the winner, with almost a full third of respondents deeming its themes to be inappropriate, was Dumbo.
And of course it is, because there is no way anyone today could make Dumbo in its original form. The crows are racial stereotypes (one of them is called Jim Crow). There’s a song where the only black people in the entire film hammer pegs into the ground while happily proclaiming: “We slave until we’re almost dead.” There’s the “pink elephants on parade” segment, where Dumbo gets drunk and hallucinates a menacing Technicolor human made of 17 disembodied elephant heads. And, don’t forget, the happy ending of the entire film – the moral payoff to a story of enforced parental abandonment – comes in the form of the US government licensing Dumbo’s likeness in order to produce a fleet of heavily armoured bombers in his image.
Of course, these films are products of their time, and judging things from the past by today’s standards is a fool’s errand. And my children have accidentally watched much more immediately distressing things under lockdown – an innocent YouTube search for “Lego Avengers” brought up a homemade video of Captain America getting stabbed by a burglar, for example. But Disney+ isn’t exactly the easy-peasy quarantine solver I thought it would be. I guess it’s time for plan B: watching the Sonic the Hedgehog movie 20 times a day until my brain explodes.