Talking Animals
To me they seem dangerous, all these stories about ugly ducklings and good things coming to butterflies that wait. They confuse biological facts with moral choice. Just once I want to read a story where the dissatisfied caterpillar chooses to stay a caterpillar, and the slow snail turns into a butterfly. I want to read about male cows.
The question of distance is always difficult. At what level am I being asked to buy into the story? At what level am I buying into the story? At what level do social groups buy into the story? When does telling our story with animals free us, when does it trap us, and when does it become confused?
Lawrence Miles once said:
And while I’m in mid-rant I’d also like to question the long-term effects of children’s movies like Toy Story and Monsters Inc, which seem to be designed to turn things that used to be astonishing and remarkable into things that are crass and ordinary. In Toy Story, all the toys magically come alive and then… hold bureaucratic meetings about paint erosion. In Monsters Inc, it turns out that monsters aren’t actually strange and fabulous beasts but bored clerical staff who spend most of the day hanging around the water-cooler at Monster Head Office. These films aren’t made with children in mind, they’re made by “professional” adults who want to feel good about their own petty lives, and as a result the next generation’s being primed for clerical work from birth. I think the word I’m looking for here is “evil”.
Yet he seems to be into fairy tales, with their castles and princesses and dragons and so on—and what are these, but the emblems of a different age. I think I would rather a story structured around an office worker than a knight. The latter seems too fallen, too entangled with toxic ideas class and gender, violence and simplicity (Cervantes was, after all, questioning this stuff four hundred years ago). The former is more fruitful ground for generating thoughtful critique.
The problem with Toy Story is that it chooses the story of a boy’s toys. The problem with Monsters Inc is that CEOs are less likely to be female, secretaries are more likely to be female, and women still earn less for the same work. The problem is not the work, but the bell curve that’s brought with it, and the assumptions that cause that bell to be formed and then mapped.
The worst of it are the biological fictions. The hippopotamus is not clumsy and hungry. The male Emperor penguin does not wear the pants. You cannot slow boil a frog. And if they are fictions about animals, then they are fictions about humans too.