I ducked a few slings and arrows the other day when I declared I would never again sit through an animated feature made by corporate formula peddlers. I said that films like Finding Dory were basically “corporate-branded heroin for the family audience.” One guy called me an asshat for dismissing quality-level animation. But it’s not the craft I’m addressing but the underlying corporate sedative that runs through the veins of (most) animated features. I explained my feelings a little better about three months ago, to wit:
“On a certain level I believe that family-friendly corporate animation is almost demonic in that it has a subversive agenda. It delivers family narcotic highs when your kids are young, but it acts as a kind of childhood sedative that leads to placated thinking and zombie lifestyles. Corporate animation is mainly about injecting and reenforcing blandly positive, middle-class consumerist attitudes and values. Watch corporate animation as a kid, live your tweener and teenaged life in malls, sign a college loan that will keep you in a kind of jail for half your life, and eternally invest and submit to American McMansionism — an Orwellian system if there ever was one.
“Childhood was a huge gulag existence when I was a kid, and Disney mythology was a key aspect of that. Comforting but phony emotion dreams do you no good as a 7 year-old — you’ll just have to unlearn them when you get older. And my parents played right along. Everything they did and said to shelter me from things they felt I was too young for constituted a huge minus in the end. It took me years to unlearn the lessons and impressions they passed along in the name of parental compassion.