How Master Japanese Animator Satoshi Kon Pushed the Boundaries of Making Anime: A Video Essay

To casu­al view­ers, most Japan­ese ani­ma­tion (at least apart from the ele­gant work of Hayao Miyaza­ki and his col­lab­o­ra­tors at Stu­dio Ghi­b­li) can look like a pret­ty unso­phis­ti­cat­ed and even dis­rep­utable affair, char­ac­ter­ized by crude flashi­ness, con­vo­lut­ed sto­ry­lines, and bizarre, sopho­moric humor. All those things do, of course, exist in the realm of ani­me, but only because every­thing does: if Japan’s ver­sion of ani­ma­tion often ris­es above those of oth­er cul­tures, it does so as a result of that cul­ture regard­ing ani­ma­tion as sim­ply cin­e­ma by oth­er means. And any cin­e­mat­ic form will inevitably pro­duce diverse vir­tu­os­i­ty: to see how a mas­ter Japan­ese ani­ma­tor can have a sen­si­bil­i­ty com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from that of Miyaza­ki, look no fur­ther than Satoshi Kon.

“Even if you don’t know his work, you have cer­tain­ly seen some of these images,” says Every Frame a Paint­ing’s Tony Zhou in the series’ video essay on Kon’s work, which includes the inter­na­tion­al­ly acclaimed films Per­fect BlueTokyo God­fa­thers, and Papri­ka.

“He is an acknowl­edged influ­ence on both Dar­ren Aronof­sky and Christo­pher Nolan, and he has a fan base that includes just about every­one who loves ani­ma­tion.” The essay shows us how those two West­ern live-action auteurs, among Kon’s oth­er fans, have bor­rowed his images for their own sto­ries, just as Kon, in turn, drew a great deal of inspi­ra­tion from a sim­i­lar­ly unlike­ly source: George Roy Hill’s 1972 cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of Kurt Von­negut’s nov­el Slaugh­ter­house-Five.

More specif­i­cal­ly, Kon drew inspi­ra­tion from the film’s inven­tive and sur­pris­ing cuts from one scene to anoth­er, a for­mal reflec­tion of its chronol­o­gy-and-geog­ra­phy-jump­ing pro­tag­o­nist’s state of being “unstuck in time.” Through­out his decade-long fea­ture film­mak­ing career, Kon “was con­stant­ly show­ing one image and then reveal­ing that it was­n’t what you thought it was.” Kon died in 2010, hav­ing “pushed ani­ma­tion in ways that aren’t real­ly pos­si­ble in live action, not just elas­tic images but elas­tic edit­ing, a unique way of mov­ing from image to image, scene to scene.” His accom­plish­ments live on not just in his own work, but in all the ways the cre­ators who admire it con­tin­ue to adapt his inno­va­tions for their own, even in the tra­di­tion­al­ly “respectable” forms of cin­e­ma.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Hand-Drawn Japan­ese Ani­me: A Deep Study of How Kat­suhi­ro Otomo’s Aki­ra Uses Light

The Phi­los­o­phy, Sto­ry­telling & Visu­al Cre­ativ­i­ty of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Ani­me Film, Explained in Video Essays

The Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Cow­boy Bebop, the Cult Japan­ese Ani­me Series, Explored in a Thought­ful Video Essay

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

The Ori­gins of Ani­me: Watch Free Online 64 Ani­ma­tions That Launched the Japan­ese Ani­me Tra­di­tion

A Salute to Every Frame a Paint­ing: Watch All 28 Episodes of the Fine­ly-Craft­ed (and Now Con­clud­ed) Video Essay Series on Cin­e­ma

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory of the Cosmos Now Published & Available Online

Image by NASA, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In the weeks before he died, Stephen Hawk­ing wrote what would be his final the­o­ry of the cos­mos. Co-writ­ten with Bel­gian physi­cist Thomas Her­tog, and now pub­lished in the Jour­nal of High Ener­gy Physics, “A smooth exit from eter­nal infla­tion?” asserts that “real­i­ty may be made up of mul­ti­ple uni­vers­es, but each one may not be so dif­fer­ent to our own.” Or so that’s how the the­o­ry gets trans­lat­ed into col­lo­qui­al Eng­lish by The Guardian. You can read an abstract of the the­o­ry here, or the com­plete pub­lished ver­sion here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion

Stephen Hawking’s Lec­tures on Black Holes Now Ful­ly Ani­mat­ed with Chalk­board Illus­tra­tions

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er 

Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical Debuted on Broadway 50 Years Ago: Watch Footage of the Cast Performing in 1968

As years go, 1968 is packed with notable events.

