#walt disnery

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I recognise Walt Disney’s talent but it has always seemed to me hopelessly corrupted. Though in most of the pictures proceeding from [Disney] studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them to me is disgusting. Some have given me nausea.

J.R.R. Tolkien

If Disney turned his stomach we can assume Tolkien would be turning in his grave at what Amazon Studios have done with 'Rings of Power'.

Tolkien's main objection to Disney - and something shared with C.S. Lewis - was how childish Disney treated fairy tales. For Tolkien fairy tales were serious business.

At the crux of his argument, which explores the nature of fantasy and the cultural role of fairy tales, is the same profound conviction that there is no such thing as writing “for children.” Tolkien insists that fairy tales aren’t inherently “for” children but that we, as adults, simply decided that they were, based on a series of misconceptions about both the nature of this literature and the nature of children. Tolkien deeply believe in language, myth, and Fairy, in that he recognised, they are deeply human things. Indeed, it is a natural right of humanity to produce fantasy.

And ye fail completely when we believe that Fairy is for children, Tolkien argued, noting that traditionally Fairy deals with the most difficult human problems, and children - understood as yet-to-be-formed humans - fall into the category of human, but they have no special hold or understanding of Fairy. Tolkien argued that the path to Fairy is neither the path to heaven nor to hell. It might be somewhat purgatorial, however, and certainly otherworldly. Fairy itself, far from being supernatural, is the most natural of worlds. Indeed, it is extraordinarily natural, as natural things live only as themselves. Rather Platonically, the tree is truly the tree (Treebeard), wine is truly wine, and bread (Lembas) is truly bread in Fairy. That is, there is little if any separation of the accidents of a thing from the essence of a thing. Those in fairy, though, through pride of beauty, often present themselves in disguise and as things they are not, thus befuddling the wanderer.

Words, definitions, and analyses, Tolkien warned, can offer only so much understanding of Fairy. Instead, one must not only travel to and through Fairy, but he must also recognise that fairy - like all mythology - is an expression of our deepest longings and fears.

A genuine fantasy, according to Tolkien, creates an immersive experience for the reader. In a successful fantasy, the author is a ‘sub-creator’: as Tolkien puts it, “He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.”

He goes on to argue that this sort of fantasy has three essential functions: recovery, escape, and consolation. Using the metaphor of a dirty, smudged window - whose film of grime obscures what we see through it - he says that we need “to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity - from possessiveness.” Fantasy helps us with this recovery of clear vision. He distinguishes the literary escape offered by good fantasy from the negative quality of escapism. And he explains the idea of consolation by coining the word eucatastrophe. It is formed of ‘eu,’ meaning good, attached to ‘catastrophe, and it means “the good catastrophe”: the unexpected happy ending, which gives us a profound taste of joy. We see it in The Lord of the Rings with the rescue of Frodo and Sam, after the destruction of the Ring, when they are sure that all is lost; we see it even more fully in the final chapters and indeed the final pages of the tale.

[petrosapian]

i was forced to watch a whole documentary on walt disnery’s crimes against the people at the tender age of eight so i essentially have a phd on the furry bastard