Book Review: Faith Trust and Pixie Dust

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Faith Trust and Pixie Dust

Author: Mark I. Pinsky

Author's web site: http://markpinsky.com/

Date: 2004

Publisher: Westminster John Knox

ISBN: 0-664-22591-8

Length: 267 pages plus acknowledgments, bibliography, and index

Quote: "These film essays vary in approach. Some are primarily critical readings of the narratives, highlighting elements of faith and values,and may provide a helpful guide for children's caretakers. Others probe deeper or take off in a different direction...I have chosen not to dwell unduly on the differences between the Disney features and the source materials from which they have been adapted...it would be difficult to argue that...the printed word could in any way compete with images on the screen for impact."

Well, right there in the introductory "Methodology" chapter, in a nutshell, is what I like least about this book.

My parents didn't go to theatres, and videos weren't sold for home viewing when I was a child, but my parents did approve of the bland, sappy, but generally wholesome Disney cartoon movies for children. I learned to read by reading Disney movie stories: Snow White, Pinocchio, Mickey Mouse as Sorcerer's Apprentice, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, the Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians, the Sword in the Stone. (Those are the topics of chapters 3 through 14 in this book.) Also (minimally discussed because they were short, or not discussed because they weren't cartoons) Brer Rabbit, Johnny Appleseed, Peter and the Wolf, Robin Hood, the much criticized MACOS tours of countries like Scotland and Morocco, Niki and Neewa (the Nomads of the North), the Swiss Family Robinson, Old Yeller, the Odyssey of the Otter...I loved those stories, and in his turn my brother did too.

Then we grew up, found the original books in the library, and realized how vastly superior they were, how Disney had desecrated good stories and cheated people out of the fun of reading stories that were more interesting and complicated than Disney's stale babyfood. Pinocchio originally had lots more adventures. Cinderella in The Glass Slipper (by Eleanor Farjeon) did a lot more than sit around feeling sorry for herself. Alice in Wonderland wandered through all sorts of delightful wordplay the cartoon version missed. Perdita wasn't even Pongo's original mate in the real 101 Dalmatians story. The Sword in the Stone was a serious story, good enough to be worth rereading even as an adult. Even Peter Pan and Wendy, a dreary sentimental book, full of tired muddled metaphors for sex and death, that Brigid Brophy skewered as "teasing children who want to know where babies come from" and that Dave Barry has profoundly improved by discarding James Barrie's what-was-he-thinking original and working directly from the movie, at least had more to it than the Disney version, even if what Disney lost was pretty "stoopid."

For me as an adult, a study of the art of Walt Disney would begin with C.S. Lewis's reaction to "the simpering dolls intended for our admiration" as more horrific than the demonic figure (and in Sleeping Beauty Maleficent gets pretty demonic; I wouldn't share the original movie, where she invokes "all the powers of Hell," obviously not referring to the tourist town in Michigan, and turns into a monstrous dragon, with a nervous child). From there it would go on to detail how much was lost when classic short stories were expanded, or classic novels cut down, into movies. It would assert that, for those children who happen to be ear thinkers, images on a screen can't compete with printed words, and go on to trace how Disney's neverending quest for perfectly inoffensive pictures had, in fact, offended a lot of people, including but not limited to the people who had appreciated the books.

And it would mention, as Pinsky does mention toward the end of this book, the "evil subliminal imbedding" in the cartoons. As Pinsky confirmed by asking the animators themselves, animators get bored redrawing scenes so that they seem to move; sometimes they'd draw something offensive or merely silly into a picture and see whether someone else would notice and remove it. Was the word "sex" spelled out in clouds? Actually, the animator admitted, it was "sfx," "special effects," but yes, it's there. The good news is that such occasional subliminal imbedding has not been shown to affect human behavior; deliberately imbedding "popcorn" into movies turned out not to increase the sales of popcorn.

Pinsky's primary approach, highlighting the values in the plots of Disney movies, may be useful in its own way. If you want to watch movies with children rather than reading books to them, here is your guide to some classic movies many children enjoy.

I think it's also helpful that Pinsky is Jewish. Two reasons:

(1) Judaism is not evangelical; its emphasis has tended to be on teaching the young "what we do" and supposing that a just and merciful God probably relates to all those People Different From Us in other ways.. This gives Pinsky an edge on writing objectively about how much Christianity, Paganism, or Islam there is in one movie or another, and whether it reaches levels that offend a reasonable Jewish viewer. (This is something many Christians want to know. We are Christians and we're not going to stop talking or writing about that, but we don't intend, primarily, to offend people.)