The Tet Offen­sive and the Apol­lo 8 mis­sion to the moon.

The assas­si­na­tions of Mar­tin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

The first 747 took to the skies. Star Trek showed television’s first inter­ra­cial kiss.

And Hair: The Amer­i­can Trib­al Love-Rock Musi­cal, which debuted down­town hard on the heels of the Sum­mer of Love, reopened on Broad­way.

New York Times crit­ic Clive Barnes—a fan—caved to pres­sure from anx­ious pre­view audi­ence mem­bers, who want­ed him to warn prospec­tive tick­et buy­ers what they were in for. Tongue firm­ly in cheek, he com­plied with­in the body of a rave review:

A great many four let­ter words such as “love”

A num­ber of men and women (I should have count­ed)… total­ly nude

Fre­quent approv­ing ref­er­ences… to the expand­ing ben­e­fits of drugs

Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty

Mis­ce­gena­tion

Flow­ers

Then, as now, a grow­ing youth move­ment occu­pied the Amer­i­can public’s imag­i­na­tion.

If 2018’s Broad­way pro­duc­ers are will­ing to take a risk on a musi­cal that’s not adapt­ed from a pop­u­lar movie, we may well be enter­ing tick­et lot­ter­ies for Gon­za­lez! some­time in the very near future.

Back then, young peo­ple were in revolt against the Viet­nam War and the val­ues their par­ents held dear.

The orig­i­nal ver­sions, both on and off Broad­way, fea­tured two of the show’s three authors, Gerome Rag­ni and James Rado, as anti­heroes Berg­er and Claude. (Galt Mac­Der­mot wrote the music.)

While oth­er cast mem­bers emerged from New York’s hip­pie scene, Rag­ni and Rado’s back­grounds were some­what lack­ing in patchouli. Rado was an aspi­rant com­pos­er of tra­di­tion­al Broad­way musi­cals. Rag­ni, as a mem­ber of The Open The­ater, was a bit more tuned in, the­atri­cal­ly speak­ing.

As Rado recalled in an inter­view:

There was so much excite­ment in the streets and the parks and the hip­pie areas, and we thought if we could trans­mit this excite­ment to the stage it would be won­der­ful. … We hung out with them and went to their Be-Ins (and) let our hair grow.

Barnes wry­ly not­ed in his review that “these hard-work­ing and tal­ent­ed actors are in real­i­ty about as hip­pie as May­or Lind­say.”

But there’s noth­ing too wig-like about the hair swing­ing around in the above footage—from the Gram­mys, The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour, and the 1969 Tony Awards where the cast was intro­duced by Har­ry Bela­fonte. There’s a spon­tane­ity sel­dom seen in big bud­get musi­cals these days, though with a nation­al tour hit­ting the road and dozens of 50th anniver­sary pro­duc­tions pop­ping up across the coun­try, we may be in for a redux.

To learn more about Hair’s role in the­ater history—including under­study Diane Keaton’s refusal to get naked and a page from the Times’ the­ater list­ings show­ing what else was play­ing at the time—read The Bow­ery Boys pho­to-packed 50th anniver­sary salute.

Sing along with the orig­i­nal Off-Broad­way cast below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Footage of the “Human Be-In,” the Land­mark Counter-Cul­ture Event Held in Gold­en Gate Park, 1967

89 Essen­tial Songs from The Sum­mer of Love: A 50th Anniver­sary Playlist

Fed­eri­co Felli­ni Intro­duces Him­self to Amer­i­ca in Exper­i­men­tal 1969 Doc­u­men­tary

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Wednes­day, May 16 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Peter Sellers Gives a Quick Demonstration of British Accents

A while ago we brought you a hilar­i­ous series of record­ings of the British comedic actor Peter Sell­ers read­ing The Bea­t­les’ “She Loves You” in four dif­fer­ent accents. Today we have a brief clip from a tele­phone call by Sell­ers on the set of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb (in which Sell­ers played three dif­fer­ent roles). Here he demon­strates the nuances of a few of the many accents around Great Britain. From cock­ney to upper class and from Lon­don to Edin­burgh, it’s clas­sic Sell­ers all the way.

