Comics and cartoon art can turn up when and where one least expects it. This week I was at Manhattan’s Film Forum, watching a marathon screening (over five hours!) of director Ingmar Bergman’s complete six-part 1973 series, Scenes from a Marriage. And twice there were brief glimpses of Disney comic books: one seemed to have Donald Duck on the cover, and the other definitely had Uncle Scrooge. (The comics seemed to belong to the protagonists’ children, though at one point an adult leafs through one of them.) I had not expected ever to see a Carl Barks-Ingmar Bergman connection, but there it is.
Later in the series, the male protagonist, a middle-aged academic who is being passed over by his superiors, observes, “I’m supposed to be in my prime, brimming with experience.” And that reminded me of the current state of the American comics industry. According to its Bizarro World logic, experience, even working on top selling books, and the wisdom accumulated over time count for little. (The corollary is that executives who come from outside the industry, ignorant of comics as an artform, business or culture, feel free to make decisions that wreak havoc, as the last dozen years have demonstrated.)
Another odd aspect of the American comics business is that even though superhero stories deal in mythic, archetypal characters and themes, comics professionals, in general, don’t look beneath the surface meaning of their work. (It strikes me that this might be the comic book writers’ equivalent of a similar phenomenon among comic book artists: the latter will cite past comics artists, and sometimes illustrators, as influences, but I rarely see an interview in which a contemporary comic book artist talks about studying past masters in the fine art world.) There are some individual writers who occasionally give indications that they’ve delved into the mythic underpinnings of their work: for example, I recall an Astro City letter column in which Kurt Busiek correctly described Spider-Man as an “urban trickster.” The San Diego Comic Con will set up panels on which comics pros discuss and debate certain themes in the genres in which they work, as if in perhaps unconscious imitation of an academic conference. But trust me: I’ve been in the comics business for two decades, and I have never yet overheard comics pros talk among themselves about What It All Means. As far as most of them seem to think, It’s Just Comics, right? My several Ivy League degrees in literature, dealing in this sort of critical analysis, have never impressed people in authority in the comics business. (Actually, to judge from my ongoing job search, Ivy League literature degrees don’t impress anybody. It’s the Bizarro World.) A friend of mine, who used to work in comics, told me that he felt that one particular editor never felt comfortable with him after learning he had a graduate school education in literature. Considering that I keep reading about growing academic interest in studying comics (I will soon be teaching a university course on the subject myself, if all goes well, and am contributing to a forthcoming academic book on comics), you may find this all rather strange.
All of this brings me to the subject of my longtime colleague Danny Fingeroth and his new book, Superman on the Couch, released this spring by the Continuum Publishing Group. Its catchy title might mislead the potential reader into thinking that it is about superhero psychology, or perhaps Superman’s sex life (a prequel to Larry Niven’s Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex?), his shopping sprees at IKEA, or his leisure time spent as a couch potato. Instead, this book is, as its subtitle states, about “What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society.”
Fingeroth is a Baby Boomer who’s been in the comics business longer than I have, writing and editing comics, rising to the position of editor of Marvel’s Spider-Man titles during some of their peak years of commercial success, and later heading a comics line for Byron Preiss. Despite his considerable credits, he, like many other talented comics veterans of his generation, finds himself out of favor in the current comics industry.
So, demonstrating an entrepreneurial drive that I envy, Fingeroth has found new outlets for employing his experience in comics. He teaches a course in comics writing at New York University. He has also created and edits Write Now, a magazine for TwoMorrows Publishing that deals with the craft of writing professionally for comics, science fiction, television and movies. (Full disclosure: I’ve contributed to Write Now, interviewing the aforementioned Mr. Busiek.) And now Fingeroth has written this book, Superman on the Couch.
