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.