They were left on the balcony with enough food and beer to get them through the day, but by late afternoon they were all naked (because their costumes were too hot), drunk, and screaming swear words at the crowd.
but by late afternoon they were all naked (because their costumes were too hot), drunk, and screaming swear words at the crowd.
Become ungovernable!
This essay is about The Lion King, but it also does a great job outlining the fascist undertones in Pinocchio
The tradition that leads to THE LION KING begins with PINOCCHIO — arguably the most beautifully animated of the Disney classics, undoubtedly the creepiest. In this, Disney's second animated feature, the blurry outlines of the Disney tradition suddenly become coherent — as the evocation of an ideology which still dared speak its name in the late 1930s, its power and prestige goose-stepping proudly across the world stage to the dazzlement of at least one animator-tycoon.
In 1938, the year PINOCCHIO was in production, Uncle Walt regularly attended meetings of the American Nazi Party in Hollywood, where Mein Kampf sold like hotcakes at corner newsstands. It comes as no surprise that Nazism resonated with Disney: he shared its conceit of white supremacy, its antagonism towards independent organized labor, its abhorrence of urbanism, and, above all, its hatred of Jews. He regarded himself as a bastion of Protestant morality in an industry dominated by Jew-spawned frivolity and lewdness. This sense of mission was buttressed by more prosaic market concerns: Hitler, who also made the link between Hollywood and Jews, barred U.S. films from Germany, an act which gravely distressed Disney. History is thus unclear on whether in making PINOCCHIO, Disney was paying homage to the Nazis or simply pandering to them. (Fortunately, Hitler returned Disney's affection: his favorite song was "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”; in 1937 Goebbels presented a birthday gift of 18 Mickey Mouse shorts to the Führer.)
PINOCCHIO begins among the honest peasants of a pristine Alpine village. Pinocchio, created by the gentle watchsmith Geppetto and "given life" by a Hollywood starlet descending from her celestial orb, sets out on the path of good: to school, where he can presumably learn about his national culture. Unfortunately, his puppet nature, lacking a will of its own, allows him to be rather easily led astray, his Jiminy-Cricket conscience notwithstanding. The villains who divert him from the straight-and-narrow, appearing in order of escalating evil, are straight out of a fascist primer; their real-life analogs would all, under the Nazis, wear distinguishing patches on their clothes before being shipped to the concentration camps.
The first villain, The Fox, is mannered, effeminate, urbane and of the theater. His small, strangely elastic companion, The Cat, constantly slithers around him and through his legs. Clumsily, the two of them often become entwined with each other in a chaos of limbs. They are clearly gay. The Fox entices Pinocchio to the "theater," selling him to the evil Gypsy Stromboli, the most blatant ethnic stereotype in the movie. Stromboli, cashing in on his new stringless puppet, is greedy, dishonest, violent and inhumanly cruel — clearly of an inferior race. His presence also underscores PINOCCHIO's distinctly Old World landscape, where Gypsies ranked higher on the list of despised minorities than they did in America. Stromboli locks a frightened and weeping Pinocchio in a cage; the puppet escapes only with the help of the starlet. Unfortunately, it's out of the frying pan and into the fire for our poor hero.
The Fox traps him again, this time to sell him to the worst of the villains: a stout, cruel-visaged businessman, dealing from a shadowy corner of a restaurant on a dark and foggy city street — so greedy and evil that he scares even The Fox and The Cat. He is, in short, everything that a Nazi would expect of a Jew.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler explains the nefarious scheme of the Jews: they lure good, solid German men — artisans like Geppetto — into the city, to be corrupted by vice and Communism. Once degraded by these alien influences, the German worker is permanently enslaved. Accordingly, the Jew in PINOCCHIO lures little (gentile) boys to Pleasure Island, an amusement park where they can misbehave. The atmosphere is dark and crowded, dense and full of movement — in short, city-like. The urban vice is there: Pinocchio and a pugfaced boy hang out in a pool hall. The Communism is there: the main attraction is a mansion that the boys are allowed to demolish in an orgiastic attack on private property. The degradation follows: the boys, having made asses out themselves figuratively, become literal donkeys. Finally, their ultimate enslavement: the donkeys are put to hard labor in the mines. Pinocchio, at first on the road to a wholesome Aryanism, is ultimately at risk of falling into the debased proletariat. And all because of homosexuals, Gypsies, and Jews.
Pinocchio luckily comes to his senses and manages to escape with only a tail and floppy ears. Returning home, he finds that Geppetto has gone in search of him — the starlet informs him that the watchmaker is in the belly of a monstrous whale.
What follows is a sequence that appears repeatedly in Disney movies: a trial of masculine initiation in which the initiate exerts his will to overcome a seemingly overwhelming force, earning his right to enter a privileged sphere of male power (whether this means becoming a "real" boy, succeeding to the throne, or growing a big set of antlers). In PINOCCHIO, of course, this scenario is Nazi-inflected: Pinocchio rescues his father (the Fatherland?) from a leviathan (the international Jewish banking system?), exhibiting the appropriate virtues of endurance, courage, and self-sacrifice — all the traits of a good soldier.
