On Why Kids Nowadays are Great Big Wussies

"The environmental movement of our times was sparked by the re-release of Bambi in the 1950s." ~Tom Platt, from Walt Whitman's The Last Days of Disco

Do you remember the huge brou-ha-ha that erupted when The Lion King came out?

First there was all the fuss over the word “sex” being subliminally inserted into a scene. A conservative activist even went so far as to ask for a ban on the film because he felt the intent of Disney was to make children sexually promiscuous (guess it worked, huh, Paris?)

Seems kind of argumentative to me, considering that kids have memorized every song from Disney movies and own the DVD before the thing is in pre-production. If you want a Disney movie to influence kids, don’t use a hazy word that you have to freeze frame the movie to find. Just have one of the lions tell kids outright to have promiscuous sex, for heaven’s sake. That would get it done much more efficiently. Only very, very nerdy children run through animated films in freeze frame trying to find hidden stuff, and it doesn’t matter whether or not they see messages telling them to have sex, because they are never going to get laid anyways. Freeze frame nudity is the only kind they’re ever going to see. Don’t take that away from them.

The Lion King was also criticized for being too “dark” for children. I guess the Nazi hyenas were pretty scary, but I don’t know that children are really grasping the fascist or genocidal undertones while they’re watching a hyena voiced by Whoopi Goldberg do a song and dance number. The dad lion did get trampled by a herd of buffalos, but that was far less traumatic than Bambi’s mother getting both barrels from that hunter. And Scar was a threatening character, to be sure, but if you’re looking for true terror in the form of Jeremy Irons, may I please direct you to Kubrick’s Lolita. That presents both Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffiths as sex symbols. Not for the kiddies. (Or grownups, for that matter, Mr. Irons, please put your pants back on.)

So what’s all the fuss these days? Kids are too sheltered if they think the African savanna is a place where zebras and lions hang out together and happily fulfill the socially dictated requirements of the caste system. Wait until they get into the corporate world. This is not a world we want children to go into unprepared for reality. Protected, yes; ignorant, no.

Let’s look at what was put forward to my generation as good kiddie fare:

Watership Down. Made the year I was born, this featured a bunch of bunnies dealing with displacement and dictatorships, all in psychedelic animation and scored to John Denver. (No, seriously.) It depicted, in full colour no less, a rabbit getting its ears torn to shreds by the owsla, the rabbit secret police (cough cough) and a rabbit burrow being plowed over while the rabbits and their babies crush each other to death as they try and scramble to the surface. The climax features a rabbit being freed from choking to death in a wire snare, blood oozing down his throat, and one rabbit tearing another’s jugular out while it screams, backlit by lightening, and blood pours down its jaws. And these bunnies are the cutest things you’ve ever seen, all expressive ears and huge eyes. I remember walking home from school very, very slowly the day we all watched that.

Plague Dogs. This is another animated movie that ostensibly indicted animal testing, something I think all of us would admit is pretty horrible as subject matters go, but that really only served to scare the pants off the children that expected the “can’t we all just get along?” camaraderie of the Fox and the Hound. No, while this movie does admittedly have a fox-dog friendship, the two titular dogs start off trapped in an experimental laboratory in Britain. (Boy, the Brits are mean to their animated animals…and let’s not even get into the concept of Dalmatian coats.) The lab is a nightmare – it even has a gas chamber for kittens. They endeavor to shield children from this horrible concept by calling it..."the kitten gas chamber.” Well done. So one of the dogs has undergone brain experiments and wears a bandage over his exposed brain (not kidding) and the other dog, noble Rowf, has had rocks sewn into his stomach cavity and is forced to undergo tests where he swims in a tank until he drowns, and then is electro-shocked back to life to do the test again. Then the dogs escape, and you breathe a sigh of relief until half an hour later when the dogs are accidentally shooting a farmer point-blank in the face with his own rifle and eating the dead human corpse. The movie ends with the dogs being driven out to sea, and it fades away as they swim towards a hallucinatory island off in the distance but presumably drown, alone and terrified. Get the popcorn, kids!

The Secret of Nimh. Yet another animated feature showing cute animals having terrible things done to them and doing rather gruesome things to each other to the sound of synthesizer music. It centers around a brave little widow mouse whose child is bedridden and in the path of a plow that will crush their home (in case the children couldn't figure out what that would look like, the movie helpfully shows it in a flashforward.) Brave mother mouse, being romantically pursued both by a seagull and a libidinous secret police mouse, consults with a group of rats. These rats are shown in flashback to have been experimented on and injected, thrashing and squeaking, with all sorts of components, and as a result have developed superhuman intelligence. Nicodemus, a superintelligent rat who has visions and really creepy glowing eyes, is plotted against by a power-mad capitalist rat faction, which is eventually successful in crushing poor Nicodemus underneath a cinderblock. All of this takes place underground, in gloomy wet caverns, and drugs are featured all over the place: medicine for the baby, sedatives for the cat, psychotropics for the rats. Pretty far from the mousy frontier fun of An American Tale.

The Last Unicorn. This wasn’t so much scary as just plain weird. It was as if the producers at Rankin/Bass got together, smoked a few joints, consulted King Lear and a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and then decided to make a children’s movie. There are sexual undertones all over the place: the huge rampaging Red Bull forcing all those delicate white girl unicorns into submission and then drowning them in the sea, the tree that tries to date rape a magician, and finally, a man that falls in love with a horse. Might be a little touchy to replicate these characters for McDonalds toys, don’t you think? Not to mention some pretty serious violence: a woman is torn apart, screaming, by a naked-breasted harpy, a young prince is trampled by a flaming bull, said bull is dragged under the waves and drowns, a decapitated skull gets loaded on wine, and the unicorns rush the castle en masse, tumbling the old king to his death on the rocks. It also features a song with the following lyrics:

“...when the last eagle flies over the last crumbling mountain
and the last lion roars at the last dusty fountain
and it seems like all is dying and leave the world to mourn...”

Not as catchy as Hakuna Matata, I suppose.

Old Yeller. "Ma? Ma...there's sumthin' wrong wit Yeller. Hey boy, who's my Yeller? What's wrong, Yeller?" Nuff said.

So after my generation survived all the fascism, rabbit capital punishment, kitten gas chambers, doggie vivisection, rat torture, and the forbidden love between a man and a tree, you’d think that Poor Mufasa’s off-screen trampling wouldn’t be considered nearly so terrifying.

Hiding anything scary from our children might be a bit of a worry. This is a generation, after all, that will have to live with environmental devastation, the continued ghettoization of the developed world, the poverty, insurmountable national debt, vicious civil wars and widespread epidemics of the undeveloped world, and Britney Spears’ continued moral decline.

They can handle a few Nazi hyenas.

For my sister A, who I remember being very scared by The Dark Crystal.