When examining the history of Disney animation, one
of the most significant facts is that there’s an interregnum of fully eight
years between the studio’s first four feature-length films – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi – and all
the others that followed, right up to the present day. That would be
significant enough in itself, but when one remembers that the first group of
films represented the very first feature-length animations that most moviegoers
had seen, this makes them a truly incomparable island in the history of cinema.
The reason for the halt after Bambi was, of course, World War II. With much of the world market
suddenly in doubt, and materials and labour now at a greater premium, the
phenomenally capital-intensive production of full-length animated features was
simply not tenable any more. For the next several years, Disney essentially
turned the clock back to his pre-Snow White
years, and the studio got by producing cartoon shorts. Many of these were for
wartime propaganda purposes (remember Donald Duck’s song “The Fuhrer’s Face”?);
others were assembled into feature-length revue films such as Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time,
and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr.
Toad; and still others reflected Disney’s contribution to the U.S.
propaganda drive of the “Good Neighbour Policy,” attempting to cultivate better
relations with Latin America – the rest of the only continent currently safe from
German and Japanese imperialism.
When Disney finally did release its first post-war
feature film, Cinderella, moreover,
the cultural landscape had changed profoundly. The supposed innocence and
populism of the earlier films wouldn’t quite fly in a nation that was now
adjusting to a position of global superpower as opposed to isolationist
industrial/economic power, and a society that was now enjoying a post-war boom
rather suffering through the pre-war Depression. Accordingly, Cinderella, as well as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, and Sleeping
Beauty after it, all feel somewhat more slickly professional and
by-the-numbers. As brilliant as these films of course are, there isn’t quite
the same sense of infectious joy in inventing the wheel – that anything and
everything is possible and every new scene is something genuinely
unprecedented. Accordingly, there seems far greater interpretive freedom with
those first four films, and a lot more to interpret given that, the in the
flush of first creativity, Disney and his artists ended up saying a lot more
than they seemed to. What follows are just a few of the observations I made when
I recently tried revisiting these four films with this mentality.
My organizing term must not be confused with “demonized,”
with all its absolutist Judeo-Christian associations of sin, damnation,
wickedness, temptation, etc. “Daemonized” draws upon the Ancient Greek and
Roman concept of the daemon – a spirit being who is not a pawn in some grandiose
celestial binary between simplistic “Good” and “Evil,” but who is distinguished
by the sharp delineation of individuality and the self. The daemon is a
self-contained entity, knowingly and appraisingly observing and engaging the
world, rather than totally at one with the world and creation. “The daemonic”
ideal is of individual genius and creative potential, rather than virtue
through sublimation to an overarching cosmogony. The daemonic is thus
profoundly amoral, and lends itself readily to Decadence. Obviating any
hysterical raptures towards the “the Good,” or equally hysterical condemnations
of “the Evil,” it coolly recognizes that both co-exist within the human
individual, and no mature sense of self is possible without a synthesis of
them. As Rilke once said: “If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels
will take flight as well.” The childish insistence upon absolute good or evil
is only possible when one has abandoned exactly the sense of mature individual
continence and complexity that daemonism is defined by. This might sound like the
last mentality that could be profitably applied to the earliest films of Walt
Disney Studios, but in my next two blog posts, that is exactly what I intend to
do…
***
When viewing Snow
White today, viewers may find its overall narrative arc childishly naïve.
There’s the obvious temptation to ask “well, what then?” after Snow White is
revived by her Handsome Prince, set upon the back of his horse, and escorted
off to his castle to live “Happily Ever After.” A bit over-simplified, isn’t
it? What happens after the initial rush of euphoria wears off and the
day-to-day reality of married life sets in?
After viewing it again, however, this question no
longer arises for me. The answer seems totally self-evident: Snow White will of
course develop into the Evil Queen all over again. She cannot help it. They are
organically successive stages of the same organism, just as a caterpillar
cannot help pupating into a butterfly. It’s an ironclad law of human culture
that Romanticism always mutates into Decadence – that every Wordsworth always
lays the ground for a Swinburne, a Wilde, a Dante Rossetti. The innocent
dreaminess that sees one wish to pick flowers and commune with the cute animals
cannot be sustained forever without going stale, and will eventually mutate
into the imperious domineeringness that will demand rigorous aesthetic perfection of one’s entire environment. Once Snow White is ensconced as a princess again,
presumably to become a Queen in the fullness of time, her chief occupation will
of course be to consolidate and defend her “happily ever after” – to let
nothing whatsoever disturb the utopian plateau her life has attained. Thus, any
unromantic or unhappy discordant notes must be suppressed with all necessary
force. This might of course take the form of charity and kindness at first, but
that can’t last forever. And of course it’s essential that the prince’s eye
must never stray, so maintaining the position as Fairest in the Land which she
usurped from the last Queen will be absolutely imperative, and will necessitate
making her own reassuring trips to the Magic Mirror….
All this to say, I now find the Queen’s demise at
the end of Snow White less offensive
and unjust than I used to. The film’s misogynistic moralizing is too
transparent to really take seriously, and it especially gives the game away by
never having Snow White share a scene with the Queen when she’s in her
imperiously beautiful true form. Obviously the sheer gulf in intensity and
charisma between them would put Snow White at an unacceptable disadvantage. In
her true form, the Queen only takes up a small minority of the film’s running
time, but it’s so disproportionately memorable that it feels like far more. The
sheer arch, hierarchical, will power that she exudes is the backbone of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ lasting artistic reputation.
Efface her, and leave the film entirely to the childishness of its eight
titular characters, and it would probably have been forgotten by 1938. As it was,
I strongly suspect that, twenty-two years later in Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent is in fact Snow White all grown up into
the Queen she was destined to become.
This sort of dramaturgy set the template that Disney was to follow for another seventy years or so – where the heroes are expected to be bumptious and unsophisticated, albeit with a certain humorous charm to them, and the heroines were expected to be totally simpering and obedient, forever in need of being led or rescued. Against this supposedly positive "norm," we are given villains – both male and female – who are the epitome of elegance, power, and sophistication; always knowing exactly how things stand, always ready with a quip and a witticism about it, and able to intelligently act upon it for their own ends. Thus, we are supposed to hissingly abominate them as evil. It's inconceivable that the adults who were making these films really believed this sort of thing themselves, or expected their target child audience to take it totally at face value. The sheer gulf in cool agency and articulacy between the supposed "good" and "evil" is just too great, and Snow White seems to implicitly acknowledge this in a way that its later successors did not. As for its immediate successors, however, my next post will get to that very soon...
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