Not only 'Mary Poppins': 5 Disney cartoons you will never watch again
UK changes film age rating: 'It's discriminatory'. But there are at least five Donald Duck and Goofy shorts that are even less politically correct
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After the disclaimers on Dumbo and Walk with the Wind , Mary Poppins also ends up in the crosshairs of political correctness. At least in the UK: the British Board of Film Classification, 60 years after the release of the Disney film starring Julie Andrews, tightens its age classification. It is no longer a film for everyone, but a work for 'accompanied children'. The rationale for the decision lies in the 'discriminatory language' that one would catch in the use of the derogatory term 'hottentots', originally used by white Europeans for the nomadic peoples of Africa, to refer to chimney sweeps with sooty faces. Of course, for the same reason, here in Italy, we should wish for a new version of a classic of our Romanticism: the Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo written by Giovanni Berchet, in which the word 'ottentotti' is addressed to the ignorant vulgo. But whatever, let us not fly so high. Suffice it to mention five short films from the Topolino production company dating back to the 1940s and 1950s that, with the current mood, you won't see again. Here they are.
Der Fuehrer's Face (1943)
.Disney was in both world wars. In the First he was a Red Cross driver in France. In the Second, already a successful tycoon, he produced propaganda cartoons for troops engaged in fighting the Axis forces. The most famous, never released in Italy, is Der Fuehrer's Face (1943), a short film that won an Academy Award for Best Animated Film. Protagonist: Donald Duck engaged in the hard life of a recruit in the Reich army, between fuses to be assembled to the cry of "Heil Hitler" and passages from the Mein Kampf to be memorised. Reconciling finale: the hapless duck wakes up in America, sighs and embraces his beloved Statue of Liberty in a blaze of stars and stripes.
Ti sogno California (1945)
.The conquest of the West according to Goofy in the short film Ti sogno California (Californy 'er Bust, 1945), with the wagon trains led by the heroic pioneers forced to watch their backs against Indian attacks. The portrayal of the Native Americans is, to say the least, macchiolithic as what was actually a genocide here becomes a kind of game. Then the hurricane arrives and sweeps everyone away.
A present for Donald Duck (1946)
.No animals were mistreated during the production of this film. How many times have we read this in the credits? Disney's animals were drawn, but in post-war America they were not so subtle: in A present for Donald Duck (Dumbbell of the Yukon) here is Donald Duck who, in order to give his beloved a less than ecological fur coat, chooses to immolate a tender bear cub. How to do him in? Beheading? Poison? In the end he opts for hanging, but obviously the enterprise is doomed to failure. Animal rights activists, auf wiedersehen.
Domorrow on a diet! (1951)
Even Goofy had problems with his figure. Not really Goofy, actually, but his 1950s alter ego George Geef, who in the episode Tomorrow we diet! (Tomorrow we diet!) engages in a gruelling hand-to-hand combat with a clever scale. Which does not hesitate to call him 'fat as a pig'. Not exactly what the child protection committees would like to hear from an audiovisual product aimed at families.