If this whets your appetite, don’t miss the items in the Relat­eds below.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Sell­ers Reads The Bea­t­les’ “She Loves You” in 4 Dif­fer­ent Accents: Dr. Strangelove, Cock­ney, Irish & Upper Crust

Peter Sell­ers Recites The Bea­t­les’ “A Hard Day’s Night” in the Style of Shakespeare’s Richard III

Peter Sell­ers Presents The Com­plete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

Pulp Covers for Classic Detective Novels by Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie & Raymond Chandler

Yes­ter­day we wrote of the low opin­ions the emi­nent J.R.R. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis held for the “vul­gar” cre­ations of Walt Dis­ney. As a coun­ter­point to their dis­dain for pop­u­lar enter­tain­ment, we might turn—as writer Steven Gray­danus does in Dis­ney’s defense—to their con­tem­po­rary, the Catholic apol­o­gist and pro­lif­ic essay­ist, jour­nal­ist, poet, and writer of detec­tive nov­els and short sto­ries, G.K. Chester­ton.

But we aren’t talk­ing Dis­ney here, but hard-boiled pulp fic­tion, a genre I think Chester­ton would have liked. Chesterton’s work “was entire­ly pop­u­lar in nature,” notes Gray­danus. He was “a great defend­er of pop­u­lar and even ‘vul­gar’ cul­ture.” Take his essay “A Defense of Pen­ny Dread­fuls,” which begins:

One of the strangest exam­ples of the degree to which ordi­nary life is under­val­ued is the exam­ple of pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture, the vast mass of which we con­tent­ed­ly describe as vul­gar. The boy’s nov­el­ette may be igno­rant in a lit­er­ary sense, which is only like say­ing that mod­ern nov­el is igno­rant in the chem­i­cal sense, or the eco­nom­ic sense, or the astro­nom­i­cal sense; but it is not vul­gar intrinsically–it is the actu­al cen­tre of a mil­lion flam­ing imag­i­na­tions.

Sen­ti­ments like these inspired admir­ers of Chester­ton like Mar­shall McLuhan and Jorge Luis Borges to take seri­ous­ly the mass enter­tain­ments of their respec­tive cul­tures.

We might apply a Chester­ton­ian appre­ci­a­tion to the book cov­ers here, illus­trat­ing detec­tive fic­tion by such nota­bles as Dashiell Ham­mett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Ray­mond Chan­dler.

Despite the cul­tur­al cachet these names bear, they are also writ­ers whose work thrived in the “pulps,” a term denot­ing, Rebec­ca Rom­ney writes at Crime Reads, “a wide cat­e­go­ry that bounds across gen­res.” Famed detec­tive writ­ers were as like­ly to be print­ed in “pulp fic­tion” mag­a­zines and cheap paper­back edi­tions as were acclaimed authors like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe. In addi­tion to a num­ber of genre con­ven­tions, the “com­mon traits” of pulp fic­tion “are cheap­ness, porta­bil­i­ty, and pop­u­lar­i­ty.”

Detec­tive fic­tion, whether “lit­er­ary” or wild­ly sen­sa­tion­al, has always been a pop­u­lar enter­tain­ment, close kin to the “Pen­ny Dread­ful,” those cheap­ly-pro­duced 19th cen­tu­ry British nov­els of adven­ture and sen­sa­tion. “Twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry detec­tive nov­els are inti­mate­ly tied to the his­to­ry of the pulps,” writes Rom­ney, which “rely on the erot­ic for their appeal.” Pulp pub­li­ca­tions sen­sa­tion­al­ize in images what may be far more chaste in the text. These “ridicu­lous­ly sex­i­fied” book cov­ers do not both­er with coy sym­bol­ism or min­i­mal­ist allu­sion. They take aim direct­ly at the libido, or, to take Chesterton’s phrase, “the actu­al cen­tre of a mil­lion flam­ing imag­i­na­tions.”

The cov­er of The Mal­tese Fal­con at the top goes out of its way to illus­trate “the only sex­u­al­ly scan­dalous scene of the book, as if it were the sin­gle most cru­cial moment of the entire sto­ry.” The cov­er is pure objec­ti­fi­ca­tion, and on such grounds we might rea­son­ably object. To do so is to cri­tique an entire mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry aes­thet­ic of “exploita­tion,” a campy style that glee­ful­ly tit­il­lat­ed audi­ences who glee­ful­ly desired tit­il­la­tion.

