Earlier this week I documented how conservatives were continuing the war on fiction by going after animated characters. Well now the idiots have made the leap from 2D animation to 3D, pushing a concerted effort against "Happy Feet" because they see the toon as some sort of leftist propaganda. I thought it was just Elijah Wood and Robin Williams doing silly voices but I clearly missed the nuance. $44 million worth of nuance, when will it end?!
It’s a kid’s animation about a dancing penguin, for Christ’s sake.
Its ecological bit isn’t even about Global Warming, it’s about overfishing.
The tap dancing penguins are coming for our children! Aieeeee!!
And they wonder why sensible people don’t take them seriously.
Global warming, overfishing, whatever. Doesn’t matter. Any work, fiction or nonfiction, which carries in any way a message which might impair the ability of any corporation or American power elite from doing exactly what it wants when it wants it is, ipso facto, evil liberal brainwashing propaganda.
Contrariwise, any work of fiction or nonfiction which calls for marginalization, disenfranchisement, or outright murder of anyone or everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman is to be praised endlessly with its author being given free air time on all the top pundit shows.
So.
Ahh, where are you Captain Planet. I owe you an apology. I thought you were leftist popaganda, now I understand I was attacking animation per se. Can’t object to content, to big business always being evil, etc. nope.
Now I thought animation has a history of being used as propaganda – by the good guys and the bad guys. If thats the case perhaps, the posters here don’t believe showing big business as evil or arctic drilling as evil is propaganda. Why thats indisputable fact!
Dugger! Look behind you!
Tap dancing penguin!!
Wouldn’t a penguin have pretty damn good reason to think Arctic* drilling is wrong?
*or, to be exact, Antarctic
Giving a fuck about the environment isn’t leftist, Dugger, and if you think it is, then what does that make you, a right-winger, except someone who explicitly doesn’t care about the world they have to live on?
Like the War of Christmas, the rightwingers will tilt at ANY Windmill(Eat your heart out Don Quixote). So, correct me if I am wrong Dugger, but caring and moderation are all liberal canards? I suppose you would have your cartoons espousing gluttony, hording, and scorched earth mentalities. Let cartoons alone for Christ-sake. Glen Beck should be more pissed that most movies are just not good. (It went down-hill after Aladdin as far as Disney type movies in my opinion).
All films convey messages and meanings whether they’re conscious or subconscious so it’s a little disingenous to suggest that a movie is only a movie.
At the same time — and I haven’t seen it yet — if Happy Feet pits big corporations against the a bunch of talking penguins it falls in a tradition of Hollywood populist storytelling that goes back almost to the beginning of the industry. The movies are a mass medium and you’d be hard pressed to find any Hollywood films that championed big, faceless forces over average people. You can call that liberal if you want but it’s been a stock structure of popular film in almost every decade.
We’re heading in to the holiday season so it seems only appropriate to throw out It’s a Wonderful Life as a classic example. The story in a nutshell is about a small town guy helping his neighbors and getting by as best he can, hounded almost to the point of suicide by a coldhearted banker who, if he had his way, would have transformed the ideal American small town into a sleazy hellhole.
Does that sound like liberal propaganda? Does Glenn Beck want everyone to boycott one of the most beloved holiday films of all time? Is he that stupid?
Does that sound like liberal propaganda? Does Glenn Beck want everyone to boycott one of the most beloved holiday films of all time? Is he that stupid?
If you’re starting a pool, I’ll take: yes, yes, and yes.
Cartoons can be free forever to propaganda-ish. And we can be free forever to conclude that they are as described and to criticize them for it. The basic situation is that you people, with an intellectual value system that equates the president to the communist dictator of North Korea, see no bias and we do. I mean you control Hollywood and the MSM, can’t be at least be free to say both are full of sh*t?
The basic situation is that you people, with an intellectual value system that equates the president to the communist dictator of North Korea,
Basic error there, Dugs.
I don’t think anyone who refers to Mr. Bush as “Dear Leader” is necessarily equating him with Mr. Kim. I think they’re equating Mr. Bush’s followers with Mr. Kim’s followers who praise even his most misinformed words and deeds.
At any rate, when you’re finding a threat to the republic in a flick about tap-dancing penguins, that’s just nutty.
“The basic situation is that you people … see no bias and we do.”
That’s hilarious. Bias in a fiction film. When it’s a message in a work of fiction it isn’t bias, you moron, it’s called personal, artistic expression.
Whenever a right wing producer/direcotr wants to step up with an 3D CG animated cartoon about Penguins that LOVE offshore oil driling and over fishing they are FREE to find financial backing for thier project and bring it to the marketplace and take their chances like everyone else.
