The continued Disneyfication [and not the Disney of "let's kill Bambi's mom" that I grew up with, where there was still a modicum of harshness, but the Disney of making everything as generic and innocuous as possible in the culture] is leading to the continued soft-headed weakness of the youth.
Like the man says, "children need the darkness" or they'll end up being woefully equipped for the world.
The Austin Chronicle Screens: Once Upon a Time in Spain: Guillermo del Toro on fairy tales, fascists, and everybody's new favorite movie:
"First of all, fairy tales, at their inception, when they were an oral tradition, were not meant for kids. They were oral folk tales, and they were mostly told to adults. And it is really quite later, when they are collected by the Grimms and so forth, that they started being read to children at all. You can read the texts by [Bruno] Bettelheim or Vladimir Propp or any of the people that truly enjoy and have cataloged fairy tales and their function in our society, and most of them agree – as do I – that fairy tales are sort of spiritual parables that allow the kid to understand the world. And children need the darkness. ...but all the fairy tales of yore, when you emasculate them, you are really creating a false sense of the world for the child. When everything has to be sanitized to the point of making Disney look tough, that's doing the children a disservice, you know? Because really, by today's standards, Disney is a tough guy! Everything has been emasculated to the Teletubby level, and I really think that fairy tales help to prepare the kid for the harshness of the outside world."
No comments:
Post a Comment