Why Disney Can No Longer Make Fairy Tales

They realize that they're in trouble. Nobody wants to see their movies anymore. Nobody cares. But it's hard to get rid of people once the company itself is made of people that think in a certain way. I don't know. I don't think they can recover from this. It felt like Disney was dropping the fairy tales. It didn't want them actually. And so in the last few live versions they've made, they've been very cynical. And then the Snow White version they made was horrible because they don't know what to do. They don't like the fairy tales. They don't know how to handle them. And so I thought this is a sign for us that those of us that actually love these stories, that care for them, and they care for our heritage, it's time to pick them up and to tell beautiful, celebratory, smart versions of the tales. Not cynical, not trying to make them into some kind of political commentary, but rather just kind of tell them in a celebratory way. That was the plan. You said that Disney is not retelling folk tales well. I think I know why that is, but will you tell me why that is? Well, I think one of the things that happened, of course, in Disney is that it got taken over by, I guess, what you could call the woke mind virus. It started with a kind of feminism trope where they didn't like the idea of the princess that meets her prince. They wanted to liberate her. It started with, I think, with Rapunzel, actually, where there's whole stories about her own self-development and the guy is just a detail in the story. And then it just kept getting worse and worse as they moved down the progressive line to a point where the images in the fairy tales didn't make sense to what they wanted to make anymore. So by the time they got to Snow White, that's why it took, I think, three, four years to make Snow White, is because the first version they made was so political and they realized that no one is going to want this because Disney, that story in particular, Snow White, it was the first full-length animation. It was a massive moment in culture when Disney made that movie and they were basically dragging it through the mud by making it into a kind of postmodern commentary. And so I think that's what it is. And now the problem they have is that they realize that they're in trouble. Nobody wants to see their movies anymore. Nobody cares. But it's hard to get rid of people. Once the company itself is made of people that think in a certain way, I don't know. I don't think they can recover from this. Nor do I. They've been stymied by their own peculiar and sort of spiraling agenda there. Initially, Disney takes a cultural artifact, like a Grimm or a Hans Christian Andersen fairy story, that's redolent with relevant imagery and ideas precisely because it's somehow presumably accessing deep archetypal truths. Then Disney, in its earlier incarnation, is somehow able to, in a sense, amplify or at least reiterate those principles through the animation. A hundred years later, Disney is not even able to stay true. Isn't it amazing how fast our culture moves? It isn't even able to stay true to its own interpretation of source material. I watched the live-action Pinocchio and it seemed like they weren't comfortable with lying or something like that or consequence. I was like, this is ******* pointless. What are they even talking about now at this point? It's a shame because there's a darkness in human beings and therefore there's a darkness in fairy stories and folk stories because there's a darkness that has to be addressed. If you deny that darkness, I wonder what happens to a culture. This is my set of questions, having made that point. See something like Snow White. That's a folk cultural object, should we call it, and likely pagan. It's a sort of a pagan object. How do we, as Christians, Jonathan, align pagan cultural artifacts with Christian interpretations in a culture that's, in a sense, a neo-modern progressive paganism? I would say the first thing is that I don't think it's true. The idea that these are pagan stories, I think, is something that was made up by 19th century anti-Christian thinkers that tried to do that for everything. They told us that Christmas is pagan, Easter is pagan, pretty much everything that's Christian is pagan. I think it's just bullshit. I think it's just bullshit. I think that these stories, although they clearly take sources in pre-Christian stories, they're a continuation of pre-Christian stories, but by the time that they're transcribed, they have a very, very deep Christian structure. They've been transformed, you could say, from these ancient, ancient Greek myths, and they've been, in some ways, fiddled with, they've been retold, they've been remembered in a manner that, in fact, has a deep Christian root to it. When I told Snow White, for example, I tried to pull the threads of the story that would make you see that this is a Christian story. I mean, the story of Snow White is a story about resurrection, it's a story, it's a song of songs, it's about a bride that finds her lover. If you watch the early Disney version, you can see that when the prince kisses her and wakes her up, he actually takes her to heaven. He takes her to a castle in the sky. Disney knew very well that this was a resurrection story, that it was a very deep Christian story. If I can back up a little bit and say, how is it that Christians deal with these? Early Christians and the late classical Christians, they had no problems with the Greek myths, in the sense that St. Basil said that you had to read the Iliad and the Odyssey before you read the Bible, because you had to be a cultured person to be able to have a kind of story track in your mind. You had to have these stories ingrained into your thinking, so that when you read the Bible, you could understand the stories there. It's the same with the supposedly Northern myths. Everybody talks about Thor and Odin and these pagan myths, but do you know who wrote those stories down? It was Christians. Christians are the ones who actually wrote down the Greek myths. They were written when the people in Iceland converted to Christianity. And so there's a very deep misunderstanding about this. In the Christian stories, C.S. Lewis talked about how, in fact, Christ is the true myth. And so in all the pagan stories, there's a hint, there's like a little glimmer, there's something of Christ in those stories, and it's our job in some ways to be able to make that little something shine and to help point it in a direction that is positive. So that's what I think about that. Thanks for watching the video. Have a look at this one over here, or join us Monday, Wednesday and Friday on Rumble.