PINOCCHIO's sexual politics follow this fascist lead: women quite literally inhabit a "separate sphere." Procreation is transformed into an act of male creativity, which women merely ratify with their mysterious ability to "give life." Women are also repositories of "morality," encouraging virtues like honesty (although even this becomes a test of masculine self-control: Pinocchio, denying his naughtiness, is betrayed by a growing, ever more erect and unconcealable nose; learning virtue and getting this unruly organ under control are the same task.) The ideal society of PINOCCHIO, as of the Nazis, is a disciplined, all male, warrior culture nurtured by idealized feminine domestics.
Pinocchio rescues his father (the Fatherland?) from a leviathan (the international Jewish banking system?)
Ngl that bit seems a little out of left field
Ironically, PINOCCHIO's thick Continental ambiance and relentlessly fascist cosmology have allowed it to age better than most Disney classics. It steers clear of embarrassingly crude caricatures of American minorities (such as DUMBO's crows or PETER PAN's Indians). Obsessively focused on male initiation, it mercifully leaves girls alone (unlike CINDERELLA or SLEEPING BEAUTY). An epic of the volk, it is not, like 99% of the rest of Disney's oeuvre, preoccupied with the travails of royalty. Finally, it also spares us Uncle Walt's wish-fulfillment fantasies of ideal workers (unlike SNOW WHITE, in which happy dwarves sing, "Hi Ho," on their way to the mines — a vision recently given a service-industry update in BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, in which hospitality workers, transformed into household objects, sing "Be My Guest" in an orgasmic fulfillment of their biological need to serve.) Avoiding the hot buttons of concerned liberals and, of course, striking conservatives as ineffably wholesome, PINOCCHIO's 50th anniversary re-release met with no controversy.
That PINOCCHIO could, nonetheless, very well have served as a Hitler Youth training film is not simply a reflection of Uncle Walt's devotion to National Socialism. Rather, he and Hitler — as well as countless other corporate leaders, government planners, architects, cultural purveyors and social thinkers in Europe and the United States — shared an overall social vision. They dreamed of a dispersed post-urban society, with a population — kept in line by a strong domestic realm instilling a keen sense of blood loyalty and "family values" — that could be efficiently mobilized to serve either the military needs of the state or the labor needs of industry.
The chief obstacle to this utopia was the disordered realm of the cities — cauldrons of ethnic intermingling, voluntary associations (of unionists, bohemians, Communists, gays and feminists), and general squalor — which offended fascist sensibilities of order, cleanliness and efficiency. It is no coincidence that the ultimate villains of Hitler's world view were also seen as the most quintessentially urban: Jews, barred from agriculture, lived largely in cities; according to Hitler, urban squalor spread outward from their filthy ghettoes. The Nazis even used a distinctly urban fauna as their chief metaphor for Jews. Like rats, Jews were inescapably "adapted" to the city. To eliminate one meant eliminating the other.
Both Hitler's and Disney's anti-urbanism was expressed as back-to-nature primitivism. Their plans, however, were in no way backward-looking. Hitler envisioned a society requiring a great deal of lebensraum, organized around autobahns and Volkswagens and interspersed with centers of monumental national architecture and educational "castles" in which children would imbibe their national culture. In other words, suburbia dotted with Disneylands.
We are now at the other end of the suburban explosion that originated with visionaries like Hitler and Disney. And, sure enough, the suburban reality continues to nurture the fascist visions that created it. Fifty years after PINOCCHIO (with Nazism supposedly repudiated, and Uncle Walt long since preserved in cryonic slumber to await his resurrection) THE LION KING echoes all of its fascist themes: hatred of gays, communists, and minorities, and the glorification of violent male initiation and feminine domesticity — all set in a bucolic suburban environment under the strong leadership of an all-male state.
Above all, it speaks of the fear of cities. This time, however, the city is not a treacherous lure to simple rural folk, but an invading threat looming over the suburban paradise.
Imagine if the Soviets had try to out Disney Disney.
What would a corpus of films from the Soviets with Disney production values look like today?
You know I heard that when they were filming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the 1960s in Germany they had to import little people actors from turkey because all the little people in Germany had been killed in the holocaust
also Oompa Loompas were black pygmy slaves that Willie Wonka had bought. It was in the first draft of both the book and the movie.
The Grubstakers podcast is :haram: but I listened to their episode about Walt Disney. That man was an absolute Nazi-loving piece of shit.
One of the scariest sci-fi stories I ever read was from a Randroid chud that fantasized about Walt Disney coming back from the grave and establishing a nightmarish fascist police state... as a good thing. :sus-soviet:
Why is Grubstakers on the badlist? I listened to it for awhile and learned a lot about how utterly immoral and sickeningly vicious anyone who even begins to approach the realms of billions is.
Maybe "haram" is too strong. Podcast is fine other than some weird drama at the end of the podcast and now the former hosts don't talk to each other anymore. Really just I see on here that Sean McCarthy was bad but I never really investigated why.
Maybe “haram” is too strong.
Too strong? it doesn't seem like you have any criticism at all.
I knew a little person who worked in films in the 1990's and it was still bad then.
There is something about old grayscale photography that evokes real sense of unease for me. It's really not that creepy but it's also hella creepy.
You’re probably right, feel like I about a jump scare any second now…
I for one love it. Its the color photos that feels unreal for me.
