I'm reminded also of the"The Muppets", who also weren't afraid to make a difficult emotional point ("It's not easy being green") but who now have been sold to Disney in order to sell SUV's and fast food ("It's not easy being a delicious Subway sandwich in less than 5 minutes!!!!!!!!!") Pauline Kael in her review of "The Little Mermaid" makes the point that children don't need to be spoon-fed, they thrill to darker elements: "Are we trying to put kids into some sort of moral-aesthetic safe house? Parents seem desperate for harmless family entertainment. As sleazy as Charlez Schulz has been made out to be in his personal life, "Peanuts" was a gift: a very sophisticated, humane comic. The redemption is in not needing redemption, for this is how LIFE REALLY WORKS, and kids are actually smart enough to appreciate this. Instead Lucy pulls the ball away, as always, and he ends up flat on his back. In any animated kids movie today he'd kick the ball a mile. Charlie slowly returns to daily life, nobody pays much attention to his failure, and in the final scene he takes a kick at the football Lucy is holding. Linus consoles him by saying that despite losing, the world didn't come to an end. Charlie returns home and takes to his bed for days. He contrasts these with the 1969 animated film "A Boy Named Charlie Brown", where Charlie LOSES the big spelling bee on the word "beagle" no less. Epplin cites many other examples: Dumbo and his ears, a garden snail winning a race in "Turbo", a rat cooking in "Ratatouille", a crop-dusting plane in "Planes". A prime example of this (which he doesn't mention) is when Rudolph is welcomed back into two-faced Santa's fold after successfully saving Christmas by guiding the sleigh with his formerly-hideous nose. Children's movies now rely on "magic feather syndrome": the plotline where a misfit child/toy/anthropomorphized animal ends up triumphing in the end by merely believing in themselves, often utilizing the very "defect" that caused them to be an outcast. You don't know how men suffer for children." Recent movies return the favor, according to Luke Epplin in his excellent Atlantic article You Can Do Anything: Must Every Kids' Movie Reinforce the Cult of Self-Esteem?. From the movie "Barfly": Jim: "You worked last year?" Chinaski: "Six months in a toy factory.
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