Moreover, though Fingeroth had always struck me as a comics pro who knew the craft of writing but had no interest in delving into the deeper meanings of the genre, in working on this book he has clearly done a remarkable job of educating himself about literary analyses of the superhero genre. He’s read and absorbed ideas from some of the all too few landmark academic books on the subject, including John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett’s The Myth of the American Superhero and Richard Reynolds’ Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. He cites Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Bruno Bettelheim, whose analyses of myths and fairy tales can and should be applied with equal relevance to the now vast sixty-years-plus body of superhero stories. In his own book, Fingeroth presents ideas he has gleaned from these academic sources in clear, accessible, often humorous and vivid prose, free from the complications of scholarly jargon. (I may have already made the point in my own book, Marvel Universe, that Spider-Man was revolutionary in making a teenage superhero its central figure, but I didn’t come up with Fingeroth’s witty way of phrasing it, “Spider-Man is the Bar Mitzvah of the superhero.”)
More importantly, Fingeroth has successfully learned to think along similar lines himself. He offers up his own ideas and theories to the reader, based not only on his own reading of scholars’ works but on his own examination of what the superhero genre has meant to him through his lifelong career of editing and writing such tales. As he tells us in his concluding chapter, “As I wrote about the heroes and their appeal, I was forced to analyze the phenomenon of the superhero through my own experiences.”
In short, Fingeroth is doing a commendable job of repositioning his career. If the comics business at present does not sufficiently value the wisdom of experience, then he will find new outlets as a teacher and scholar. Some of the rest of us are attempting to pursue a similar path. Denny O’Neil is another example of a longtime comics writer and editor who in time discovered that his comics stories had mythic depths and set out to study their archetypal meanings; when and if O’Neil writes his own book on the subject of superhero mythology, I expect it will become a classic of comics scholarship. There are Trina Robbins’ several books on women in comics, both on the page and behind the scenes. Tom DeFalco has done a book of interviews with fellow Spider-Man writers, soon to be released. And, of course, there’s me, writing this weekly column of exhaustively detailed literary analyses of comics past and present. (And someday perhaps I’ll find someone willing to publish them as a book! Is anyone out there interested?) I also have another book proposal in the works, but I can say no more as yet.
Unlike me, Fingeroth does not deal in the analysis of specific stories in his book. Instead, his interest lies in determining how and why the major characters in the genre – Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, et al. – work. Along the way he concisely describes the roots of the modern superhero in ancient mythological figures such as Gilgamesh and Beowulf and in prose and pulp proto-superheroes such as the Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro. He likewise summarizes the origins of the comic book medium itself, in newspaper comic strips and in early 20th century pulp magazines like The Shadow and Doc Savage.
Fingeroth explores many basic concepts of the genre: the appeal of the secret identity, why so many heroes are orphans, Superman as immigrant and Clark Kent as an example of cultural assimilation, the “dark” hero (like Batman, Hulk, and Wolverine) as vicarious expressions of the readers’ anger, the roots of masks in tribal ritual, the superhero team as surrogate family. Much of this will be familiar to scholars like myself. I think I can best show you what I like about Fingeroth’s book by singling out some of his own ideas and observations and commenting upon them.
Early on Fingeroth makes the incisive observation that readers can fantasize being the villains as well as the heroes. This makes sense, and some comics writers may consciously or unconsciously recognize this. A number of classic Julius Schwartz Flash stories made members of the character’s great Rogues Gallery virtual protagonists, following their thoughts and deeds as they sought to concoct a new means of ridding themselves of the Flash. Schwartz went even further in the Black Hand tales in Green Lantern, narrated by the villain himself, breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing the readers. A good current example is Paul Dini and Bruce Timm’s Harley and Ivy mini-series, an entertaining buddy comedy turning two of Batman’s nemeses into the protagonists. Through many super-villains, whether they are colorfully comedic like Harley Quinn or noble, even tragic figures like Doctor Doom, the reader has a vicarious outlet for his own id, and can safely exercise his own dark side before his superego, in the form of the story’s superhero, locks the villain and the antisocial impulses he embodies back up where they belong.
