You all follow Movies with Mikey, right? He’s a guy who really loves the movies, and does these wonderful analyses of pop culture — between him and Lindsay Ellis I’m learning to see movies with a fresh eye.
Anyway, he’s started a new series, “Lessons Animation Taught Us”, and it’s…interesting.
Much of it is about how children and adults see these kid’s movies with a different eye. Lessons learned:
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He really liked Disney’s “Sword in the Stone” as a kid — I didn’t care for it myself, but I read TH White’s book first, which I found much more vivid than the movie — but it’s really the story of an abused child deprived of all agency and trapped in a fate he didn’t want.
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“Dumbo” is horrifying. It’s the story of an abused, tortured child told through the lens of a racist culture. Don’t show it to your children.
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But the movie we are all obligated to see, and the one we should take more lessons from, is “Grave of the Fireflies”.
Let that one sink in for a moment.
I took my daughter to see that one when she was a teenager. We thought, ah, Studio Ghibli, it’ll be fun and quirky and thoughtful and beautiful. It’s a about a 3 year old girl dying slowly of starvation after the firebombing of Japan in WWII. We walked home afterwards in a kind of shocked silence.
Mikey is right, though. Americans should actually all see the consequences of our actions abroad.