He may be the creator of "all time classics", but the true stories are even better.
The Beast in Beauty and the Beast was not so cruel, Cinderella was not entirely dimwitted, and Pocahontas was 13 while John Smith was in his fifties. Then along came Walt Disney. He took the classic fairy tale stories and morphed them into child fantasies. Worse than that, they never challenged the child's imagination. The child would watch the animation while their brain focused on the pretty colors and lights. How fasinating that the generation who grew up with these "classics" GENERALLY has a low interest in books, their attention span is short, and the majority of their time is spent in front of the television. (Note the generally...)
And it still gets better.
Disney is often connected with animation, true, but also sex. Wait. Disney and...sex? Shocked me, let me tell you. Disney found a way to insinuate "sex" in some way on each of the covers of his movies. Remember the sweet scene of Simba and Nala reconnecting and rekindling a lost love? The leaves spell out "sex" in the background. Fantastic, and yet one has to ponder the ingenuity of it all. Who would have ever guessed that the movies most popular with children are the ones that have sex all over them, quite literally.
Then there is the Disney Princesses. Oh boy. The dream of all little girls: to be in a tough situation, knight in shiny armor comes up and saves the girl-by the way, the knight is a prince-a rich one at that-they fall in love and live happily ever after. Thanks to Disney, many girls aspire to be what they can never achieve. Of course, Disney was not the first to do this, but they were the first to make it mainstream.
As a Disney child I must say my imagination runs too wild, I never wanted to be a princess (I wanted to be Belle, NOT technically a princess, but she was known for her beauty and brains) and I am not brainwashed into having sex. There must be a bright side of course: computer animation.
Ah. The truth to it all. Disney was one of the first companies to do a feature film in pure hand-drawn animation. Amazing. Snow White took almost 5 years, drawing picture after picture after picture, every motion had to be recorded. Today, one only has to model the object, give the computer a beginning point and an end point and voila, motion(of course the modeling takes time...I made it sound to easy >.>) Disney also helped to create one of America's cutest icons, Mickey Mouse. Mickey was animated by Disney, but created by someone else. That person also animated Mickey, but was unsuccessful as far as mainstream avenues go.
Walt Disney may have had bad points, but helped to open an amazing world of computer graphics that may never have been explored. Every year, hundreds of discoveries are made to compensate with the demand for entertainment. Without Disney, we may still be stuck with flip books, not to mention reading books, active imaginations, true fairy tales (oxymoron you have got to love) and girls who never dreamed of having something they can never achieve. Who knows?
He may have improved our society.
I actually believe that disney released a statement saying that in the lion king it says SFX rather that sex, SFX was a sponsor <3onceupontoday
Really? I assume my source is correct. An entire year's worth of research on the man known as Walt Disney...but yes. I accept that it is most likely true, I have a really hard time accepting sex on the movies...anywhere.
Not to mention why Disney decided on the Grimm fairy tales for inspiration?
But i must say the it is not entirely Disney's fault that this generation lacks imaginition. It also has to do with a television focused generation and our public school system.
Wow my mother and I were just talking about this topic the other day. Awesome. I totally agree. ~angi~
Beauty and the beast, Pocahontas, and Lion King were all created after Disney's death.
God forbid we let kids watch fun and cute stories and enjoy childhood. I'm all for the real world, but can't kids enjoy things when they are young? Is that comparable to ordering the deaths of millions?
Don't forget, our parents grew up on a steady stream of disney movies and short cartoons.
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Bambi turned a whole generation of kids in to anti-hunting gun grabbers. Walt Disney was indeed evil.
Bambi did not do this to me. I am pro-hunting and and I am pretty pro-gun. I'd just really prefer people be required to either prove they can use one correctly, or have to take classes in order to be able to purchase one. I wish I had some free time to take some hunting classes because I remember having fun with it when I was little but then we moved out of Alaska and we stopped hunting our own meat. I get moose once in a blue moon now instead of like twice a week. :-(
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Walt Disney's style of brainwashing is not 100% effective. You can only do so much with a cartoon. It mainly worked on the weak minded who actually believe that deer have human thoughts.
If deer had human thoughts, I would probably still eat them. I'm pretty heartless. Plus they taste good.
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Being deer, they have deer thoughts of course.
You clearly don't live in a largely rural area, do you? Unless you're being sarcastic. Plenty of my friends grew up with fathers who hunt regularly and they love venison. I was talking to one kid who said he didn't like gun hunting, just because there was less of a challenge than using a bow and arrow. Hell, I'm a failed vegetarian and I still support gun ownership, as long as you are using it responsibly.
Do you also mean to tell me that kids who bring guns to schools and may even kill people with guns simply never watched Bambi?
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I live in Wyoming. I know very well that there are lots of hunters left in America. As I said, Disney was not 100% effective in his brainwashing.
When I was in highschool (class of '77), almost every boy I knew drove a pickup to school with a gunrack in the back window equipped with some sort of deer rifle, a shotgun and a .22 calibur rifle for plinking.. It was common for us to go shoot praire dogs during the lunch hour. We never had a single violent incident and I can't remember hearing about one anywhere in Wyoming. I'm not sure what happened with the sickos in your generation who seem to have gone crazy with guns but I blame it on parents who have stopped teaching their children about gun safety and responsibility.
