Walt Disney: man or mouse?

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, for instance, Disney was inundated with letters from outraged parents who felt that Snow White’s flight through the woods or Pinocchio’s excursion on Pleasure Island or the devil in “Fantasia” or Bambi’s mother’s death were all too real and terrifying and hardly a gloss. Disney would typically respond that he didn’t make films for children and that, in any case, children had to learn to deal with the terrors of the world.

Despite this, “Disneyfication” became and remains a dirty word — the primacy of false experiences over so-called real ones. —Walt Disney: man or mouse? (LA Times)

The course I had planned to teach on Disney in culture has been canceled. Students were very interested in the subject, but apparently the cost of spending a week in Florida was prohibitive.

I’m still in the habit of blogging thoughtful essays on the subject. I’ll probably try to offer the course again in some other format.