The complexity of the cartoon characters

What's behind the Disney characters? Many have tried to give philosophical or moral meaning to Disney's masterpieces, also studying the appearance of its characters. Let's think of Winnie the Pooh, that cute teddy bear who carries his hand on his forehead and hisses “I think, think, think, think...”. Now, it is clear that Winnie the Pooh, with his incredible optimism, never held back by anything, is a new Candido (we mean Voltaire's), as well as his friend, Ih Oh the Donkey, is specularly the existentialist of the group: sure and absolutely certain that every event can only be interpreted in the worst way. Note that almost all the dialogues are surprising paradoxes and joyful syllogisms: “I lost a hammer and I lost friends. So if I find the hammer, I find my friends too...”.

The Madagascar series is also absolutely philosophical, all centred on the labile concept of identity: the scene in which the zebra Marty, who happens to be with his friends in Central Africa in the second episode, loses himself in a forest of other zebras just like him, so much so that not even his closest friends, including the lion Alex (who is accused by his father of not being a real lion), recognise him anymore. Other than Jung!

And what is the meaning of cats? The numerous Disney short films and in various cinematic masterpieces cats are the protagonists, but it is a fact that in Disney fairy tales while praising dogs and mice, cats are all unpleasant. Negative heroes, like Gambadilegno, bad subjects like Lilli's Siamese and the vagabond, cruel and vermin like Cinderella's Lucifer and whoever has more of them.

Well, there is a resounding exception: the Aristocats, nice, jazz lovers, intelligent and sensitive, vaguely psychedelic during the party scene in the attic that is home to the kitty Romeo. This is the last Disney film made under the supervision of the great Walt: a resounding homage to the feline world son of dying repentance? Who knows.

We want to talk about the erotic aura of both Cinderella (she showers naked!) and Snow White. Many give their Marxist reading of the relationship between Donald Duck and Donald Duck: the eternally exploited poor and the unscrupulously rich. Robin Hood has a revolutionary matrix of his own: it is no coincidence that the deeds of the archer who steals from the rich to give to the poor are a clear hymn to subversion.

Equally obvious is that Snow White reflects the spirit of her era (1937): well, the relationship between the princess and the seven dwarfs is set in the sign of a representation of the relations between the dominant and subordinate clauses. In short, Snow White's condescension towards the seven dwarfs (who, we remind you, acquire name and personality only starting from this version, before being downgraded to garden furniture) is chilling. Don't worry, it is still a masterpiece. And that ferret is Captain Ahab. He has a wounded eye and is obsessed with what he calls "the great white beast". He is willing to do anything to continue his duel indefinitely: it is in this eternal challenge that the very meaning of his life takes place in the abyss. Do you remember anything? For example, Moby Dick of the great Melville? Of course, I do. But it is also the main story of the third chapter of the Ice Age saga, and the hero we are talking about is Buck, who helps the herd composed of a pair of mammoths, a sabre-toothed tiger and two possum brothers to save their sloth friend in an underground valley where, miraculously, dinosaurs survived in the middle of the Ice Age.

And the biggest and most terrible of them all, the one you see and don't see for the whole duration of the cartoon, is its "great white beast" just like the white whale of Melville. And let's overlook the fact that the rest of the film is a parable about motherhood, from the birthing mammoth to the mother dinosaur, passing from the desire to have children of a sloth suspected of homosexual tendencies. Mothers always present or even deceased at a young age and replaced by a stepmother identical to Frankenstein's bride, Cinderella's, as well as Snow White's, while Pinocchio's mother is absent.

Still, on Pinocchio, shall we talk about poor Geppetto? He is Swiss. By the way: why on earth did Disney transfer Pinocchio, Geppetto to Switzerland, dressing him up as a Tyrolean and filling the house with cuckoo clocks? Just Hollywood-branded historical-geographic squint or is there something else going on here? We can go on endlessly examining them all, starting with Mickey Mouse and Goofy, having fun finding the thousands of implications behind the Disney characters and a thousand other cartoons.