The cov­ers date from the mid-thir­ties to ear­ly fifties. All of the typ­i­cal visu­al pulp themes are here, which are also typ­i­cal of detec­tive fic­tion and noir: the femme fatale (called “a lus­cious mantrap” on the cov­er of Ray­mond Chandler’s The Big Sleep below), in var­i­ous seduc­tive states of undress; the unsub­tle hints of vio­lence and sado­masochism. Such themes in the nov­els can be overt, implic­it, or ful­ly sub­merged. The focus of these cov­ers turns the tropes into cheap come-ons. In this, per­haps, they do their authors an injus­tice, but their naked inten­tion is sole­ly to make the sale. What read­ers do with the books after­ward is their own affair.

“These absurd cov­ers,” Rom­ney writes, “speak to the detec­tive novel’s unavoid­ably shared her­itage with oth­er sen­sa­tion­al pulp gen­res, much like the ever-present creepy uncle at Thanks­giv­ing.” As much as qual­i­ty detec­tive fic­tion, sci-fi, fan­ta­sy, and hor­ror might receive crit­i­cal praise as high art, they will always be inex­tri­ca­bly relat­ed to the “vul­gar” plea­sures of the pulps. To speak of such enter­tain­ments as the domain of the low­brow, the mag­nan­i­mous Chester­ton might say, is only to “mean human­i­ty minus our­selves.” Still, I won­der what Chester­ton would have said had his col­lect­ed Father Brown sto­ries appeared in a pulp ver­sion with a non­sen­si­cal­ly sexy cov­er?

Vis­it Crime Reads to see these cov­ers com­pared with those of more sub­tle, and arguably more taste­ful, edi­tions.

More pulp cov­ers of clas­sic lit­er­a­ture can be found at LitHub.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter the Pulp Mag­a­zine Archive, Fea­tur­ing Over 11,000 Dig­i­tized Issues of Clas­sic Sci-Fi, Fan­ta­sy & Detec­tive Fic­tion

“20 Rules For Writ­ing Detec­tive Sto­ries” By S.S. Van Dine, One of T.S. Eliot’s Favorite Genre Authors (1928)

Ray­mond Chandler’s Ten Com­mand­ments for Writ­ing a Detec­tive Nov­el

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch AC/DC Rock a Gymnasium Full of High School Kids in 1976

Through the mag­ic of black and white video, this rare gig of Bon Scott-led AC/DC has been unearthed. The sound is poor, the light­ing some­times non-exis­tent, but who cares? Just look at the faces of the 16-year-old girls in the front row as one of the hard­est rock­ing bands plays (checks notes) the St. Albans High School gym­na­si­um in 1976! It’s absolute mad­ness. Who knew at that time that AC/DC were going to hit big, like sta­di­um big, like essen­tial hard rock band of all time big? To some it was prob­a­bly a fun night out and isn’t it fun­ny that the lead singer likes to rock a set of bag­pipes?

In fact, the song they play in the video “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wan­na Rock ‘n’ Roll)” is the first (per­haps) track to pit bag­pipes against gui­tars.

In this key bit of inves­ti­ga­tion by Dan­ger­ous Minds, writer Cher­ry­bomb won­ders whether Bon Scott–a trans­plant from Scot­land to Aus­tralia when he was six–actually could play the pipes at all. I mean, yes, one might *assume* that being Scot­tish means you’re half-way there, but in fact, accord­ing to a piper called Kevin Con­lon, Scott only got an inter­est in the instru­ment dur­ing the record­ing of 1975’s T.N.T. :

I got a call from Bon, and he didn’t know who I was and I didn’t know who he was. He want­ed to buy a set of bag­pipes and have a few lessons. I told him they would cost over $1000 and it would take 12 months or more of lessons to learn how to play a tune. He said that was fine and came down for a few lessons, but as we were only going to be mim­ing, he just had to look like he was play­ing.

Cher­ry­bomb con­cludes that maybe, just maybe, Scott is play­ing the pipes dur­ing this num­ber, instead of mim­ing to a pre-record­ed track over the P.A. But lat­er the pipes got smashed up, and the num­ber got dumped from the act. And report­ed­ly the rest of the band was furi­ous over their lim­it­ed funds being spent on an instru­ment Scott couldn’t real­ly play. The whole sto­ry has a tinge of Spinal Tap excess to it, but hey, you wouldn’t want it any oth­er way, right?

