Cinema
Toy Story (PG, selected cinemas)
The mouse that rules
Mark Steyn
Fifty years ago, who would have bet on Walt Disney? He was a minnow then; the real moguls were at MGM, Fox, Columbia . . . Great names, but names is all they are today. Only Disney endures as a brand; and only Walt, in suspended animation or not, endures as a mogul; his dream of a Disney world draws closer every day.
As far as I know, The Spectator is not yet owned by Disney, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time. Everything else is. I didn't mind when the Mouse bought up Ameri- ca's ABC television network; I didn't fret, as many media commentators did, about the possible impact a showbiz corporation could have on ABC's news division, since ABC's news division, from its bouffed anchormen down, is already a branch of showbiz. I didn't care when they annexed Broadway by moving a stage version of Beauty and the Beast into the Palace Theatre and buying up the New Amster- dam, once home to The Ziegfeld Follies and The Meny Widow; since the Follies closed, the New Amsterdam has been home mostly to a lot of porno movies and urine-sodden derelicts; Broadway's beggared itself and, as it's degenerated into theme-park theatre anyway, you might as well give it to some- one who can do the job properly.
But I drew the line a few months back when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police sold exclusive international image-market- ing rights to Disney. That's right: the most famous symbol of my native land apart from Pamela Anderson's breast implants is now owned by Mickey Mouse. The `Well, I for one am glad we live in a banana republic.' Mounties should know better than anyone of the pernicious, distorting influence of Hollywood: RCMP officers cringe when tourists start raving about Randolph Scott saving the Northwest or melisma-crazed Nelson Eddy ululating the 'Indian Love Call' across the snow-capped peaks. Pierre Trudeau once described the relationship between Canada and America as that of a mouse in bed with an elephant; now, it's a mouse in bed with The Mouse.
I sat through Toy Story mainly to see if the Mounties would turn up, but, if they did, I missed them. Truth to tell, I dozed off at the beginning because the commer- cials seemed to be going on a long time. It was only when I woke up that I realised that the commercials were, in fact, the film. Toy Story is the first digital animated fea- ture and the first collaboration between Disney and the computer-animation com- pany Pixar, whose principal achievement to date is a Listerine television ad, widely recognised as the state-of-the-art mouth- wash commercial. All Disney movies are about selling merchandise, but this is the first to draw the logical conclusion and make the film one long advertisement.
Disney got their fingers burnt last year with Pocahontas, which only made a million billion trillion dollars instead of the million billion trillion squillion gazillion they'd been expecting. It was their first venture into animated history, so, to avoid charges of demeaning native persons, they hired Native Americans to voice the Powhatan Indian characters, while, to avoid charges of demeaning Englishmen, they hired Mel Gibson to voice the part of John Smith. The lesson they learned was that true Stories are unnecessary complications. Toy Story, by contrast, never pretends to any- thing as troublesome as characterisation; it's a story about toys, so simple that, if it were a painting-by-numbers kit, it wouldn't get past three. There's a cowboy called Woody and a spaceman called Buzz Lightyear and they're sort of buddy rivals and they're trying to get back home. And that's it. John Lasseter tries his best to sim- ulate live-action camera angles, but he can't disguise the clinical coldness of this style of computer animation. Nor, alas, can the friendly, human voices of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen.
Nonetheless, it worked; in America, they sold a ton of toys. Given the way the great British public, despite the gratuitous slurs on its national honour perpetrated by Poc- ahontas, still dutifully trudged off to Toys R Us and bought all the spin-offs, I don't hold out much hope of plucky bulldog resistance this time. But do the kids a favour: buy a cowboy doll, a spaceman doll, get the camcorder and make your own movie instead. It couldn't be any lamer than this one. Disney degrades and en- feebles us all when we swallow this sort of huckstering. Or as the title of their forth- coming sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids boasts: Honey, I Shrunk Everybody.
Previous page
