Transworld Travel in Postwar Animated Musicals
Fig. 1 - Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1951) and Peter Pan (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1953).
The films of postwar Hollywood often featured wanderers, characters who were “trying to leave behind the tensions of a modern world for the clarity of another place; a place outside history” (Polan 1986, 264). While this character type and narrative structure primarily materialised as a foray from urban spaces out to the country or a transatlantic trip to a different continent, occasionally the stresses of the world merited a journey completely outside reality, depositing characters into fantasy realms. These transworld travel films, like the majority of films of the studio era, focused on adults, dedicating at least part of their storylines to the pursuit of romance. However, in two postwar examples produced by the Walt Disney studio and released back-to-back, Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1951) and Peter Pan (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1953), child protagonists are instead used as the wanderers, offering a different point of view than other classical Hollywood fare (Fig. 1). As this blog will argue, these two cel-animated musicals use the anxiety of childhood to mirror the cultural anxiety of 1950s America, and the worlds of fantastical escape present in their respective narratives ultimately end up serving to replicate the tensions of socio-cultural reality. The gestures made by Disney to real world anxieties and a quickly encroaching modernism usher the main characters of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan into accepting the grownup duties and responsibilities they had been running away from. The children in these animated musical fantasies serve to learn the lesson (and reinforce it to the audience) of abandoning the inquisitive individuality that comes with childhood for the stability of unquestioning conformity to societal standards to escape any looming feelings of dread.
Fig. 2 - Alice in Wonderland’s Victorian Oxford.
The different modes that define these films, fantasy/musical/animation, each have been linked to ideas of escapism. Christopher Ames observes “the musical’s generic tendency towards fantasy” (1997, 56), with people bursting into perfectly coordinated singing and dancing in their everyday lives (something sadly lacking in our real world). The medium of animation increases the unreality of the musical genre, allowing it to become completely untethered from the confines of reality with songs springing forth from anthropomorphic animals and choreography able to defy gravity. The “non-literal, non-objective, non-conditional status” of animation “places the material world and its functional and utilitarian conditions into relief, rendering the perception of such a world unstable”, thus marking it as fantasy (Wells 2018, 25). Both Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan take this a step further, moving their characters from an established real world into a realm of explicit fantasy, heightening all readings of escapism. This does not mean that these films do not reflect the contemporary time in which they were made, for as David Butler notes in his work on fantasy cinema, “When escapism works effectively, it is to acknowledge the problems of the real world and provide us with the means to make sense of them and deal with them constructively” (2009, 101). The absurdity of the animated musical fantasy realms reflect the feelings of instability prevalent at the time, and while the two films offer multiple points of escapism, the lessons the child protagonists learn in these worlds will reinforce the importance of home over wandering.
Fig. 3 - Edwardian Bloomsbury in Peter Pan.
Both Disney films are also adaptations of children’s literature from the Victorian and Edwardian eras (see Figs. 2 and 3), highlighting Sarah Gilead’s assertion that this sort of writing “permits the adult to recuperate the familiar […] and to link slippery modern culture to the lost wholeness and stability of an imagined (and largely imaginary) past” (1991, 288). By adapting stories set in an historical era, Disney is able to offer a false fantasy of a simpler time, a time before wars unsettled the peace of a well-regimented society. This is also a common trait of the classical-era musical, where the action unfolds in a time or place removed from the audience’s reality, either set in the past or in a foreign (non-American) land. Rick Altman identifies a subgenre of the Hollywood musical, the ‘fairy tale’ musical, which often sees “propelling one member of the couple from a humdrum daily life into the fairy tale world”, though the fairy tale world is usually not so literally a fantastical space (Altman 1989, 152). Classical musicals tended instead to use European cities as places of escape from American issues or would be set in the not-so-distant past as a means to escape the problems of modernity. The animated adaptations of both Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan explicitly set their fantasy realms as musical realms, with the first use of songs in each occurring as the characters begin their journeys into new worlds, leaving their “humdrum” non-musical reality behind (Figs. 4 and 5). However, the escapism of these fantastical modes ultimately serves to reinforce the idea of danger of a world free from order and rules. The safety of home and, by extension, conformity is privileged as the correct place to settle.
Fig. 4 - In a World of My Own.
Fig. 5 - You Can Fly! You Can Fly! You Can Fly!
Anxiety was the major characteristic of the postwar era as the spectre of wartime danger and death collided with efforts to return to prewar norms of gender and sexuality. For example, women had taken up working roles in large numbers with millions of men shipped overseas and the return of men created a great upheaval in gender roles. After the war, nearly 2 million women were fired from their jobs, even though 80 percent reported wanting to stay employed (French 1978, xvii). There is a general unease which permeates the time period, as the malleability of gender exposed by necessity during the war (with women and men successfully taking on new duties and characteristics in the absence of the opposite sex) sits uncomfortably next to the attempted reintroduction of strict gender roles. This specifically modern gender anxiety is prevalent in both Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.
