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That Mickey Mouse operator has trampled on our dreams
De mortuis nil nisi bonum, we are told. Speak nothing but good of the dead. How absurd that is. What better time could there be than post mortem to say what one really thinks? And even if it is rather mean to do so when some, at least, are grieving for the dear departed, there can be very little wrong in doing so on someone's 100th anniversary.
So I would like to take the opportunity of his 100th anniversary to say that I absolutely hate Walt Disney. I do not mean the man, so much as his works, and most particularly his so-called animated feature films, or cartoons.
There is something loathsome about the homogenised, sanitised, reductive sentimentality that is the Disney vision. He has invaded the whole world, commandeered its great myths and turned them into stereotyped, saccharine schlock, and then forced them back on us in their new, soulless form.
It is a mystery that his work is called animation; animation should surely mean bringing life or soul to something. Disney has drained some of the world's best stories of both; he turns archetype into stereotype. He has colonised our imagination.
Loathing Disney is sometimes lonely. The only person I know of who hates him as much as I do, probably even more, is one of my favourite American writers, Carl Hiaasen, and I suspect he may be mad. People seem to think I am a bit mad about this, too. After all, billions of children love it, don't they? And it's a dazzling technical and imaginative achievement, isn't it?
Well, the same could be said of junk food and its marketing. Children love junk food, too, and so do squillions of adults all over the world. Disney to me is the revolting, unhealthy candy and cola of imaginative life - addictive, hugely profitable and very bad for you in ways that people are only beginning to understand.
One of life's mysteries is the way in which inferior Western products, such as junk food, Disney and bad pop music, can so easily drive out the better things that went before. There can hardly be a villager in Indonesia who would not now prefer to watch a Western soap on television than watch traditional shadow puppets with an old-fashioned wayang gulit orchestra.
If you have read or been told the story of The Little Mermaid, or Aladdin, or Charlotte's Web or 101 Dalmatians, you will have all sorts of subtle, shifting, half-formed images and feelings in your imagination; the imprecision, the shadowiness of your own imaginings are a large part of their power, their glamour.
But if you watch any of the Disney versions, your vision will be entirely blotted out by his folksy, cutesy monstrosities and his vulgar music. Soon you will not remember how you saw and felt; his response will have supplanted yours.
Of course this is true of the rest of the so-called animation industry, and Disney is not necessarily the worst. It's just that Disney has just become the generic term, like Hoover, for a certain product, and in my view a certain mutilated sensibility. If you look back over the most powerful examples of the Disney vision, and most of us have seen most of them, what we get is an extraordinarily limited universe.
It is a world of simpering fairies and sexless princelets, of squeaking infantile voices and silly walks. Almost all the heroines have bulging baby brows and childish mannerisms, and their eyes are too grotesquely manipulative for even Diana, Princess of Wales to have tried on.
I almost thought, watching Aladdin not long ago, that those slowly blinking eyelashes and sidelong glances that shy young Disney lovers always exchange were in this case being deliberately camped up. But probably not. Nothing is too excessively obvious or sentimental for Disney.
The humans are bad enough - Disney is useless on real heroism or adult love, and only any good on the bad and scary - but the animals are far worse. Disney takes the wildness and strangeness of animals and reduces them to domesticated pseudo-human ninnies.
A great deal of skilled observation and technical virtuosity has gone into depriving them of their essential qualities and their dignity. Think of the monstrous barnyard creatures in Charlotte's Web, or the vile singing lobster in The Little Mermaid, or the unforgivable King of the Jungle song in The Jungle Book.
Even as a little girl, I could see that there was something wrong about Lady and the Tramp; watching the two dogs sharing a plate of spaghetti with meatballs, eating in a most undoggy way and simpering at each other - she with fluttering eyelashes, upturned eyes and self-deprecatory smirk, as per the Disney formula - I knew then that neither dogs nor humans did or should behave like that. It was seriously untrue, and embarrassing. The same goes for most of Disney - invasive, embarrassing and profoundly untruthful.
Tread softly, as Yeats wrote, because you tread on my dreams. Walt Disney was quite incapable of treading carefully. In fact, he began by sending a fat, stupid mouse to mince and gesticulate and jump up and down all over the magic carpet of our private dreams.
But perhaps the public psyche has made its own protest. "Mickey Mouse" has gone into the language as an expression meaning preposterous, useless or a cheap imitation. That is Disney's fitting epitaph, the last, unscripted squeak of the damnable mouse that began it all.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, December 01, 2001
