{"id":49945,"date":"2019-10-29T13:39:03","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T20:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=49945"},"modified":"2019-10-29T13:39:03","modified_gmt":"2019-10-29T20:39:03","slug":"tolkien-vs-disney-educate-or-entertain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/tolkien-vs-disney-educate-or-entertain\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien vs Disney: educate or entertain?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nWhat are the\u00a0similarities<\/a>\u00a0between\u00a0JRR Tolkien’s\u00a0The Hobbit<\/em>\u00a0, and\u00a0Snow White and<\/em>\u00a0Walt Disney’s\u00a0Seven Dwarfs<\/em>\u00a0?\u00a0None, except that the two works for young audiences were born a few months apart – the novel in September 1937, the cartoon at Christmas – and they both feature a group of dwarves.\u00a0Tolkien discovered those of Disney at the beginning of 1939, in a cinema where he had mischievously trained his colleague and friend\u00a0CS Lewis<\/a>\u00a0, the future author of the\u00a0Chronicles of Narnia<\/em>, who had previously seen the movie with his brother.\u00a0The two austere professors of Oxford University came out revolted.\u00a0The reaction of Bilbo’s father to Prof, Dormeur, Grincheux or Simplet is a symptom of a\u00a0cultural\u00a0cleavage<\/a>\u00a0that was then put in place in the fiction of youth and is still very much alive.<\/p>\n

In the 1930s, when mass culture emerged on the ruins of popular culture, Disney and Tolkien were two antagonistic ways to revitalize the old folklore.<\/p>\n

The humanities against the show<\/strong><\/h4>\n

For Tolkien, a specialist in Old English and Scandinavian philology, the marvelous is a serious affair that touches the sacred through the myth.\u00a0Before even conceiving\u00a0The Hobbit<\/em>\u00a0for his son Christopher, he came to literary invention to prolong the intellectual pleasure of his studies.<\/p>\n

Thus he creates various imaginary languages \u200b\u200bas well as\u00a0The Silmarillion<\/em><\/a>\u00a0, a set of legends that opens to a musical cosmogony and retraces the first ages of his imaginary universe, Middle-earth.\u00a0For young readers,\u00a0The Hobbit<\/em>\u00a0transfers this poetic vein into the realm of adventure, without compromising on its demiurgic dimension.<\/p>\n

For Walt Disney, fairy tales are first and foremost entertainment, and even a show.\u00a0It is known that he determined to produce\u00a0Snow White<\/em>\u00a0in memory of the pleasure he had as a child, to see the film adaptation that\u00a0Winthrop Ames<\/a>\u00a0, aka Jessie Braham White, had taken from his play in 1916. It is to this former director\u00a0of Broadway’s\u00a0Little Theater<\/em>\u00a0that we owe the Shakespearian accents of the cartoon.<\/p>\n

Disney went very early to the marvelous.\u00a0From 1922, he transposed in America at the time “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Puss in Boots” or “Cinderella”;\u00a0as many cartoon shorts that chained gags on the model of silent cinema.\u00a0From 1929, with the\u00a0“Silly Symphonies”<\/a>\u00a0, he perfected the aesthetic that we know him by pushing his teams to draw inspiration from the great European illustrators – Gustave Dor\u00e9, Honor\u00e9 Daumier, Beatrix Potter, etc.\u00a0– as well as Pre-Raphaelite painters and German Expressionism.\u00a0Humor remains present, but poetry and artistic ambition are added.
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