The Films: No Longer for the Jung at Heart

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Disney movies succeed not merely because they appeal to the least common denominator, but because Walt Disney Productions carefully--and exclusively --addresses itself to the most common problem of the entertainment consumer: "Where can we take the kids?" In order to do so, the corporation has sacrificed creative vitality, cultural relevance and its former, justifiable pretensions to genuine, if inevitably industrialized, artistry. Which is a way of saying that somewhere along the road to its present, seemingly invincible prosperity, it lost its soul.

That soul, on the evidence of the early short cartoons--made before Disney or anyone else devoted any time to consumer analysis--was anarchic, occasionally cruel, broad and barnyard in its humor. If it did not comfort the afflicted (except by providing them with virtuoso entertainment), it certainly afflicted the comfortable. It was a direct spiritual descendant of the great silent screen comedies.

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.

They were dream works, not in the pressagent's sense of the word, but in Jung's. Snow White's flight through a forest that seemed to come alive and clutch at her; the vision of the creation of the world in Fantasia; Pinocchio's search for his father, taking him through the grotesque amusement park on the island of lost boys and into the belly of a whale--these sequences strummed psychic chords that live-action comedies like The Barefoot Executive (1971) do not aspire to touch.

The clue to what has happened lies in the 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 the animated features, the typical Disney movie today is static, overreliant on low-grade verbal humor and ill-conceived comic situations--cars and chimpanzees that are almost human, which is more than you can say for the people who appear in support of them.

The technical effects--see the re-released Mary Pop pins, or even 1971's Bedknobs and Broomsticks--are Still wondrous, but the stage waits between them can turn a kiddie matinee into a squirming riot of befuddled restlessness.

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.

This is partly because, for a couple of decades, the studio has had no 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 and animated shorts at the Lincoln Center retrospective ought to demonstrate that there is a hunger for something more.

As 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" instead of "Uncle Walt." . Richard Schickel

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