Fingeroth does good work in comparing the superhero story to another American heroic adventure genre, the Western. He makes the very good point that thought the Western, like the spy adventure and other action-adventure subgenres, may outwardly seem more realistic than superhero tales, they likewise involve a considerable degree of fantasy. How is it, Fingeroth asks more than once, that so often the good guy in a Western is untouched by the hails of bullets fired at him? With a talent for grounding his arguments in the reader’s personal experience, Fingeroth asks the reader to imagine himself in a fistfight and then to wonder about those fictional heroes, not just in superhero stories but in other action genres, who endure battle after battle without lasting injury. Fingeroth therefore rightly postulates that characters like Dirty Harry, James Bond, Rambo, and Charlie’s Angels (and he could have gone a lot further – how about a lot of John Wayne’s roles?) actually inhabit a “middle world” between explicit superheroes and reality. Hence, a great deal of popular entertainment partakes more of the superhero archetype than is commonly recognized.
Fingeroth also makes the valuable point that perhaps one reason why superheroes were created was because the 20th century produced real life super-villains: the likes of Hitler and Stalin. This makes sense, too: the creation of the first superheroes paralleled the events leading to World War II. Think of the cover of Captain America Comics #1, with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America punching out Hitler. Simon and Kirby had created an imagined demigod to oppose a real life devil.
Fingeroth notes that usually in a story, the protagonist undergoes a character change or evolution. In contrast, he points out, not only do comics superheroes not age, or age extremely slowly, but that they do not evolve as personalities. Even seemingly major changes. like the weddings of Clark Kent to Lois Lane and Peter Parker to Mary Jane Watson, he asserts, do not substantially change the characters. (Instead, he pointedly observes, the marriages handicap writers by doing away with the romance subplots!)
Reading this section, I immediately thought of former Marvel editor in chief Jim Shooter, with his insistence that in each story the hero must change in some way as a character. Considering how many stories Spider-Man appeared in every month of every year, and how many writers dealt with him, this always struck me as an impossible task. Fingeroth is arguing that in fact it is an irrelevant goal in this genre, which eternally fixes a superhero at a particular age and outlook on life. Fingeroth could have gone farther with this argument, exploring the nature of story arcs in the superhero genre if the hero himself cannot evolve. (I think of one of Steve Englehart’s great Batman stories, in which Batman is imprisoned for the entire issue, and the tale instead explores the actions of all its other characters, and it is the villain, Professor Hugo Strange – who impersonates Batman and becomes the real protagonist – who undergoes startling character evolution.)
Fingeroth demonstrates the benefits of studying the underpinnings of the genre when he voices caution about the recent tendency in comics to play down or get rid of the traditional device of the secret identity. He concedes that the secret identity is increasingly viewed as unrealistic. In fact, it’s not just Clark Kent’s glasses that seem a weak excuse at disguise; Fingeroth brilliantly points out just how ineffective even most masked superheroes’ disguises would be in the real world. But Fingeroth makes the important argument that in seeking to make the superhero genre more realistic, writers should not cast aside important fantasy elements like the secret identity that have a primal appeal to the audience. Whereas it is familiar to see attacks on movie and TV versions of superhero series for getting things wrong, here and elsewhere Fingeroth rightly points out that often recent TV and movie depictions of the heroes value important elements of the characters that jaded contemporary comics pros dismiss. So, yes, in the Spider-Man and Daredevil movies the title heroes have genuinely secret identities. Over the years at Marvel, editors and writers have gradually aged Peter Parker from a fifteen-year-old high school student to a man well into adulthood, despite the protests of traditionalists such as John Byrne and Roger Stern, who perhaps even regret that Stan Lee had Peter graduate into college. Fingeroth points out that the makers of the Spider-Man movie recognized that, among other things, the story of Spider-Man is a coming-of-age saga, and rightly portrayed Peter as a teenager.
