4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An important and engaging study., February 23, 2008
This review is from: The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present) (Hardcover)
David Whitley's excellent book is remarkable for many reasons, chief amid which is that he is supremely sensitive to the way Disney-made animated movies (and he usefully differentiates between later movies made by the Disney studios and those overseen by Walt Disney himself) have shaped our ways of seeing nature. He takes the trouble to observe not only what the movies present but precisely how they do so - and in the process reveals some fascinating insights into the ways we have seen and continue to conceive what `Nature' might be.
It's not a small point - as Whitley remarks, Bambi was in 1990 the third highest grossing movie of all time, having had a run of nearly 50 years at that point, and it has shaped attitudes in adults and in children alike. As those children became adults they carried their prejudices into a modern world that has been less than sympathetic towards nature in any guise.
Whitley's analysis is especially illuminating when he comes to look at Pocahontas and to untangle for us the cultural evasions that the movie embodies on both sides of the arguments about colonization. While the Europeans tended to see America as a place to gather wealth so they could return home, the attitudes of the Native Americans were hardly as simple or as naïve as they have been presented to us over the centuries, and so in Pocahontas we see an attitude critical of the colonists but also surprisingly unquestioning of the peoples they discovered. Gently, Whitley brings us into contact with our own blind-spots about what we imagine our history to be and how we tend to look at the natural world, shaping it in ways that say a great deal about our human capacities for delusion.
If we're to come to some realistic understanding about what our relationship to the natural world might be - and as we destroy more and more forest and ransack unspoiled land in our economic rapacity for raw materials it's a good question to pose - then we'll need such sensitive and intelligent assessments of our world as Whitley supplies.
Whitley's admirable close readings, his extensive and eye-opening research, and his lightness of touch when dealing with these movies reveal them in a whole new way. This is a book to own, to re-read, and to treasure.
Allan Hunter
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