Disney derided
From Mrs Deborah Clarke
Sir: It's all very well Matthew d'Ancona going dewy-eyed and philosophical over Disney's films ('Disney is the new Shake- speare', 16 October), but he is ignoring the whole insidious Disney culture that is swamping the Western world.
People spend entire holidays soaking in the bland 'everything is wonderful' atmo- sphere at Disney theme-parks instead of seeing the real world. The films themselves, far from being the moral treatises that Mr d'Ancona imagines them to be, offer a world of sickly, syrupy figures with curly eyelashes; a world where every ending is a happy one, every piece of music promises eternal romance, and every plot follows the same hackneyed formula.
' One of the worst things about Disney is that so little of it is original: high-quality story after story from other sources is sub- jected to the same sentimental treatment and inevitably loses its own identity to the universal Disneyfied one. Take Winnie-the- Pooh: a perfectly good set of stories and illustrations changed to fit the Disney
dream, so that many children now don't even know that there ever was a different Pooh Bear. After all, Disney even publishes its own books now — who needs real ones? — and they are far worse than anything Enid Blyton ever wrote, with bland, ano- dyne language and plots robbed of all char- acter or excitement.
Critics may be snobbish at times, but the world of Disney needs to be on the receiv- ing end of some snobbish criticism if our children are to retain any ability to distin- guish between Disney culture and genuine culture.
Deborah Clarke
Bazelark@aol.com
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