(2) Although Walt Disney specifically purged his movies of overt references to Christianity, or even to God, to avoid offending Jewish viewers, and although he worked with Jewish colleagues, he's been accused of anti-Jewish bigotry. Pinsky considers the evidence and finds Disney not guilty. On the evidence Disney seems to have known enough Jewish people, without prejudice, to have liked some and disliked others as individuals. (The wolf acting out the stereotype of a Jewish peddler, in the original Three Little Pigs, was apparently based on what the Disney brothers had watched "well-known Jewish comedians portray" and written in as, according to a later critic, "a positive reference to the trust most Americans of the time had in Jewish peddlers." Nevertheless, Disney reworked the movie.)

What may be less helpful is that, when Pinsky "probes deeper and takes off in a direction," he seems to get stuck in a rut that leads in only one direction: Is the movie politically correct? Does it, shudder, quake, stereotype anybody?

It's enough to trigger a backlash in readers: How bad is it if a fictional character does resemble a stereotype? Stereotypes don't come to exist without some base in reality. Stereotypes bore readers because they have nothing new to tell us. Stereotypes are the native language of movies; where a memoir would tell you "I felt these emotions because what was said stirred up these memories," and a novel would have given you an image that stirs up or builds memories for readers too, and a journalistic or historical version would tell you the consequences of what was said, a movie gives you a stereotype, usually a face that is presumed to look the way the character's face would look in reaction to an emotion. (Facial expressions are sometimes assumed to be a universal language of emotions. They are not. At communicating whether the feeling has anything to do with the conversation or is strictly a physical feeling about something going on in the person's body, much less communicating the degree of emotion or the mix of emotions or what the person is going to do about it, one word can be worth a thousand pictures.) Movies work, to the extent that they do, by manipulating stereotypes. What flashes around the screen is not a living person, but a set of stereotypes that attempt to evoke something about a living person.

Ooohhh, but some stereotypes, the ones about currently active pressure groups, are hurtful...

Nothing brings out my sadistic side like this whole concept of "hurtful." People who have actually been hurt don't whine about what is merely, intangibly "hurtful" in some stereotyped way that's usually being invoked as a camouflage to describe something that's more effective than some more recent effort they, or some "creative" friend of theirs, has wrought. The Taming of the Shrew works if it's played strictly for laughs, as a little-bully-quietens-down-when-exposed-to-bigger-bully story; it does not work if you try to take it seriously as a statement about women or marriage or the hope for peace...but, because the whole point of the story is that the mean girl is not beaten or raped but simply beaten at her own game, it's not subject to criticism as being "hurtful to women." Spare me. Women are tougher than that, and also more individual.

Stereotypes of whole demographic groups of people in the arts have hurt people whenever they've become normative. It never hurt anybody to recognize that there are passive, wimpy girls like Disney's Cinderella and that some of them do occasionally "luck out" and get what they've been whining for.. (Whether they like it when they get it is another matter; as Gregory Maguire reminded us in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, in historical fact the prince who invited all the single women in the realm to the ball was free to marry a commoner because he was dying.) What has, in the past, hurt women writers and women audiences has been that publishers and movie-makers have refused to recognize that more interesting girls, like Farjeon's Ella, or like Maguire's, or like Amelia Earhart or Helen Keller or Hedy Lamarr, also exist; for too many years the high-paying publishers, and all the Hollywood movie-makers, wanted to define every female character as Disney's Cinderella. That hurt a generation of women's sales figures, and the next generation's ability to enjoy contemporary fiction, rather badly.

But, now that it's over, spare us the whines about how older fiction with passive "heroines" needs to be buried--regardless of whatever other merits it has or doesn't have--because any portrayal of a passive "heroine" is sooo "hurtful." Bah, humbug, and also pooh. That's "pooh" as in Winnie the..., a charming storybook that might have been better if Kanga had had more lines, but that works just fine as a story about a little boy's imagination of all his toys as little boys if they're not designed to look unavoidably like mommies, and that does absolutely no harm to little girls who can now read it along with other stories where different kinds of lively, active female characters have plenty of lines.