I’ve long thought that Wonder Woman, even if she is the archetypal superheroine, does not seem as conceptually strong as her peers, Superman and Batman. Fingeroth thinks so, too, and makes the intriguing argument that this is because while Superman and Batman were created by young men from impoverished backgrounds as expressions of their own heroic ideals, Wonder Woman was created by a financially and professionally successful middle-aged psychologist, Dr. William Moulton Marston, as a role model for young girls. Of course, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were middle-aged when they created so many classic Marvel characters. But, as we know, in the early 1960s Lee had decided to start writing the kind of superhero stories he himself would want to read; hence, I would argue, Spider-Man and the rest were expressions of his (and his collaborators’) dreams, fears and ideals. Fingeroth’s contention that Wonder Woman lacks that passionate core to her being because she was created as an adult’s idea of what is good for kids makes sense to me. (I wonder how Trina Robbins might respond to Fingeroth’s argument)
Elsewhere in his discussion of Wonder Woman, Fingeroth insightfully spots her “virgin birth,” sensibly compares her to another World War II icon, Rosie the Riveter (a woman doing a “man’s” role in wartime), and figures out that Xena is a more recent version of the Wonder Woman archetype. (I’d add that Red Sonja is the transitional figure between the two.) I suspect that Chris Claremont and Frank Miller would be startled by Fingeroth’s contention that Dark Phoenix and Elektra perpetuate negative stereotypes that powerful women must be evil. Claremont has been the most important figure between Marston and Joss Whedon in the creation of the positive feminist superheroine. Claremont’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” and Whedon’s “Dark Willow” arc on Buffy, obviously inspired by Claremont’s, hardly sums up either man’s image of women. Still, Fingeroth’s interpretation of the “Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Elektra Saga” is certainly arguable, and admirers of either Claremont or Miller’s work must deal with it.
Fingeroth also persuasively argues that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the first great superheroine created since Wonder Woman, and one who is much more conceptually sound. (I expect that Joss Whedon created Buffy to be his own concept of a hero, not just one for kids.) Fingeroth correctly links the X-Men, Buffy (with her “Scooby Gang”), and Harry Potter (with his schoolmates) series together as examples of surrogate families in the superhero genre. (I think that Harry is not truly a superhero series, but is heavily influenced by the genre. And, of course, I’d go further and point out that all three series are variations on an archetype of a school for superhumans.)
Fingeroth does make occasional mistakes about superhero continuity, though none that affect the theories and arguments he makes. Considering the vast number of comics that have been and are being published, how expensive our hobby has grown, and the fact that folks like Fingeroth are no longer on the major companies’ freebie lists, a few mistakes here and there are understandable and excusable. (Of course there should be someone at each of the Big Two keeping track of continuity and making the information available to inquiring comics pros, but as I well know, the Big Two don’t see the point.)
Drawing on Reynolds’ work, Fingeroth makes the intriguing claim that superheroes are really defenders of the status quo, whereas the “reformers,” the people seeking to change society, are super-villains: think of Magneto. Fingeroth notes that stories in which superheroes try to change society will lead to disaster, as in Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme. This is an interesting idea, but I there are counter-examples. Though rare, there are important stories about the superhero as revolutionary, seeking to overturn a corrupt establishment, such as Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, and even his Batman: Year One, and Claremont and John Byrne’s “Days of Future Past.” In 1602 Neil Gaiman pictures Captain America as a rebel leader against a totalitarian American presidency. Such tales turn the superhero into a modern day Robin Hood. I suppose that Denny O’Neil’s version of Green Arrow also fits this mold. This is a valid way of portraying super heroes, so perhaps the real question is why it is not done more often.
I like Fingeroth’s contrast between Batman as a figure taking revenge for his parents’ death on the world, and Spider-Man as taking revenge for his uncle’s murder on himself. I also quite like Fingeroth’s observation that readers don’t just identify with the persecuted X-Men out of their own sense of alienation. “Especially in adolescence,” he dryly observes from the standpoint of mature adulthood, “the romantic notion of belonging to a persecuted minority – whether or not one really is – has great appeal.”
