“Whistle While You Work”

Comparing the 2025 Snow White to the one released in 1937, Disney's first full-length animated film:

.... The 2025 film brazenly removes the heart of the original film’s princess. It was dead on arrival.

The 1937 Snow White is the only Disney princess film that includes a literal depiction of prayer. Many age-old stories contain allegories for divine intervention (fairy godmothers, for instance), but in the original Snow White, the princess kneels at her bedside and prays. She prays for the seven dwarves, for Grumpy to like her, and for her dreams to come true—namely, that someday, her “prince will come.” (Lest we forget, the prince was a man she knew and liked from her time at the castle, not a complete stranger.) She prays for safety.

And her prayers are answered. The evil queen is vanquished by a lightning strike from the heavens. Divine help is integral in the 1937 film; the dwarves, the prince, and the princess just participate in it.

In the live-action film, there is no prayer for love and marriage. Not only that, desiring such things is ridiculed. ....

In the classic, Snow White sweeps while singing “Whistle While You Work.” In the remake, she noticeably offloads the broom to one of the dwarves. The filmmakers are clearly trying to remove any insinuation that cooking and cleaning are women’s work. But the Snow White in the original is defined by cheerful acceptance of such duties—performed in gratitude for the dwarves’ hospitality—and hopeful optimism in the face of hardship and persecution. In the new version, Snow White is despondent and worn down by injustice. The impression one is left with is that the filmmakers rewrote the character because they simply do not like Snow White. .... (more)

The illustration is from the 1937 version. I do have the '37 Snow White on Blu-ray. I should watch it again.

Mary Rose Somarriba, "How Disney Killed Snow White," First Things, April 4, 2025.

Watership Down

Russell Moore presents his annual ten favorite books list: "My Favorite Books of 2023." The first on the list is Watership Down: The Graphic Novel. I had missed its publication but now that I know it exists I am sorely tempted. Moore:

Once, I mentioned the novel Watership Down and a young man said, “Yeah, I read that when I was a kid. It was really sweet.” After a couple of minutes of confusion, we realized he was thinking of The Velveteen Rabbit. The rabbits in Watership Down are anything but velveteen. The book deals with the darkest aspects of human existence projected onto the lives of warrens of rabbits—murder, envy, rivalry, exile, scapegoating.

That’s why I loved this graphic novel. The artwork captures what the book is attempting: to give the reader the vertigo of seeing animals we are acculturated to view as harmless while at the same time seeing the tension, peril, and depravity that we pretend we don’t see in ourselves. The last page, particularly, is astoundingly beautiful.

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you—digger, listener, runner, Prince with the Swift Warning. Be cunning and full of tricks, and your people shall never be destroyed.”

Russell Moore, "My Favorite Books of 2023," Christianity Today, December 7, 2023.

“Truth, Justice and the American Way”

From "The death of Superman: How Hollywood killed the American hero":

Something has been absent in recent times in the adaptation of film and art — the idea of a fundamentally American hero. Superman, as a character, is ultimately about why America is good, and Hollywood simply does not believe America is a force for good. ....

Americans do not think of themselves as sharing a common enemy, as they did during the Cold War. Hollywood won’t portray radical Islam in film due to cultural and media sensitivities. China fills a natural role, but thanks to the growing market overseas for films, Hollywood is capitulating to them politically by offering alternative edits to their films and even going as far as having Chinese state officials on set, as Marvel did with Iron Man 3 and others. On issues of race, policing, gender and politics, Hollywood takes a progressive posture. ....

...Hollywood has the very idea of Superman backwards. Superman knows what American exceptionalism is; Hollywood and our media struggle with accepting the same idea. Instead they view him as a symbol of imperialistic and misguided patriotic propaganda, and therefore, he must be reinvented, re-imagined and rewritten. ....

...[T]o ignore the American propaganda aspect of Superman and similar comic heroes is to betray their entire reason for being. The character’s co-creator Jerry Siegel enlisted in the United States military in 1943. He was trained as both a skilled mechanic and as a reporter for Stars and Stripes. The character of Superman himself was published primarily as American military propaganda, with the character routinely foiling Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

The world may have changed around him, but Superman is constant, and should be understood as the quintessential American hero. It is not Superman who struggles with his identity. He knows what his purpose is. Despite its failings, America is a global force for good, like Superman. We struggle, we falter, but our ideals remain a constant. They are everlasting. It’s not Superman and America who need to be re-imagined. It’s Hollywood. (more)

Stephen L. Miller, "The death of Superman," The Spectator, August 30, 2023.