Or, more to the point: Disney Studios' Aladdin, produced long after the Disney brothers' death, is true to the Disney tradition of being vapid and shallow and silly. Eisner didn't want the Disney movie list to discriminate; Disney always meant it to present "simpering dolls" of every ethnic type from around the world, to desecrate every available artistic tradition impartially. And yes, the grandfather in Peter and the Wolf, of whom my brother once said, pointing to the picture in our book, "Is that the grandfather or the wolf?", gave some of us a certain image of what Russian people look like that lasted until we started to see them venturing into warm climates and peeling off the dead animals' skins, and wotta surprise that they look just like other humans underneath. And Pinocchio is ineffably Italian, too. Why didn't Pinocchio and Geppetto shape my generation's unspoken expectation of what Italian people look like? Because we saw real Italian people, both Italian-American immigrants, and images of Italians doing their own thing in Italy. Many of us didn't know any Russian-American immigrants, and the images we saw of people in the bad old Soviet Union seem in retrospect to have been chosen to support the idea that they all dressed up in bearskins because they intermarried with bears. War propaganda, even during a "cold" war, is harmful--by design. But the cure for the image of the grandfather in Peter and the Wolf was not to suppress Peter and the Wolf, which is actually a rather delightful introduction to classical music for children; it was more images of good-looking Russian athletes.

Eisner, I suspect, wanted Muslim or Arab-Americans to celebrate Aladdin as a step toward interfaith dialogue, and was disappointed that they didn't like it. Because they hadn't been conditioned by two generations of mass-market stupidity, that's why! Aladdin is a set of caricatures of stereotypes of the Arab countries, just as Sleeping Beauty is a set of caricatures of stereotypes of the European countries. Nufsed. I don't blame Muslims for being disgusted by Aladdin in the same way Lewis was disgusted by Sleeping Beauty, and for the same reasons, but the remedy is not to suppress Aladdin and wail about how the main characters (deeply tanned, with black hair and huge dark eyes and Arab-style clothes) don't look "Arab" enough, so "all the Arab characters" (meaning the minor characters caricatured as mean or foolish people, not counting the Genie, who's not human) "are violent or very nasty," and that makes Aladdin "hurtful." I think, historically, part of the problem is that the Arabian Nights stories were collected from all over the world and Aladdin was originally Asian not Arab--which might be what the cartoonist was trying to say by drawing him from what I suspect was an Indian model--but then, too, it's a long step from "Badroulbadour" to "Jasmine" or from Aladdin's Arabian Nights adventure to the Disney plot, so who cares. I watched the movie and I recall plenty of uncharacterized animated images of vendors and buskers and beggar children who were neither violent nor nasty; maybe the whiner seriously thinks that all real Arabs' faces look like the way Americans draw facial expressions that stereotype violent or nasty intentions, but that's still not the real problem, nor is it a solution. The solution is for Muslims to get busy writing children's stories, and making videos of them for those who prefer videos, that Muslims can actually like, in the same way Lewis liked The Wind in the Willows and Animal Farm. American children badly need stories about Arab people that are neither fantasy fiction nor cartoon movies...so Arab people need to stop whining and start writing, translating, and filming.

For me Pinsky's obsession with stereotypes is not as useful as his focus on the moral values portrayed in the stories.

That said, if you like cartoon movies and want to share them with children, Pinsky has given you a wonderful guide to choosing from the classics of the genre. Should Pocahontas, who left not a word about her spirituality beyond the fact that she eventually joined the Church of England, have been shown practicing a very twentieth century New Age impression of a Native American religion that, like cartoon Pocahontas herself, belongs to the Plains not the Coast? Is Robin Hood a hero you want to discuss with your children? Does it matter that the Deep South accent grotesquely assigned to the monkey chief in Mowgli belonged to a White actor, that "King Louis" was named after that actor rather than Louis Armstrong? (Oh, please...the voice was so obviously not Louis Armstrong's.) Pinsky notes the details and leaves you to decide.

And, if you don't like cartoons, don't want to watch any, and would prefer a Cliff's Notes approach to this aspect of twentieth century U.S. pop culture, Faith Trust and Pixie Dust can hardly be recommended enough. Here are well written, accurate, terse, and enjoyable summaries of thirty major Disney cartoon movies. I can testify that they bring back memories of the movies I've watched and stories I've read; I'd trust Pinsky's summaries as a guide to which, if any, of the newer movies I would or would not be willing to sit through.

Pinsky's web site indicates that he's sold enough of his books about the spiritual values reflected in pop culture to have dropped that thread and changed his focus to historical studies. So, his earlier books, about the values or "gospels" of Disney movies and "The Simpsons" cartoons, are now Fair Trade Books; they're more widely available secondhand than new, and you can get them for lower prices, but when you send this web site $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment, we'll send $1 to Pinsky or a charity of his choice. (If you want both Faith Trust and Pixie Dust (The Gospel According to Disney) and The Gospel According to the Simpsons, you'd mail a postal order for $15 to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or e-mail salolianigodagewi for the correct current Paypal address to send $16, and Pinsky or his charity would get $2. Contact information is at the bottom of the screen, below the Amazon widget.)

For Pinsky's recent contribution to North Carolina history, Met Her on the Mountain, go here.