Fingeroth goes on to make the familiar observation that comics fans may also see themselves as a misunderstood minority group, but intriguingly goes further by arguing that “The decrease in comics sales, ironically. . .coincidental with heightened profit-generating public awareness of, and affection for, super-heroes via movies and TV series, only makes fans feel more ‘persecuted’ and more avant-garde for their specialized tastes in pop culture.” I can see why they’d think that way: however popular and financially successful recent comics-based movies may be, comics themselves, the source material, have only made tantalizingly slow progress in achieving cultural respectability.
In fact, the decline of comics as a mass medium is a recurring undercurrent in Fingeroth’s book. He observes that a kid today might come to know and like Spider-Man from the movie and the video games without ever reading a Spider-Man comic. Gloomily (as we shall further see), Fingeroth offers only slim hope that the comics will survive.
But even if the comics die, Fingeroth asserts, the superheroes will live on through other media. To him, the “superhero is forever”; having been created in its familiar form in the 20th century, it is here to stay.
But I’d add that this may not be the entire story. Yes, there have always been superhuman heroes, going back in Western literature to the very beginnings, with Gilgamesh. But what we think of as the superhero did not start until the 1930s. It is a new form that Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces took in the 20th century in response to the mindset of Americans of that time. As Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen shows, 19th century literature is full of forebears to today’s superheroes and super-villains. But could the writers of the 19th century have foreseen the American superhero of the 1930s (even though some of its forebears’ creators, like H. G. Wells and Conan Doyle, lived long enough to see it)? Even the figure of the Great Detective, which seems another eternal archetype to us, really did not exist in literature before the 19th century and men such as Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe.
So, I wonder if at some point in the 21st century, a new form of larger-than-life hero will evolve, as relevant to its time as Superman was to the 1930s and Spider-Man was to the 1960s. Perhaps we will live long enough to see this new kind of superhuman hero, but perhaps few if any of us can imagine what it will be like from out standpoint in 2004. Oh, I expect that Superman and Batman may survive as cultural icons into the 22nd century. But there’ll be some other kind of hero by then, one we cannot envision as yet.
At points it seems as if Fingeroth is declaring that superhero stories are for kids, not for adults. Explaining why Spider-Man’s eternal youthfulness is essential to the character, and why he is best portrayed as a teenager, Fingeroth states that “what a teenager brings to the table is knowledge and experience without cynicism and bitterness.” He continues, “Hope fills Spider-Man’s world, the hope that only a teenager can have. . .It’s the hope that our efforts will probably be for naught, but, by golly, just might succeed. . . .It’s hope despite the fact that our hopes are dashed on a daily basis. Because sometimes, the hope becomes reality. And that – that one time in a hundred – is enough to keep the adolescent going, to keep him or her coming back day after day.”
In middle age, it seems, Danny Fingeroth has entered his own Grim and Gritty phase: hope, he seems to be saying, is for heroic, idealistic kids, and not for us bitter, cynical middle-aged adults, beaten down by life’s defeats. Hope, it would seem, is for the blissfully naive and immature.
I beg to disagree. Hope is part of religious faith. Hope is part of the American spirit (as I see Joe Klein noted in passing in his column in the new, June 7, 2004 issue of Time). I also note Brent Staples’ “Editorial Observer” piece in The New York Times (Sat., May 29, 2004) about adolescents obsessed with the Internet. Staples asserts that on the Net, “everyone has a pseudonym, telling a story makes it true, and adolescents create older, cooler, more socially powerful selves any time they wish. The ability to slip easily into a new, false self is tailor-made for emotionally fragile adolescents, who can consider a bout of acne or a few excess pounds an unbearable tragedy.”