A streak of terrible remakes

Madeleine Kearns on "How to Ruin a Fairy Tale":

.... Like all fairy tales, the story of Snow White communicates certain timeless moral messages: the destructiveness of vanity; the evil of envy; the virtues of kindness, gentleness, and hard work; the triumph of good over evil, love over hate. What it doesn’t communicate is our more modern priorities and sensibilities, such as defeating the patriarchy and being sensitive to minority groups.

These omissions appear to be what filmmakers seek to rectify in the new live-action remake of Snow White, coming to theaters next year. Rachel Zegler, who plays Snow White, said in a resurfaced interview from 2022 that Snow White is “not going to be saved by the prince and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love.” Rather, she’ll be “dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true.”

The attempt to mix things up is also evident in the casting. Snow White is named thus on account of her “skin as white as snow.” Zegler, meanwhile, is tanned. This is sort of like having Little Red Riding Hood appear in a blue baseball cap or having a brunette play Goldilocks. And in service of what point, exactly?

The seven dwarves, meanwhile, have been reimagined as “magical creatures.” Disney explained that it consulted with members of the dwarfism community and wanted to “avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film.” This is one of those situations where you can’t win. Cast people with dwarfism as the seven dwarves and you’re stereotyping. Cast people of a normal height (then make them look shorter through CGI, as was done in Snow White and the Huntsmen in 2012), and you’re insulting those with the condition through appropriation. Alternatively, remove the focus from dwarfism entirely — as in this case — and you’re erasing the disability altogether. Better, then, to just stick with the seven dwarves, and cast the best actors for the roles. .... (more)

Madeleine Kearns, "How to Ruin a Fairy Tale," National Review, July 30, 2023.

Brer Rabbit

I only have a couple of DVDs that are probably pirated. One of them is Disney's "Song of the South." It is completely understandable why Disney now considers the film objectionable — happy plantation field workers. Unlikely. But the cartoons are pretty good and they can be found on YouTube.

Angry pacifism

I loved this, perhaps because it combines a lesson from history, political cartoons, and C.S. Lewis, but also because I like the historical analogy:

On September 9, 1944, mere days after the liberation of Paris by Allied forces in World War II, one of the most revered English minds of the 20^th century penned a warning that looked beyond the immediate conflict toward the unthinkable—a third world war. C.S. Lewis was concerned about a lingering public attitude of apathy that threatened to leave Great Britain ill-prepared for her own defense in the years to come, just as a similar climate had sapped its strength in the age of appeasement in the 1930s.

“We know from the experience of the last twenty years that a terrified and angry pacifism is one of the roads that lead to war. I am pointing out that hatred of those to whom war gives power over us is one of the roads to terrified and angry pacifism. … A nation convulsed with Blimpophobia will refuse to take necessary precautions and will therefore encourage her enemies to attack her.”

What did Lewis mean by Blimpophobia? It’s an allusion to a popular British political cartoon of that era....

Colonel Blimp was the creation of Sir David Low, considered one of the most influential political cartoonists of the 20^th century. The colonel sported a walrus mustache, a stately paunch, and carried an air of the old British aristocracy. Blimp invariably found himself pontificating on world events while wrapped in a towel, red faced, and enjoying a good sauna or Turkish bath. He came to represent the confused, contradictory, but no less confident attitude of British officials in the 1930s: He was befuddled but well-meaning, and he consistently made bold but incoherent statements on domestic and foreign affairs. ....

Low habitually used Colonel Blimp to lampoon Britain’s confused, contradictory, and accommodating treatment of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and other rising threats in Europe and Asia:

“If the Abyssinians don’t stop defending themselves, Mussolini will take it as an act of war … ”

“There’s only one way to stop these bullying aggressors—find out what they want us to do and then do it … ”

“Hitler only needs arms so that he can declare peace on the rest of the world.” ....

