Disney's Desecrations

...For when filmmakers shy away from the complex and subtle characters of these classics, they often inadvertently inject the ugly stereotypes they thought needed avoiding in the first place-vulgarities the original authors could never even imagine...

...At the finale of Tom and Huck, Twain's intractable Huck jumps at the first opportunity to be "sivilized...

...Revenge isn't just a fact of life in the jungle to Kipling, it is a noble pursuit in and of itself...

...Any Hollywood boom features an immense amount of dross along with the gold, and the great irony of the current creative resurgence of the live-action family movie is the fact that not a single good one in recent years has come from the foremost brand name there is: Disney...

...Even minor characters like Becky Thatcher are perverted out of all reason...

...Kipling has, of course, fallen severely out of favor because he was unapologetically fond of colonialism and sometimes condescendingly fond of India and its people...

...Though little of this can be found in his tales about Mowgli, Disney denudes them of their insight and originality anyway...

...it mirrors the world of man, complete with pettiness, kindness, anger, friendship, hatred, and sacrifice...

...Inadvertent message: Slavery wasn't so bad, owners were generally good people, and everyone was relieved when it was ended...

...While studio after studio tries and fails to match the intelligence and craft of Disney's animated films, Disney's live-action movies for children have been abysmal...

...Tom teaches Huck the importance of friendship with maxims like, "When a friend's in trouble, you don't run away...

...In the recent Jungle Book, for example, Mowgli easily outwits the white men...

...From Mark Twain to Rudyard Kipling, great works have been desecrated, sometimes to ensure they conform to Hollywood ideology, and sometimes just because their makers and producers are remarkably bereft of taste and judgment...

...And at the climax of Kipling's tales, Mowgli gleefully lays a trap for Shere Khan and kills him...

...At the climax, he peacefully faces down the tiger Shere Khan, reporting proudly, "Shere Khan sees me not as a man, but a creature of the jungle...

...Looking at a stuffed tiger in a trophy room, Mowgli says, "The more I learn what is a man, the more I want to be an animal...

...White men are evil and stupid or at best benignly foolish...

...And well-intentioned mush is the most unhealth-ful mush of all...

...If there were stereotypes in his works, they were balanced by complex, engaging characters, such as the title role in his masterpiece Kim...

...Kids love to hear the same stories told over and over again in the same way, and parents love to plop the kids in front of the TV for an hour and a half of relative peace...

...Tom is aghast when Huck talks excitedly about going to school before running off to escort the Widow Douglas to a church social...

...And throughout the film, even most of the slave owners are pictured as wonderfully concerned about their property and wracked with guilt about the whole arrangement...

...In the novel, Tom and Huck are basically equals...

...Shere Khan, for example, is an almost mythically evil presence in the stories and constantly on the lookout for a chance to murder Mowgli...

...Consider The Jungle Book...

...The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn generally scares the bejesus out of filmmakers, because it deals so forthrightly with slavery and the racial attitudes of the 19th century...

...In the end, Mowgli joins the world of man because that's where he belongs...

...a willful, interesting girl-child in the book, Becky becomes a distractingly modern woman in the movie, pushing Tom into a creek at one point and punching him out at another...

...Huck hangs out with the slaves and goes to Jim for advice...

...This, it goes without saying, is a travesty of the lessons of Twain's novel, one of the deepest explorations of the idea of freedom in literature...

...But while they never shy away from the cold hard truths at the heart of their stories, the Disney adaptations show a level of disrespect for literature that studios usually reserve only for audiences...

...Still, while Tom takes special delight in Huck's notoriety, he won't go so far as to be seen with him in public...

...Inadvertent message: The dark-skinned natives are even more wily and evil than the worst white people...

...So sales are booming...

...No such balance exists here...

...And who wouldn't...

...Inadvertent message: Girls should remember their place, especially when doing dangerous things like exploring caves that are better left to the boys...

...But Disney's The Adventures of Huck Finn wouldn't even frighten Aunt Polly...

...Perhaps the only real surprise in this movie is that they didn't change the name of the bad guy: Injun Joe...

...Babe, A Little Princess, and The Secret of Roan Inish are also derived from books of some distinction...

...Only Babe did well at the box office, but all three will make a fortune when they are released as videos...

...Almost every major studio has a division devoted to creating live-action movies for kids, and 1995 saw the release of at least three such films that will one day be considered classics: Babe, A Little Princess, and The Secret of Roan Inish...

...even commercial and creative flops, like the flaccid remake of Miracle on 34th Street, can sell truckloads...

...Disney distorts and dilutes Mark Twain's undeniably progressive worldview just as thoroughly as it does Kipling's colonial ideology...

...Parents looking for "safe" entertainment for their kids should avoid these three movies and, until there's some suggestion the studio has learned the error of its ways, whatever live-action literary adaptations Disney attempts in the future...

...Mush is never part of a well-balanced diet...

...In the Disney version, Mowgli is a sweet and innocent creature who plays and frolics with his animal friends...

...The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a far less controversial novel, though even here Twain gently and persistently mocks the conventions of society...

...First turned into a cutesy cartoon by Disney in the 1960s-hardly a memorable effort apart from Phil Harris's singing "The Bare Necessities"-Kipling's stories of a boy raised among the animals of India was again made into a movie by the studio last year...

...Kipling's jungle isn't an idyllic Eden separate and better than the world of man...

...None of this has a thing to do with what Kipling wrote...

...Mowgli survives and rules over this world not despite the fact that he's human but because he's human- none of the other animals can even look him in the eye for more than a moment...

...In the movie, Tom is sweet and good, while Huck is generally bad-a selfish and scared coward (though the movie is quick to point out he was abused as a child by his drunken Pap...

...When he's captured, it's always by treacherous and blackhearted Indians...

...But Tom and Huck, the newly released Disney version of the book, still finds plenty to fiddle with...

...Kipling may have coined the phrase "white man's burden," but his ideas about the differences between the races were layered and ambiguous...

...When filmmakers try to skirt the prickly truths of these stories, they rob the tales of dramatic power and inadvertently hold up a mirror to their own prejudices and failings...

...And when the two of them are rafting down the Mississippi, Jim always has a plan in mind or takes the time to teach Huck the difference between right and wrong...

...Worse yet, the studio has faltered by foraging through texts of classic children's literature and wreaking havoc on them...

...In The Adventures of Huck Finn, Twain's giddily optimistic finale is taken to even further extremes when the slave Jim is dressed to the nines and exchanging pleasantries with his former captors shortly after being freed...

...These three fiascos teach a very interesting lesson about the dangers of tampering with the works of significant authors...

...In Tom and Huck, the newly modernized Becky endangers the safety of her and Tom by refusing to heed his warnings not to yell at the top of her voice while they're in the caves outside town...

...Michael Giltz last wrote for The Weekly Standard about Andrew Kimbrell's The Masculine Mystique...

...Her willful heedlessness causes a cave-in that traps the two and almost costs them their lives...

...Though he attempts to join human society, it's deeply distasteful to him...

...Jim is clearly far more intelligent and thoughtful than Huck, giving little speeches about equality and the evils of slavery...