The crux of the plot of Disney’s Peter Pan reflects this discomfort of gender roles with Wendy upset about being moved out of the nursery to begin to shoulder the responsibilities of adulthood. It is her fear of impending womanhood and being treated differently than her brothers which compels Peter Pan to rescue her from growing up and opens up the adventures of Neverland to the Darling children. Wendy wishes to continue in her childhood freedoms of play and make-believe but her experiences in Neverland, a fantasy realm presented as a place she will not have to grow up, turn her almost immediately into a pseudo-mother to the Lost Boys, causing her to have to take on this prescribed role even when she is removed from reality. Wendy excels at mothering, of course, and her enjoyment in being placed in a position of care is what drives her eventual acceptance of growing up (Fig. 6). This is a major revision from J.M. Barrie’s play from which the film is adapted, which does not place this ticking clock on Wendy’s childhood. In fact, growing up is never explicitly talked about by the characters and is only referenced in the subtitle to the play (“The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up”), making this anxiety of adulthood a specific insert for the Disney production. Anxiety is even named in the trade publications of the time, with Bosley Crowther of the New York Times (1953) drawing attention to the differences between the film and the source material, stating that the framing of the film as a dream takes away a central focus on magic and fairies. He notes that these changes were perhaps “due to some anxiety that the mention of pixiness in the modern American movie theatre might provoke some embarrassment” since contemporary audiences were much more “literal” than at the turn of the century when Barrie’s work was first produced (Crowther 1953). The adapted Neverland, then, carries specific modern burdens, making the Darling children’s return to their London nursery much less bittersweet than the play as Wendy has learned the responsibilities of reality are preferable to the chaos of fantasy.
Fig. 6 - Maternal Wendy in Peter Pan.
While Disney’s Alice is not on the precipice of adulthood like Wendy, her innocence serves as an avatar for the postwar audience to return to a less burdened time. Alice wants to escape her history lessons and the ever-growing number of books without pictures in them that have entered her life. But this naiveté comes at a price and hiding from responsibilities (and the remembrances of the past she tries to avoid by shirking her schooling) must be shown to be the wrong decision. Alice as written by Lewis Carroll in the original books is an adventurer, embracing the absurdity of Wonderland and never wavering in her curiosity. She is forthright in her questioning and moves confidently amidst the oddness of the fantasy realm of Wonderland. Disney’s Alice shows her mid-century influence through the introduction of anxiety to the character, uneasy amongst “mad” people and disorder. The film inserts a section where Alice becomes distraught that a potential path home has been erased (“symbolic of her now acknowledged need for order and direction”) and she tearfully sings about “the importance of reason and patience” whilst chastising herself for succumbing to curiosity (Ross 2004, 57) (see below). Alice’s desires to return home are repeated by the Darling children two years later, solidifying the importance of a familiar and orderly community to postwar audiences. The fantasy realms mitigate reality, offering the guise of absurd adventure only to return the characters to the mundanity of their everyday lives to accept precisely the fate they had been trying to avoid. Alice begins her adventure by exclaiming, “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense”, but this central thesis becomes the very point which must be corrected by the action of the film. Alice must ultimately not only accept but actively long for the stability and uniformity of the real world.
Alice in Wonderland.
Importantly, both Disney adaptations change their endings from their original texts to position their fantasy realms as dream worlds. At the end of the film version of Peter Pan, Mr. and Mrs. Darling find their children asleep in the nursery just where they left them, rather than spending days worried about their absence as in the play. In the original text, the Lost Boys are adopted by the Darlings and Mrs. Darling speaks with Peter Pan, enforcing that Neverland is a fantastical place that really exists. Barrie’s Peter Pan eventually returns for Wendy years later only to find she has grown up, so he takes her daughter Jane on an adventure to Neverland instead, suggesting a generational access to escape, something that is denied to future generations of Darling children in the Disney adaptation (though the studio returns to this idea in the direct-to-video sequel produced decades later). Alice’s time in Disney’s Wonderland comes to a nightmarish end as she frantically runs from an angry mob wanting her head, the fright of which helps wake her from the dreamworld. In the books, Alice returns to the very real Wonderland again, this time stepping through a looking glass to enter the realm. By denying the film characters the chance to re-enter the world of fantasy, the “return-to-reality closure” instead reinforces the need to obey the strictures of society (Gilead 1991, 277).
By privileging the point of view of children, these postwar animated musicals produced by the Disney studio were able to neutralise the anxieties of the American audience, showing them as something to be left behind in childhood. The films offer a temporary cathartic release in the absurdity of the fantasy realms before exposing such escape as ultimately ill-advised. In displacing the anxieties of the real world into a fantasy realm, these films serve to placate the fears of the audience, asking them to cast off childish concerns of abandoning individualism and curiosity for the stability created by an unwavering adherence to societal guidelines and gender roles for the greater good of the community. The fantasy of another world (Neverland, Wonderland) could be entertaining but the world outside the home was one of chaos, with the safety of stability and conforming to expectations presented as the favourable choices over the excitement of adventure.
**Article published: January 15, 2021**
References
Altman, Rick. 1987. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ames, Christopher. 1997. Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Butler, David. 2009. Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds on Screen. London: Wallflower Press.
Crowther, Bosley. 1953. “The Screen: Disney’s ‘Peter Pan’ Bows; Full-Length Color Cartoon, an Adaptation of Barrie Play, Is Feature at the Roxy.” New York Times, February 12, 1953. https://www.nytimes.com/1953/02/12/archives/the-screen-disneys-peter-pan-bows-fulllength-color-cartoon-an.html.
French, Brandon. 1978. On the Verge of Revolt: Women in American Films of the Fifties. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing.
Gilead, Sarah. 1991. “Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction.” PMLA 106, no. 2: 277-293.
Polan, Dana. 1986. Power & Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ross, Deborah. 2004. “Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination.” Marvels & Tales 18, no. 1: 53-66.
Wells, Paul. 2018. “Wonderlands, Slumberlands and Plunderlands: Considering the Animated Fantasy.” In Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres, edited by Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant, 23-40. London, Routledge.
Biography
Lisa Duffy is an independent researcher specialising in screen musicals and classical Hollywood film. Her PhD thesis looked at gender and sexuality in the fantasy spaces of mid-century Hollywood musicals. She is currently researching the aesthetics of evil in Disney animated musicals.