Lewis recognized that a reflexive opposition to an engaged foreign policy, rising out of a distaste for those in charge, was setting the stage for disaster. Prior to his fame as an author, theologian, and thinker, Lewis was a distinguished veteran of World War I and a keen observer of his country’s mood during the interwar period. He had seen the results of the “angry pacifism”—it had “led to Munich, and via Munich to Dunkirk.” In other words, frustrations aimed at the past had caused Britain to suffer near destruction in the present. As the war in Ukraine hits the one year mark, our nation must ask itself whether it will be led in the 21^st century by a terrified and angry pacifism, buttressed by a confused and contradictory foreign policy, or whether it will stand up against stupidity in its many iterations and manifestations. People are dying. It is not the time to listen to our home-grown Colonel Blimps when they stand in solidarity with dictators who demand capitulation and call it peace. (more, but likely requiring a subscription)

C.S. Lewis's essay “Blimpophobia” appeared originally on September 9, 1944 in Time and Tide. It has been reprinted in Present Concerns.

Jacob Becker, "The Dangers of an ‘Angry Pacifism’," The Dispatch, Feb. 23, 2023.

Good grief!

An appropriate recognition:

A century after his birth and two decades after his death, the Peanuts characters remain beloved American icons. What American doesn’t know Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, or Lucy? The Peanuts Christmas special, made in 1965, remains a holiday tradition. The Peanuts Movie, released in 2015, made a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide. The U.S. Postal Service is honoring the centennial with stamps of the Peanuts characters — but not of Schulz himself, who always insisted that he should be known only through his comics. ....

Watterson, who has written that Schulz “blazed the wide trail that most every cartoonist since has tried to follow,” is the first to acknowledge his debt to the melancholy Minnesotan. Schulz expanded the whole idea of what a comic strip could be about, and he did so without ever depicting an adult. ....

.... More than anyone else in the popular culture of the day, the sensitive and cerebral Schulz grasped something important about childhood: that it is a time not only of play but of anxiety, insecurity, social uncertainty, and the struggle to forge an identity and place in the world. The Peanuts gang knows only unrequited love and endless frustration, except when Snoopy is disappearing into his Walter Mitty fantasy lives. Schulz also understood that portraying these feelings in children would resonate with adults, because so many adults still carried those emotional scars, as he did for his entire life. Peanuts could be clever or wickedly funny at times, but it was the pang of emotional recognition that bound audiences to its characters. .... (more)

Dan McLaughlin, "Charles Schultz at 100," NRO, Dec 1, 2022.

Nice!

From The Spectator:

.... Nice, as in “a nice cup of tea,” was a word loathed by my schoolmistresses, like got. Their cue may have been Jane Austen. “This is a very nice day,” remarked Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, “and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! — it does for everything.” Yet the oddest thing about nice was its change of meaning from “ignorant, foolish” to a bundle of senses bigger than Jane Austen suggested. For nice in English came from the classical Latin nescius, which spawned words in Romance language such as necio in Spanish meaning “blockhead.”

More surprising than nice in the sense of “pleasant” being applicable to days, walks or ladies, were its concurrent quite contrasting meanings. “It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,” said the Duke of Wellington to Thomas Creevey about the Battle of Waterloo. ....

It could mean “punctilious in conduct,” too, as it still did when P.G. Wodehouse’s hero declared: “Bertram Wooster in his dealings with the opposite sex invariably shows himself a man of the nicest chivalry.” ....

In that year of 1598, John Florio in his English-Italian dictionary A Worlde of Wordes exemplified nice in the phrase “an effeminate, nice, milkesop, puling fellow.” Robert Cawdrey in his English dictionary A Table Alphabeticall (1604) listed nice as “slow, laysie.” In marshaling such different meanings simultaneously, English speakers exercised a nice judgment.

Dot Wordsworth "The not-so-sweet roots of ‘nice’," The Spectator, August, 2022.

Ingratitude

This somehow seems like profound commentary. Today's Calvin & Hobbes:

"Sequelitis and mediocrity"

I haven't purchased a Pixar film since Ratatouille and seldom re-watch that. In "To Mediocrity and Beyond" Ross Douthat on Pixar movies:

The decline of Pixar can be charted with relative precision from its acquisition by Disney in 2006. After a few artistic high points that had been in the works before the acquisition — most notably 2008’s Wall-E — the studio responsible for a remarkable decade of originality began to descend into sequelitis and mediocrity. There were occasional bright spots, from Toy Story 3 to Inside Out, but the brand gradually passed from a certificate of excellence to a firm promise of “just okay.” ....

