Frozen, Disney’s new animated musical, has thawed the crusty hearts of many a critic. It has an 88% “freshness” rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has been called, by some, the best Disney flick since The Lion King. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I appreciated Frozen quite a bit. It’s fun and funny and moving. Its messages of sacrifice and sisterly love are spot-on. And while it is a little scary at times, the 108-minute movie is pretty clean, too.
Cleaner, in fact, than the short that precedes it.
“Get a Horse,” starring Mickey Mouse and his nemesis Peg-Leg Pete, was seven minutes worth of questionable content. From Pete ogling Minnie Mouse to a cow flashing her udder to wall-to-wall slapstick violence (involving electricity, pitchforks and strategically placed cacti), “Horse,” while clever and funny, is loaded with elements that can make reviewers like me fill up pages with cautionary scribbles. And I’m not the only one taking notes.
“I just do not get the point of that kind of stuff in kids movies,” Toniko opined on our Movie Monday blog yesterday. “Especially since the actual movie’s message was so uniquely uplifting.”
But here’s the interesting thing: “Get a Horse” was designed to be an homage to Disney’s earliest efforts, circa 1928. Mickey looks just like he did in “Steamboat Willie.” The animation is distinctly retro. And all that content? That was standard fare for early Disney products (and those from other studios). Back then, cartoons were bawdy and violent. The humor could be sadistic. They were glowing, glorified Punch-and-Judy shows, really—filled with enough mayhem to make Wile E. Coyote cringe.
Disney’s animators weren’t pushing the envelope with “Get a Horse.” They were reverting to an envelope opened more than 80 years ago.
It’s tempting to think, sometimes, that the culture around us is on some sort of uniform downward spiral. And there’s no question that in many ways society’s grown more coarse. Today’s “family” television doesn’t look anything like I Love Lucy or The Andy Griffith Show. Today’s most popular albums have content warning stickers on them. Just recently, we ran a culture clip about how many PG-13 movies are more violent now than R-movies were back in the early 1980s.
And yet, we find reminders that those innocent days of yesteryear weren’t always that innocent, either. Sure, we never heard an f-word in a black-and-white Humphrey Bogart movie, but the characters drank like camels and smoked like Alaskan chimneys. Back then, casual racism and sexism were considered funny. Even kids’ movies were harsher. G-rated classics like Snow White and Pinocchio are far more frightening than Frozen—so frightening that I wonder whether, if they were released today, the MPAA might debate whether to give them both a PG-13 rating. (The scene in Snow White where the queen turns into that old hag gave me nightmares for years.)
“Get a Horse” is a reminder that just because something’s old doesn’t necessarily make it good, content-wise. Sure, maybe society sometimes feels like it’s forever devolving, growing ever more infantile. But some things have grown up a little—and grown wiser. And this juvenile Mickey Mouse reveals just how far, in some respects, we’ve come.
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