Maybe you should quit your bitching, put down the Scotch and get working on that screenplay …
GAWD what a doofus you are Dugs.
Dugger – As a long time fan of animation, I will agree with you on your detestation of Captain Planet, though for entirely different reasons, no doubt.
The big problem I have with things like Captain Planet, and the equally execrable “Ferngully: The Last Rainforest”, is that they present a ridiculous caricature of the “bad guys” that is so outlandish as to demolish any possibility of real learning. In both these productions, the forces damaging the environment were usually doing so because “pollution is fun”! or “Toxic sludge gets me horny!” I don’t think even the most strident Greenpeace activist would suggest that the chairman of Union Carbide enjoys hot-tubbing in Polychlorinated Biphenyls.
As an example of animation considering the relationship of man to the environment done right, might I offer Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke”? I was dismayed by the few comments I saw on it from right-wingers several years ago who were determined to see in it something to hate, and oversimplified it to “Yawn, another industrial society bad, nature good propaganda.” If you really pay attention to it, you’ll note that Miyazaki takes a far more nuanced view. Yes, the actions of the humans are destroying the ancient forests and the nature gods that dwell therein (Japanese animism another cultural feature easy for parochial Christianists to decry as evil pagan propaganda). But, the leader of the town doing this is using the wealth and power generated to protect her people, and shows a great deal of compassion to people normally outcast by the rest of society (lepers and prostitutes).
The film was made in part as a means for Miyazaki to examine the destruction of nature in Japan. But he himself said with respect to the film that he didn’t know what the answer was: he didn’t want to stop all progress (as wingers usually accuse environmental activists of planning), but at the same time felt that too much human activity was causing something precious and irreplaceable to be lost. For people willing to look at the film without preconceptions, he did a good job of provoking some thought about where we’re going without falling into the narrow dogmatism and caricature seen in most American animated message films.
Captain Planet,
He’s our hero
Gonna take pollution down to zero
He’s our hero, flying high
And he’s fighting on the planet’s side
The power is yours!
I wanna note that I did that entirely from memory. Thank you Ted Turner for putting out a silly cartoon with the idea that polluting is bad. Your ideas, along with the radical Sesame Street ideas that we should be nice and play fair led to the far leftist you see today.
We should be nice and play fair?
Jeez, did I misread that show when I was a kid. I’m so embarrassed …
Quaker, Nahh. When you (not you you) call the president ‘Dear Leader’, you’re equating him with Kim – not his followers with Kim’s followers – which is scarcely any better – anyway. And propaganda is seldom, itself, a threat. that doesn’t mean its right or desirable.
Rheinhard, That was interesting (and well written). I’m now Googling the good ‘princess’.
Dugger
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
When you (not you you) call the president ‘Dear Leader’, you’re equating him with Kim – not his followers with Kim’s followers
Context is everything.
If the term is used in the course of criticizing your (not your) unwavering and unquestioning devotion to George Bush, then yes, it’s a criticism of the follower, not the leader.
Having actually seen ‘Happy Feet’ (on opening day), I turned to my companion after it was over and said, “Finally, a Hollywood movie that actually DOES give the National Review something to complain about!” Forget the environmentalism, the raging secularism is what’s astonishing about this movie.
It has a constant theme of questioning thinly-veiled religious authority (be it Robin Williams’ Barry White-channeling revivalist or Hugo Weaving’s dour Presbyterian doomsayer.) Yeah it’s against conformity and for the environment, but it’s really a call to REASON.
As our topsy-turvy world has shown, that IS lefty propaganda.
Secular tap-dancing penguins?!?
Oh, dear God.
any work of fiction or nonfiction which calls for marginalization, disenfranchisement, or outright murder of anyone or everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman
Surely there are so many of those that you can name one… ?
This is a textbook case of the right wing’s political strategy. They know that on the real issues they’ll lose, so they kick up a fuss about some stupid movie about dancing penguins saying it’s “leftist propaganda,” or that Harold Ford will go after all your white daughters. It’s shameless. What do you expect from the faction of American politics that re-elects a racist like Trent Lott, and appoints him as minority whip?
Yeah it’s against conformity and for the environment, but it’s really a call to REASON.
Well, no wonder they missed it.
Also, Reinhard, may I make a case for Nausicca as well, along the same vein.
I thought more than anything the sexual references were a little much on top of how depressing of a movie it was. There were many instances of the penguins doing things that I don’t think warranted a G rating. It shouldnt be shown to young toddlers.
You know , every time a great movie comes out , SOMEONE has to make it sound like it’s life threatening! Well they are big drama queens! This is a great movie!
Boogie Wonderland la la dance , dance , dance Mumble! Boogie Wonderland!