Freud Does Disney

Dumbo is Walt Disney's myth of modernity, a film in which he uses a story about infant-mother separation as a vehicle for assimilating modern technology and management structure to the evolved mechanisms of the human mind. This paper considers psychoanalytic and evolutionary psychology, examines the structure of scapegoating as a means of social contral, considers parallels with the story of Genesis, the role of machines and animals in the modern world, the interplay of nature and culture, the distinction between animals that talk and those that don't, and features extensive descriptive an analytic work on the film, with many frame grabs.

The range of subjects in Disney’s Fantasia is encyclopedic, placing it in a class with such very different works a Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Joyce’s Ulysses (cf. Mendelson on encyclopedic narrative and Moretti on the modern epic). The episodes are arranged such that they call on an increasing range of mental faculties with each succeeding episode. In discussions of individual episodes (all of them) I deal with ring-form, animated acting, Freudian undertones, the relationship between sound and imagery, and Jakobon’s poetic function.

The Pastoral Symphony episode in Disney’s Fantasia depicts scenes from domestic life as realized by various mythological creatures: child-rearing and play, courtship, wine-making and celebration, mutual aid and protection, and sleep. Gods are ‘played’ by human-form characters one of which, Bacchus, is central to the episode. Humans are played both by animal-human hybrids (centaurs and fauns) and by animal hybrids (flying horses, unicorns). Bacchus is accompanied by a Disney-invented hybrid, a unicorn donkey. Patterns of oral and sexual imagery are arranged in ring-form structure that runs in counterpoint to a typical cumulative dramatic structure, which is built on a contrast between the Dionysian mode of the central Bacchanal and the more Apollonian conclusion, where all’s right with the world and everything is in it’s place. The poetic function, as described by Roman Jakobson, governs various transformations and displacements that structure the visual and sonic materials in such a way that the episode has something of a ‘meta’ quality of being art about art, with Bacchus as a figure for the artist.

Teresa Fraile, Eduardo Viñuela (eds.), Relaciones Música e Imagen en los Medios Audiovisuales, 2015

The article studies how original music was re-orchestrated and adapted in Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, to prove how two approaches to sound actually concur to the definition of the aesthetic of those films. Moreover, it will be demonstrated how the differences in the ways of manipulating music in the two features could be understood as a consequence of the modification of the audiovisual taste of the audience from 1940 to 2000, and also as a trace of the change in the scopes and the aesthetic of Disney films.

C'è una cosa dei film Disney che suscita in me una grandissima emozione: è la devozione riservata loro dai bambini; quegli sguardi immobili, per ore, le battute imparate a memoria e il compromesso raggiunto con i genitori. Perché non è un cartone qualsiasi, è un classico Disney e, probabilmente, anche mamma lo saprà a memoria. Ce lo dice Disney stesso: "You're dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway!".

2013

These notes consist of five posts discussing the description of literary texts and films and five appendices containing tables used in describing to manga texts (Lost World, Metropolis) and two films (Sita Sings the Blues, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence). The posts make the point that the point of description is to let the texts speak for themselves. Further, it is through descriptions that the texts enter intellectual discourse.

In The Wind Rises Hayao Miyazaki weaves various modes of experience in depicting the somewhat fictionalized life of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese aeronautical engineer who designed fighter planes for World War II. Horikoshi finds his vocation through ‘dreamtime’ encounters with Gianni Caproni and courts his wife with paper airplanes. The film opposes the wind and chance with mechanism and design. Horikoshi’s attachment to his wife, on the one hand, and to his vocation on the other, both bind him to Japan while at the same time allowing him to separate himself, at least mentally, from the imperial state.