I own numerous firearms. I seldom fire them anymore although I drag them all out annually and grease them. Except for the self-defense weapons scattered about the house, most of them are kept in a safe.I have a BB Gun by the backdoor that I plink at a tin can nailed to my fence pretty often just for the heck of it. I also pop deer with it when they start eyeing my garden. The last time I shot a real weapon was last summer my brother dragged me out and we put about a thousand rounds through the latest additions to his arsenal. I admit that it made me grin. At one time I was very into trap and skeet shooting and would shoot and reload a couple of hundred rounds every weekend but I've kind of lost interest. I used to enjoy pheasant hunting but I have never been much on shooting big game. I don't like venison and while elk tastes great it was never in me to shoot one (the Disney effect?). They are too cool when you run across them alive. I have no problems with anybody else who wants to shoot one and generally regard hunting as a good thing. The last time I did a lot of shooting consistently was during the years when my daughter was between 5 and 12. I think it is important for children to learn how to safely and responsibly handle firearms. My father did it for me and his father did it for him.
Mainly my comment was sarcastic. Imagine even contemplating that Walt Disney was the most evil man ever? My comment was an apparently overly-subtle mocking of the entire notion of this blog. Did Disney commit any mass murders like other evil people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussain? Has his work been an inspiration for other to kill? Disney's evilness does not even place him in the top ten-thousand of most evil people in history.
Walt Disney was a visionary business man. He did what he did mainly to make money. In the process he gave a lot of joy to a lot of little kids and made a bunch of movies that many people consider classics and which are far more benign then most of the garbage that is put out by Hollywood today.
Was there some mild distortions of history, some mild sexual inuendo, perhaps some poor choices of stories. Probably. Entertainers have been doing these things for a long time. Was William Shakespeare one of the most evil men in history? He badly distorted history, chose some very questionable stories to set in his plays and sold sex wantonly. He and Disney were a lot alike and evil is probably not the word that should be used to describe them. Genius would be better.
If your comment was sarcastic, then I can leave it at that. But I won't. I have too much trouble distinguishing when you are being sarcastic, and not hearing your tone doesn't really help. My earlier comment pretty much said the same thing you did, that creating children's movies is not on the same level as leading mass murders.
Anyways, my problem with your statement was that, had you been serious, you were making a generalization by saying an entire generation is against gun use, which, had he indeed done that, wouldn't have even been the worse thing in the world. Arguments like that are too easy to poke holes through.
By the way, according to my sociology text last semester, school-shootings are not on a rise, and haven't been for some time. Kids in the 80s were about as bad as us in my opinion. And I could think of a few sickos from your generation, if you really wanted me to.
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I have been paying more attention to your posts recently and they are often quite sensible.
Did you really believe that anybody would think somebody was evil because they made the movie Bambi? The only alternative is sarcasm. But I guess I was overly subtle.
Truly (no sarcasm) there has been a major shift in attitudes towards hunting and guns in my lifetime. You probably grew up post the shift so it just seems normal to you. But for me it is very noticeable and dramatic. Things like PETA and gun registration and barring people from bringing guns to school were unthinkable (and unnecessary) when I was young. I think Bambi did play a role in this shift but I don't think that even if it was an intentional effort to change public attitudes that it would qualify Disney as evil.
I wondered when you would notice that you kept arguing with the same person.
Anyways, I did suspect it was sarcasm, but I figured I'd ask to be sure. I'll have to look up when Bambi was made, but it may have reflected the change, as opposed to influencing it.
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Bambi was made in 1942.
I think it preceded the shift which I would attribute to the Flower Power movement of the 60's. Those kids all grew up with Bambi. They probably started doing drugs partly because of Disney's Fantasia.
From Wikipedia:
"Although the film received good reviews, it was criticized as being inappropriate for children because of the death of Bambi's mother, as well as the scary violence of the hunting scenes, dog attacks, and the forest fire climax. In 2006, a straight-to-VHS/DVD midquel titled Bambi II was released. It picks up from just after Bambi's mother is killed and he follows his father into the forest.
The death of Bambi's mother is one of the most famous moments in American film history, a moment so upsetting to certain children that they had to be carried sobbing from the theater; the scene was even satirized in a Slappy Squirrel segment on Animaniacs, titled "Bumbie's Mom". For this reason, along with Bambi's brutal fight with a rival buck and the horrific climactic hunting/forest fire sequence, many critics question whether Bambi is suitable for very young audiences."
I think it is pretty fair to surmise that this scene played a role in the anti-huinting movement.
Yeah, I suppose my hypothesis doesn't really make much sense.
Frankly, I think people tend to overreact to scenes like that. I watched the movie as a little kid and I turned out fine. Plenty of people make jokes about that scene, so I don't think it has had any effects that were all that bad. But, if it came out in 1942, that was during WWII a time when kids were afraid of death and potentially losing a parent.
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