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

AC/DC Plays a Short Gig at CBGB in 1977: Hear Met­al Being Played on Punk’s Hal­lowed Grounds

Hear a Super­cut of the Last Sec­ond of Every AC/DC Song

Demen­tia Patients Find Some Eter­nal Youth in the Sounds of AC/DC

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Enter an Archive of Over 95,000 Aerial Photographs Taken Over Britain from 1919 to 2006

As deep as we get into the 21st cen­tu­ry, many of us still can’t stop talk­ing about the 20th. That goes espe­cial­ly for those of us from the West, and specif­i­cal­ly those of us from Amer­i­ca and Britain, places that expe­ri­enced not just an event­ful 20th cen­tu­ry but a tri­umphant one: hence, in the case of the for­mer, the des­ig­na­tion “the Amer­i­can Cen­tu­ry.” And even though that peri­od came after the end of Britain’s sup­posed glo­ry days, the “Impe­r­i­al Cen­tu­ry” of 1815–1914, the Unit­ed King­dom changed so much from the First World War to the end of the mil­len­ni­um — not just in terms of what lands it com­prised, but what was appear­ing and hap­pen­ing on them — that words can’t quite suf­fice to tell the sto­ry.

Enter Britain from Above, an archive of over 95,000 pieces of aer­i­al pho­tog­ra­phy of Britain tak­en not just from the air but from the sweep of his­to­ry between 1919 and 2006. Its pic­tures, says its about page, come from “the Aero­films col­lec­tion, a unique aer­i­al pho­to­graph­ic archive of inter­na­tion­al impor­tance.

The col­lec­tion includes 1.26 mil­lion neg­a­tives and more than 2000 pho­to­graph albums.” Orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed by Aero­films Ltd, an air sur­vey set up by a cou­ple vet­er­ans of World War I and lat­er expand­ed to include small­er col­lec­tions from the archives of two oth­er com­pa­nies, it “presents an unpar­al­leled pic­ture of the chang­ing face of Britain in the 20th cen­tu­ry” and “includes the largest and most sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of air pho­tographs of Britain tak­en before 1939.”

Here you see just four selec­tions from among those 95,000 images from the Aero­films col­lec­tion dig­i­tized by the four-year-long Britain from Above project with the goal of con­serv­ing its “old­est and most valu­able” pho­tographs. At the top of the post, see bomb dam­aged and cleared areas to the east of St Paul’s Cathe­dral, Lon­don, 1947. Then wing­walk­er Mar­tin Hearn does his dare­dev­il­ish job in 1932. Below that, a near­ly abstract pat­tern of hous­ing stretch­es out around St. Aidan’s Church in Leeds in 1929, the light ship Alarm pass­es the SS Col­le­gian in Liv­er­pool Bay in 1947; and Scot­land’s Loch Lev­en pass­es through the Mam na Gualainn in that same year.

Attain­ing a firm grasp of a place’s his­to­ry often requires what we metaphor­i­cal­ly call a “view from 30,000 feet,” but in the case of one of the lead­ing parts of the world in as tech­no­log­i­cal­ly and devel­op­men­tal­ly heady a time as the 20th cen­tu­ry, we mean it lit­er­al­ly. Enter the Britain from Above pho­to archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1927 Lon­don Shown in Mov­ing Col­or

A Daz­zling Aer­i­al Pho­to­graph of Edin­burgh (1920)

Amaz­ing Aer­i­al Pho­tographs of Great Amer­i­can Cities Cir­ca 1906

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 His­tor­i­cal Films on YouTube

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heartfelt Loathing” for Walt Disney and Refused to Let Disney Studios Adapt His Work

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I’ve just start­ed read­ing J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit to my 6‑year-old daugh­ter. While much of the nuance and the ref­er­ences to Tolkien­ian deep time are lost on her, she eas­i­ly grasps the dis­tinc­tive charms of the char­ac­ters, the nature of their jour­ney, and the per­ils, won­ders, and Elven friends they have met along the way so far. She is famil­iar with fairy tale dwarfs and myth­ic wiz­ards, though not with the typol­o­gy of insu­lar, mid­dle-class, adven­ture-averse coun­try gen­try, thus Hob­bits them­selves took a bit of explain­ing.

While read­ing and dis­cussing the book with her, I’ve won­dered to myself about a pos­si­ble his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship between Tolkien’s fairy tale fig­ures and those of the Walt Dis­ney com­pa­ny which appeared around the same time. The troupe of dwarves in The Hob­bit might pos­si­bly share a com­mon ances­tor with Snow White’s dwarfs—in the Ger­man fairy tale the Broth­ers Grimm first pub­lished in 1812. But here is where any sim­i­lar­i­ty between Tolkien and Dis­ney begins and ends.