Until this summer, that is, which has brought us an intensification of Pixarian decline, via the movie known as “Lightyear.” ....

One of the best superhero movies, Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, was a Pixar offering that improved on most of Marvel and DC, and after so many lousy Star Wars sequels and prequels one could imagine an animated space opera that likewise recaptured some of the old Skywalker magic, but with a different galaxy and cast.

The reason The Incredibles worked so well, however, is that it wasn’t afraid to be a straightforward superhero movie — cheeky and comical and self-deprecating rather than brooding and self-serious, but with the genre structure still intact, the supervillain and his lair, the world-destroying weapons, the works. ....

If the creative model where you sell action to kids and heartstring-tugging to their parents ends in this kind of mediocrity [i.e. Lightyear], was it really ever quite as brilliant as we imagined? Is there a reason that my own kids re-watched The Incredibles obsessively but were one-and-done with critically garlanded fare like Up and Ratatouille, or even the later Toy Story movies? When we look back on the Pixar age, will we see artistic glory — or just the clever manipulation of parental vulnerabilities, which became stale and obvious with repetition?

It’s too soon to say: Ask me again after a lightspeed jump to a future where the misbegotten Lightyear is forgotten.

I do re-watch The Incredibles.

Ross Douthat, "To Mediocrity and Beyond," National Review, June 23, 2022.

"May God bless and keep you always..."

On his 81^st birthday, Bob Dylan:


From 1971:

Participation

 

Calvin's wisdom

Originally posted in 2012:

Edd McCracken gives us "Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else" (I added the cartoon). For instance:

On expectations

Calvin: Everybody seeks happiness! Not me, though! That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world. Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!

On the tragedy of hipsters
Calvin: The world bores you when you’re cool.

On looking yourself in the mirror
Hobbes: So the secret to good self-esteem is to lower your expectations to the point where they’re already met?

James Q. Wilson in 1995 wrote "'Calvin and Hobbes' and the Moral Sense," from which:

Occasionally Calvin ponders what character may mean. As Christmas approaches, he knows he must be good for Santa Claus to deliver the countless presents (including a heat-seeking guided missile) that he covets. But, he wonders aloud, can he be thought truly good if he is good only to get the presents? "I mean, really, all I'm doing is saying that I can be bribed. Is that good enough, or do I have to be good in my heart and spirit?" But this brief insight quickly vanishes: "OK," he asks of Hobbes, "so exactly how good do you think I have to act?"

Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else, "Calvin and Hobbes and the Moral Sense," The Weekly Standard

Bob Dylan is 80

Lots of articles about Dylan today, his 80^th birthday. From "Bob Dylan Refused to Be the Voice of a Generation," quoting him:

There’s no black and white, Left and Right to me anymore, there’s only up and down, and down is very close to the ground, and I’m trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.

A writer at the same site observes;

I had little enough use, myself, for Dylan’s music until I was in my mid 30s. Getting past the image and into the deeper waters is where Dylan is best encountered.

I didn't appreciate Dylan until I was about that age.

And:

Few American musicians have attracted more praise or influenced more artists than Dylan. He even won a Nobel Prize in Literature for his lyrics. Dylan is loved by some and respected without affection by others, yet, for many, the sound of his voice and the words of his songs produce a reflexive revulsion. Either way, Dylan has always been more complex and interesting than the public image embraced by casual fans and bitter detractors alike. ....

From 1971:

"I can see the Master's hand":

It's November!

Re-posted.

 

Beginning in 1907 and continuing at least into my youth, at some point in the Fall the Sunday Chicago Tribune would publish these on the front page. The cartoonist was a nationally famous Tribune cartoonist, John T. McCutcheon.

The story, from 1907 — if this is difficult to read (it will enlarge if clicked upon), it is also here

Misfortune

Re-posted because it's perfect:

Really sorry!

Victimhood

Perfect. Thanks, Joel.

Stupid ethical questions

Resolutions