What Staples says could be applied to the appeal of secret identities in comics, as well. But when Peter Parker takes on the guise of Spider-Man, he is not just escaping into a more powerful self but taking on serious responsibility. To accept that “with great power must come great responsibility” is a sign of maturity. Spider-Man is not a “false self,” but in some ways, a truer self.
Moreover, it seems to me that bitterness and cynicism are not the sole property of adults, and that to become mired in them might well be a sign of immaturity. Staples’ argument that to blow one’s problems out of proportion is a true sign of adolescent behavior (in its negative connotations) makes sense to me.
To my mind, hope is a sign of a mature attitude; instead of mourning one’s defeats, one keeps on striving, hoping things will improve. It’s why those of us cast aside by the present economy keep searching for new jobs; pessimism won’t benefit our quests. It’s part of why I keep doing this column, casting my bread upon the water. Eventually someone will notice and it will lead to bigger things career-wise. (It already has in a few minor ways). If I, and others like me, keep on writing serious appreciations of comics as an artform. it will slowly but surely gain further respect in American culture. (We have already come further than we could have imagined in the 1960s.) I’m hopeful I can reposition myself as well as Danny Fingeroth has, as a teacher, scholar and authority on comics. As the female protagonist of Scenes from a Marriage says towards the very end, after she has aged from confused depressed youth into hopeful, wiser middle age (it’s a long five hours!), “I persevere. I enjoy myself. . . .I am content with my direction.”
And I suspect that deep down, Danny isn’t as pessimistic as his book sometimes implies. Despite the appeal superheroes have for kids, Fingeroth notes that “the superhero genre is rich with metaphors and parallels that help us recognize and make sense of much of what goes on in our lives.” He admits that “I have deep and complex feelings about the medium and the characters it has spawned.” We may first get to know superheroes when we are children, but as Danny states, “We each have to be our own superhero. It’s the work of a lifetime.”
Superman on the Couch is a good, solid, entertainingly written basic textbook on the superhero genre. But it is merely an introduction to a vast subject on which so much more needs to be written. What Danny Fingeroth says in this book should set readers thinking more deeply about superheroes in comics, movies and TV, and encourage them to range still further in investigating this fascinating but still underrated area of American popular culture. I plan to recommend this book to my students this fall; I’m recommending it to you now.
HOMELESS
Some weeks ago I went to see Home on the Range well aware that it is the last hand-drawn animated film from Disney for the foreseeable future. Since Shrek and the Pixar movies (Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo), all computer animated, have been so wildly successful while most of their traditional hand-drawn animated films have been commercial disappointments, Disney and DreamWorks have decided that audiences only want to see CGI animated films from now on.
Keeping this in mind, now consider the plot of Home on the Range. A ranch run by a kindly, elderly woman is in danger of going bankrupt, whereupon all the cattle on the ranch will be sold off. Could this have been an intentional metaphor, at least in the minds of some of Disney Animation’s people, for what they must have feared was the approaching doom of traditional animation – and hence, their jobs?
In the movie the ranch is ultimately saved, but in real life doom came to the animators. In recent months, I’ve been reading articles at JimHillMedia.com, a website for Disney aficionados, about the closing of the Disney animation studio in Orlando, where Home on the Range was done. (For that matter, so were Mulan and Lilo & Stitch, the latter being a hand-drawn animated film that was indeed a major success, proving, one might have thought, that audiences do still like traditional animation as long as they find the story and characters appealing.) Hill ran messages from downsized members of the Florida studio, pointing out that while the topmost people will find new work elsewhere in animation, many others will not: says one, “If you weren’t an A-Lister (at Disney Feature Animation), you will get left behind..” Animation people tell Hill that people had come from around the world to Orlando to fulfill a life’s dream by working in Disney animation, that many had mortgages to pay and families to support, that many had put down “roots” in Orlando and did not want to leave, that a happy creative community was being dispersed. Hill comments that “if I had happen to me what just happened to these 200 dedicated, extremely talented artists and technicians at Feature Animation-Florida – that a job I loved, a job that I was really good at, just taken away from me for no good reason – I’d still be in a fetal ball somewhere, weeping softly.”