In fact, Tolkien most­ly hat­ed Disney’s cre­ations, and he made these feel­ings very clear. Snow White debuted only months after The Hob­bit’s pub­li­ca­tion in 1937. As it hap­pened, Tolkien went to see the film with lit­er­ary friend and some­time rival C.S. Lewis. Nei­ther liked it very much. In a 1939 let­ter, Lewis grant­ed that “the ter­ri­fy­ing bits were good, and the ani­mals real­ly most mov­ing.” But he also called Dis­ney a “poor boob” and lament­ed “What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent soci­ety?”

Tolkien, notes Atlas Obscu­ra, “found Snow White love­ly, but oth­er­wise wasn’t pleased with the dwarves. To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of a con­cept they held as precious”—the con­cept, that is, of fairy sto­ries. Some might brush away their opin­ions as two Oxford dons gaz­ing down their noses at Amer­i­can mass enter­tain­ment. As Tolkien schol­ar Trish Lam­bert puts it, “I think it grat­ed on them that he [Dis­ney] was com­mer­cial­iz­ing some­thing that they con­sid­ered almost sacro­sanct.”

“Indeed,” writes Steven D. Grey­danus at the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter, “it would be impos­si­ble to imag­ine” these two authors “being any­thing but appalled by Disney’s sil­ly dwarfs, with their slap­stick humor, nurs­ery-moniker names, and singsong musi­cal num­bers.” One might counter that Tolkien’s dwarves (as he insists on plu­ral­iz­ing the word), also have fun­ny names (derived, how­ev­er, from Old Norse) and also break into song. But he takes pains to sep­a­rate his dwarves from the com­mon run of children’s sto­ry dwarfs.

Tolkien would lat­er express his rev­er­ence for fairy tales in a schol­ar­ly 1947 essay titled “On Fairy Sto­ries,” in which he attempts to define the genre, pars­ing its dif­fer­ences from oth­er types of mar­velous fic­tion, and writ­ing with awe, “the realm of fairy sto­ry is wide and deep and high.” These are sto­ries to be tak­en seri­ous­ly, not dumb­ed-down and infan­tilized as he believed they had been. “The asso­ci­a­tion of chil­dren and fairy-sto­ries,” he writes, “is an acci­dent of our domes­tic his­to­ry.”

Tolkien wrote The Hob­bit for young peo­ple, but he did not write it as a “children’s book.” Noth­ing in the book pan­ders, not the lan­guage, nor the com­plex char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, nor the grown-up themes. Disney’s works, on the oth­er hand, rep­re­sent­ed to Tolkien a cheap­en­ing of ancient cul­tur­al arti­facts, and he seemed to think that Disney’s approach to films for chil­dren was espe­cial­ly con­de­scend­ing and cyn­i­cal.

He described Disney’s work on the whole as “vul­gar” and the man him­self, in a 1964 let­ter, as “sim­ply a cheat,” who is “hope­less­ly cor­rupt­ed” by prof­it-seek­ing (though he admits he is “not inno­cent of the prof­it-motive” him­self).

…I rec­og­nize his tal­ent, but it has always seemed to me hope­less­ly cor­rupt­ed. Though in most of the ‘pic­tures’ pro­ceed­ing from his stu­dios there are admirable or charm­ing pas­sages, the effect of all of them is to me dis­gust­ing. Some have giv­en me nau­sea…

This expli­ca­tion of Tolkien’s dis­like for Dis­ney goes beyond mere gos­sip to an impor­tant prac­ti­cal upshot: Tolkien would not allow any of his works to be giv­en the Walt Dis­ney treat­ment. While his pub­lish­er approached the stu­dios about a Lord of the Rings adap­ta­tion (they were turned down at the time), most schol­ars think this hap­pened with­out the author’s knowl­edge, which seems a safe assump­tion to say the least.

Tolkien’s long his­to­ry of express­ing neg­a­tive opin­ions about Dis­ney led to his lat­er for­bid­ding, “as long as it was pos­si­ble,” any of his works to be pro­duced “by the Dis­ney stu­dios (for all whose works I have a heart­felt loathing).” Astute read­ers of Tolkien know his seri­ous intent in even the most com­ic of his char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions. Or as Vin­tage News’ Mar­tin Cha­lakos­ki writes, “there is not a speck of Dis­ney in any of those pages.”

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

J.R.R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hob­bit for 30 Min­utes (1952)

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

Sal­vador Dalí & Walt Disney’s Des­ti­no: See the Col­lab­o­ra­tive Film, Orig­i­nal Sto­ry­boards & Ink Draw­ings

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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