USCCB Election Roundup

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:30:14 -0500

Disney’s Christian Past and Tangled Present

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:01:00 -0500

In Tangled , the Walt Disney Company’s new animated, feature-length, 3-D adaptation of “Rapunzel,” critic Armond White finds , sadly, that the story of the girl with the very long locks not only “has been amped up from the morality tale told by the Brothers Grimm into a typically overactive Disney concoction of cute humans, comic animals, and one-dimensional villains,” but also that the film’s “hyped-up story line . . . gives evidence that cultural standards have undergone a drastic change” in the decades since Walt Disney first set out to charm both children and adults with his animated retellings of fairy tales. “The once-common moral lessons of fairy tales no longer get passed on the same way they used to,” says White, writing in the December issue of First Things . The wildly reworked story of the aptly named Tangled “gets strained through a sieve of political correctness that includes condescending to fashionable notions about girlhood, patriarchy, romance, and what is now the most suspicious of cultural tenets: faith.”

Although White is absolutely right about the tendency of today’s animated films ( Tangled included) to pander to the most annoying and depressing aspects of popular culture even as they ignore or deny the richer, deeper culture from which most classic fairy tales emerged, the animated features that Disney brought to the screen when Uncle Walt himself still oversaw the studio made a point of drawing considerable aesthetic, emotional, and narrative power from specifically Christian aspects of the culture that, even today, America shares with Europe.

Walt Disney’s Fantasia is an ambitious”even, for its time, daring”film: not a fairy or folk tale, but a series of animated interpretations of seven pieces of classical music played by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Leopold Stokowski and introduced on screen by composer and critic Deems Taylor. Everyone remembers Mickey Mouse as Paul Dukas’ (and Goethe’s) Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and, once seen, the vision of toe-shoed ostriches and tutued hippos performing Amilcare Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours stays forever in the mind’s eye.

Fantasia begins with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, as arranged for orchestra by Stokowski himself. The audience sees the maestro silhouetted on his podium, summoning forth music from his orchestral forces. Images and colors shift and swirl as the music rises and falls; along the way there are fleeting suggestions of Gothic tracery, images of light shafting down through darkness, and the sun rising through clouds. The often-mesmerizing sequence ends where it begins, with Stokowski, the wielder of musical power, on his podium.

After pieces by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and Beethoven (not to mention the hippos and The Mouse), the final number on Fantasia ’s program”the concert’s climax and conclusion”offers a deliberate echo of the first. This time, the offering is of two seemingly unrelated pieces of music”Modest Moussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria””presented in a single sequence.

But wait: Although musically and thematically dissimilar, both pieces have roots deep in the rich and varied faith life of European Christian culture. The narrator tells the audience they are about to hear and see “a picture of the struggle between the profane and the sacred”: first, a depiction of Walpurgis Night on Bald Mountain, “the gathering place of Satan and his followers,” where “the creatures of evil gather to worship their master,” and then the dispersal at dawn of the demonic horde, sent flying by the ringing of church bells and the singing of the “Ave Maria,” “with its message of the triumph of hope and light over the power of despair and death.”

As the sequence begins, night falls on the mountain and the village that nestles at its base. Moussorgsky’s music swells, and, at the mountain’s peak, Satan”horned, leering, and with gleaming slits for eyes”unfurls his batlike wings and raises his arms (a deliberate echo of Stokowski on the podium) to summon his minions. The devil’s shadow falls across the village, and skeletal figures rise from graves to join their dark lord and his demons in their fiery revels.

The demonic debauchery goes on all night, with increasing frenzy, until, suddenly, the sound of a single church bell stops Satan short. He winces and cowers as the bell continues to ring. His fires subside, his demons slither away, and the skeletal dead drift back to their graves through the predawn mist.

As Satan raises his fists to heaven and folds himself back into his wings, dawn begins to break. A choir is heard, singing “Ave Maria,” as a candlelit procession makes its way over a Gothic-arched bridge and through a landscape of trees whose soaring trunks and branches resemble the delicate tracery of a Gothic cathedral. As shafts of light illuminate the darkness, a soprano voice sings lyrics commissioned by Disney from poet and novelist Rachael Field specifically for Fantasia :