This all reminds me of the similar upheavals in the comics industry over recent years. ‘Nuff said.
The metaphor in Home could have been even more biting (which, come to think of it, is an appropriate choice of words, as you will soon see). Hill also reports that people at Disney Animation had wanted to make it clear that if the ranch were sold, the cows (including the three talking cows who are the lead characters) would be sold to a slaughterhouse. It seems the movie, as it now stands, does not make the doom that awaits the cows clear inasmuch as Disney had hoped to get a Happy Meals promotional deal with McDonald’s, which, of course, makes hamburgers from slaughtered cows.
As it turned out, Disney didn’t get the Happy Meals deal anyway, though perhaps that was a blessing in disguise now that the new documentary Super Size Me has focused attention on the decidedly unhealthy aspects of McDonald’s fast food. (I may love hamburgers, but I never eat at McDonald’s unless I’m stuck at an airport with no other alternatives.)
Hill also reports the speculation that Disney underpromoted Home on the Range, which did indeed vanish quickly from theaters, in order to guarantee that its forthcoming computer-animated movie, Chicken Little, will look financially successful by comparison. Well, that’s credible. But if indeed Disney decided not to promote Home as much as it could have, perhaps it’s because the movie really isn’t as good as, say, Lilo was (to give the Florida studio credit for one of its successes).
Part of the reason is, as the Times critic Elvis Mitchell noted in one of his last reviews there, the efforts at humor often seem frenetic rather than funny. I’d add that the characters do not seem distinctive or memorable enough; it’s hard for me to imagine any of them spinning off into their own TV series, say, as Aladdin and the Little Mermaid and even The Lion King‘s Timon and Pumbaa did. Indeed, the latter two have proved to have not only so much appeal but so much depth as characters, that the new The Lion King 1/2 sequel on DVD is really about them; how often is a cast of characters so richly conceived that supporting players can carry their own movie?
Oh, the leading characters, three cows on a quest to save their ranch, and some of their allies are likable; I had a pleasant time watching this film, but no more than that. The lack of depth to the characters betrays the main problem: the lead characters’ story arcs lack the psychological and emotional resonance that Disney feature film heroes’ quests should have. Sure, the three cows are trying to save their home. But do they psychologically change in any important way? Does their quest have metaphorical import beyond its surface meaning? Disney took a gamble here. This is not a coming-of-age story, as so many Disney animated features are. Nor is there a love story at its heart, which may be a major factor that made Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and even Lion King so successful. The three cow heroines are mature adults: one of them is downright matronly. I’d like to think that Disney could do an animated feature about adult characters and make it dramatically involving for both children and adults. Come to think of it, the heroes of the Pixar/Disney films—Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc. and the father in Finding Nemo, plus two title characters in the forthcoming The Invincibles – ARE adults!If you want examples of the kind of multidimensional story lines I’m looking for, consult my analyses of Disney’s Brother Bear (see Comics in Context #19) and Pixar/Disney’s Finding Nemo (Comics in Context #40). It’s too bad that Home on the Range doesn’t come close to the mythic depth of either. I’d rather traditional Disney animation had gone out with the proverbial bang.
So, if Disney blames the disappointing box office performance of its recent (non-Pixar) animated features on the fact that they were hand-drawn, what excuse will Disney find if its future (non-Pixar) computer animated films bomb? Maybe there’s more to making the films work than the way they look.
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
Regular readers of this column should look out for Back Issue #5, from TwoMorrows Publishing, now on sale, for which I interviewed Chris Claremont and John Byrne on the subject of Wolverine, who marks his thirtieth (!) anniversary this year. Mr. Byrne did the striking cover portrait of Wolverine, which should catch your eye as you scan the comic shop racks. This is my second piece for Back Issue, and there are many more to come!
-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
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