DISNEY IS THE NEW SHAKESPEARE

Matthew d'Ancona hails the majestic contribution

of Mickey Mouse — and now Tarzan — to 20th-centuty culture

THE thing about Tarzan is he thinks he's Tony Blair. This, at any rate, was the con- clusion my girlfriend and I drew as we left the premiere of Disney's new adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic jungle adventure on Sunday. I am not sure how many of the beaming children bearing their Taman goody-bags as they emerged from the cinema had made at the same analysis. Indeed, most of them seemed more con- cerned with meeting Baby Spice than deconstructing the visual extravaganza to Which they had just been treated. But take It from me: today's Tarzan looks like David Ginola, talks like Tony Blair.

The less facetious observation to be made about Tarzan is that it is really very, very good indeed, one of the best films of the year. This is the 48th movie adaptation of Burroughs's original, and, like Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula (1992) and Ken- neth Branagh's underrated Frankenstein (1994), it retells an utterly familiar story in a manner which responds to the spirit of the age. It updates the timeless, if that is not a contradiction in terms. The technolo- gy used, a new technique called 'Deep Canvas', is quite breathtaking, and makes the experience of the film, as the viewer is whisked spectacularly through the tendrils

and creepers of the jungle, as much like a rollercoaster ride as the recounting of a simple, charming narrative. But there is art of another kind here, too.

Simplicity and clarity arc aesthetic goals of the highest order, and it is in this respect that the art of Disney has made such a majestic contribution to the culture of the 20th century. There is a completely absorb- ing integrity to films like Tarzan and its predecessors. Vermeer's use of light, or the rhythm of e.e. cummings, or the first bars of Schubert's Quintet in C major are so moving because they are so simple and so direct, and because they eschew the lazi- ness of unnecessary complexity. It is this great truth about art which Walt Disney understood from the moment when he introduced Mickey Mouse to the world in Steamboat Willie (1928) and, nine years later, transformed the gruesome gothic fairytale of Snow White into one of the great Hollywood love stories. What he had grasped, specifically, is that the technology of animation, even then, could provide modern culture with the fairytales and myths which in previous ages were provid- ed by the composers of sagas, fables and parables. I am not saying that Jungle Book is as historically important as Beowidf; but it is certainly more historically important than Eyes Wide Shut.

What Disney films have always been good at is the communication of simple messages about loyalty, redemption and coming of age in a way that does not make children fall asleep.

The question is why, then, these master- pieces are so often sneered at by the British intelligentsia, why is it so intellectu- ally disreputable to enjoy or — much worse — to admire them? One explana- tion for the strength of this Disneyphobia

is that the vast majority of film critics do not like movies which are not obviously difficult and complicated. Critics in all fields of the arts have always been power- ful, but film critics exercise a very specific form of authority. This has been so since the writer Pauline Kael more or less invented the school of American auteurs of the 1970s – Warren Beatty, Martin Scors- ese, Dennis Hopper, Hal Ashby. This awe- some group of directors modelled themselves upon Truffaut and Antonioni, longed for the recognition of writers such as Kael, and sought it actively. They court- ed her and cultivated her. But, at the end of the 1970s, two directors who had origi- nally toyed with the auteur identity — George Lucas and Steven Spielberg — peeled off and invented the modern Amer- ican blockbuster. Star Wars and Jaws utter- ly changed the rules of modern movie-making in their blend of state-of- the-art technology and narrative of the simplest kind. In the 1980s, this was to be called 'high concept' film-making. Natural- ly, the critics who had made the auteur school hated it and attacked it viciously.

In this country, Alexander Walker, long- standing film critic of the London Evening Standard, has achieved a similar dominance to Kael's, often displaying a weariness with the sheer ordinariness of ordinary people's taste. Such writers have been a model to many younger critics, who seem to see it as their duty to encourage the pretensions of film directors and to deplore all that is mainstream, populist or — God help us — enjoyable. 'A subtitled movie which wins the Palme de Tristesse at the Ukrainian film festival is much more likely to impress them than one which grosses $20 million in its first weekend of release. The logic sometimes seems to be that a successful film is necessarily a bad one — according to which skewed logic almost every Disney animated production must be bad.

There are some brave exceptions among the critics, such as Anne Billson, the Sun- day Telegraph's brilliant film critic, whose little book on the John Carpenter horror classic The Thing (1982) shows how it is possible to analyse a work of popular cine-

ma without scorning it. In particular, she was also one of the few critics to grasp that Spielberg's Jurassic Park, in its mastery of new technology, would change the film industry for ever. The movie magazine Empire has struggled against intellectual snobbery. But most within the critical car- tel have failed to acknowledge that the blockbuster genre should be subjected to different aesthetic standards from those of arthouse movements; that Starship Troopers, in its way, is as good as The Draughtsman's Contract.

A more general reason for Disneyphobia is that the middle class in this country is naturally inclined to the Stoic error that enjoyment is incompatible with edification. There was a time when many parents stopped their children reading Enid Blyton, not (as now) because those books were politically incorrect but because they were too readable, too obviously a source of entertainment to be truly educational. There is still a comparable, and outra- geous, snobbery about the works of that English genius, P.G. Wodehouse, on the grounds that anything which makes you laugh until you cry cannot really be litera- ture. In the case of Disney, this very English separation of fun and self-improve- ment has been sullied by anti-American- ism. Mickey is seen, as it were, as a Trojan Mouse, insidiously forcing barbarian American values and philistinism upon British children. On this basis, denying your child the chance to see a Disney film is an act not only of tough love but of hero- ic cultural resistance to Americanisation. This is as silly as saying that reading Tintin books turns small children into Belgians, or that Asterix brainwashes the young into behaving like the ancient Gauls.

So silly is it, in fact, that I am happy to make what Mr Blair would call an early pledge. Any child of mine can demand to see Disney movies, as a right and not a privilege. That's what I call a cultural resis- tance, the maquis of the Disneyphiles. Per- sonally, I can't wait for Tarzan 2.

Matthew d'Ancona is deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

'I'm useless at reversing.'