You can't teach an old dog new tricks

Rating: 8/10 (9 August 2009)

Walt Disney has done better animated films in the past. This one is rather average. But it is important because it shows a radical change in the targeted audience. The concept of family audience has completely changed. The kids are no longer accompanied by their parents but by their grand-parents. So the film targets these grand-parents as a potential audience and is built on two main characters, the child and the senior citizen. The whole film is based on this crossing over three generations. Then the film is also aiming at a younger audience that is living in decomposed more than recomposed families and the child is thus living with his father and another woman than his mother, and he is systematically betrayed, in spite of what he mat say, by his father. The boy scouts are shown as particularly father-centered if not male-chauvinistic by not allowing a boy to be supported by another person than his father when receiving medals in some ritual ceremony, the father or another fatherly man, but not the mother. A very long tradition with Walt Disney: their support of the family structure like with Ebenezer Scrooge in the famous Christmas Carol, or of course Snow White and Cinderella. Fathers are not particularly enhanced and step mothers are frankly demonized. The animals of the film are not essential, just some kind of mirror in which children will be able to recognize their phantasms and dreams. But this film is absolutely Anglo-Saxon and based on a myth from this culture and this culture only, or nearly, and particularly the English branch of that myth and culture, the Lost World of Conan Doyle, the belief in the existence of a pocket or virginal nature surviving behind un-crossable mountains that can only be reached by air with a blimp or a flying house. It is thus normal to have some paradise cataract and a bird of paradise, a giant one mind you, and of course this bird will have three chicks, a trinity that is there to sanctify this virginal world, this garden of Eden. At a time when Jules Verne was looking for adventures that contained a great quantity of danger, Conan Doyle was dreaming of the rediscovery of the garden of Eden. Charles Muntz has little to do with Captain Nemo. In fact he has no humanity at all, not even the good sense to forget about, and forgive, the dumbness of human beings. He is ready to kill a child and destroy a bird of paradise and doom its – her actually – chicks to perdition for his own vanity. It is these particularities that make the film interesting, but it does not have the finesse and the subtlety of Ratatouille. The allusions to American culture are numerous but it would be fastidious to give them all, like the small house surrounded by high rise buildings (Death of a Salesman). These allusions are aimed at the adult and elderly audience of course. But I can't resist asking one final question: is the Shady Oaks retirement home covering some shady business or some shaky eugenic mentality concerning the elderly? Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID