GROSS/46 1955 - Lady and the Tramp - a very, very good boy
Disney's ultimate hymn to conformity.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
LADY AND THE TRAMP, Directed by HAMILTON LUSKE, CLYDE GERONIMI, WILFRED JACKSON. Voices PEGGY LEE, BARBARA LUDDY, LARRY ROBERTS. Production company WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS. 1955. Running time 76 MINUTES
We’ve reached the seventh is a sequence of top-grossing movie from the studio of Walt Disney - the kind of run of successful releases not really seen again until the era of the franchise. What have we learnt? Well, we know, by now, that this guy is a piece of work. This won’t be news to you, of course. The organisation he built, and the project it has pursued since he founded it and since his death, is perhaps the most disciplined machine for the reproduction of the American ideology there has ever been.
To watch these movies from a critical point of view is to notice that there’s something hermetic about them (about all animation?). Something about the entirely manufactured nature of the studio’s product that means it can escape the occasional accidental humanism of the live action movies around it. It turns out that when there are no humans present - only synthetic people and talking animals - there can be no leakage of authentic human emotion, no unpredictable affect. Where there are no facial expressions, movements or gestures other than those made deliberately at the animator’s drawing board, all that is fugitive or uncontrolled can be eliminated. An animated movie is a sterile environment.
Where human performers run through fields, talk into dictaphones, cradle babies, laugh, get into cars, smoke; there is always the possibility of the unauthorised production of meaning. Where figures drawn and inked to strict specifications move against painted backgrounds there will be no too-expressive eye movements, no oddly resigned demeanour, no insouciant manner or unmanageable sexuality carried forward from film to film - or through a whole career.
When a director takes on a performer, plants them in a role, they implicitly agree to tolerate the inconsistencies and idiosyncracies of the actor’s performance style, their demeanor, their visible character. No matter how controlling and autocratic the director is, they take a chance - “if I put [Cary Grant/Susan Sarandon/Timothée Chalamet/insert actor] in this role I’m accepting the risk that the performer might undermine my message or sabotage it or even trash the whole project.”
From a Disney movie we expect fluidity, wit, breathtaking art, disarming characterisations. And we’ll usually like or even love some of the characters, but the movie’s style and its ideological content is locked down in the studio. A Disney production will celebrate the individual, the family, the hierarchy, the ordered community (sometimes the dreamer). But never the masses, the collective, the worker (or the rebel). A Disney movie, no matter how deep in the forest or how far into the past its setting, will never, even accidentally, assert anything other than the morbid logic of capital, the static hierarchy of money and work and family. It’s the rules.
Am I just being a humourless dick here? Should I just shut up and enjoy the movie? Probably. But, think about it, Walt Disney sailed through the Hayes and the McCarthy eras without touching the sides. He was 100% compliant. His only brush with the production code came when he was just too racist even for the censors. He addressed the HUAC once but - of course - as a friendly witness (he named names and destroyed some careers).
Every creature in Lady and the Tramp, from the master of the house to the smallest and stupidest pet, complies in every respect with the social code of Eisenhower’s America (here projected back into something that looks like Victorian New England). Even the animals are organised into rigid family units (or pathetically long to join one). Tramp, the charismatic and resourceful stray, is ruthlessly funneled into domesticity. No allowance at all is made for his maverick character, his actual, feral self. He’s granted a collar with a licence medallion hanging from it. It’s a potent image of defeat for a free spirit (like McMurphy’s lobotomy in Cuckoo’s Nest). The only reason the poor hound is not actually neutered is because he has important reproductive work to do.
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I guess a rogue voice actor could spoil things a bit or an animator with a grudge might try to dilute the vibe but, really, an animated movie is an ideological black box. A sealed unit.
Of course, although the movie itself may be a sterile entity, the affect it produces in the audience will be as unpredictable and as varied as for any movie. Even Walt Disney couldn’t control how we receive his work.
Actually, I should say that there is one unruly creature here, one insurgent: the rat.
The Disney movies considered here so far, in chronological order: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Bambi (1942), Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950) and Peter Pan (1953). The ones still to come, in this interminable stream of artful manipulation? 101 Dalmations, The Jungle Book, Aladdin, The Lion King, Toy Story 3, Frozen and Inside Out 2 - the last from this year, ffs. It will obviously never end.
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