There was an article recently in a magazine called "Salon" about the abridgement of classic children's books like
The Wind in the Willows, how they're dumbed-down and generally mutilated to make them more 'cartoonish': you can read it at:
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2...ows/index.html
Lately I've been reading several things around this topic, and I'm infuriated.
Even taking into account that the article is about one publisher , I think that there is a definite movement away from books like
The Wind in the Willows and many, many children in the United States grow up without ever reading or even hearing about these books. Which publishers and corporations take advantage of and encourage with their half-literate adaptations and spin-offs, not only by supplanting them but by defanging them when they do appear. I've no idea how many kids grow up with
The Wind in the Willows and
The Jungle Book, but I would guess they're the minority ... my mom works at a preschool, teaching kids who are around four years old now, and was complaining to me once about how most of the stories available on the shelves are trash. And I said that was a shame, since there are a lot of great children's books - maybe she should bring some in - so that they could be exposed to something better than "Rugrats."
"Read them The Just So Stories," I said. "Like The Cat That Walked by Himself: here, listen to this: 'Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and be-happened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild, and the Sheep was wild, and the Pig was wild — as wild as wild could be — and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.'
That's not too difficult," I said. "What do you think?"
My mom was not too keen on the idea, but then again one of the other teachers at the school, when she was reading "The Three Little Pigs" changed the ending to: "and they all sat down to have a nice dinner together and lived happily ever after."
A few days ago I read an essay by a film critic that said that, ever since he had three young sons and began paying attention to children's movies, he discovered that Disney had constructed childhood to make it fully compatible with consumerism. So even if the abridged versions of classic children's books are not as widespread as the Salon article suggests they are, I think the quality of the literature and films that most children grow up with is not very high - which is doubly a shame because there are so many good films and books, stories out there - written by authors like E. B. White and Lewis Carroll.
Especially Disney films! Disney films, the early Disney films, are masterpieces: "Sleeping Beauty," "Bambi," "Pinocchio" ... I stopped paying much attention to Disney movies after I finished watching "Beauty and the Beast" ... now if I go into Blockbuster I see "Snow White 2" right next to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," and "Sleeping Beauty" is nowhere to be found. Is it really better to have "A Beauty and Beast Christmas" than "Dumbo"?
I'm sure everything is not
all that bad but there seems to be a clear pattern and a trend - in a culture mostly apathetic ... that keeps golighting films where the overwhelming message is "we want your $9" and one of the biggest, longest-running bestsellers is
The South Beach Diet that not even children's books, the OLD children's books, that don't require any new creativity or imagination but only appreciation, are not taken seriously and are on a par with the latest sequel spin-off from a gigantic corporation - and often even less because they're not
N * E * W. The obsession with new things is also something that disturbs me; I remember when I visited my dad a few months ago we went to a music store, and he said he didn't care what he listened to, he wanted to listen to "anything new" - you know, whatever's hip. So we listened to OutKast.
Not, of course, that there can be nothing new that's good - there CAN, and probably is - this is later than Walt Disney, but "The Great Mouse Detective" is not bad at all - but sometimes the old films and stories are as good as it gets: moments like "man has entered the forest" in "Bambi," or going up the staircase in "Sleeping Beauty" are worth a hundred "Pocahontes" and rank with the very best in film - and literature - ever. I get the superficial impression that most of it is hack work, or overly condescending - children's literature demands, or it should demand, originality and daring.
Is it just me, or is it awful for anyone else? What do you think about the article and children's literature and film in general - or in other countries?
It also makes me sad that Disney is now the name of a multimillion dollar company and no longer the last name of Walt Disney
who was a genuine talent and did great things in animation. "Disneyfication" is a coinage and almost a dirty word to some people, like the woman who wrote the Salon article ... and it's a shame, what else can I say, a gosh-darned, howditcometothis kind of shame that I think I would feel even more if I had been alive in the forties and fifties.
Just to end with something totally unrelated, but also a bummer: Peter Ustinov has died.
If you don't know his films, let me recommend them to you -