Peter Pan



Peter Pan takes all the worst aspects of the early Disney films and combines them into one muddled mess. It is no exaggeration to say that it is my least favorite Disney film, and I am trying to watch all the Disney films. So what's so bad about it? The most glaring thing is the overt and obtuse racist depictions of the so-called 'injuns'. They are depicted as monosyllabic, literally red, aggressive, and stupid. You might say, well what's the problem? They're in Neverland- they're not real people - it's racist, and it is just a part of the general racist attitude towards Native Americans that exist in our culture. It's even worse than in Dumbo because in Dumbo the racist characters, for the most part, are animals, so they could kind of get away with it, and while Song of the South is structurally racist, at least they had real African-Americans depicting characters. Here you have animators who made choices in an animation studio, which made a choice to depict people who exist in real life in hideous ways. The animation is really muddy and not clear. It looks like a cheap cartoon from the 1990s which is surprising because earlier Disney films had high quality animation. Peter Pan's face looks ugly, but that's because they based it on his voice actor Bobby Driscoll and his face also not the best looking. And I don't know if it's a Disney problem or an original source problem, but Peter Pan is a psychopath. He cuts off Captain Hook's hand for fun and then feeds it to a crocodile, and then at the end of the movie when Captain Hook plummets to his death, he just watches and does nothing to rescue him. And it's not like Captain Hook is some kind of evil person, he is just mad that a boy fairy cut off his hand and wants revenge. His motivations are, if not pure, understandable. Every character that Wendy encounters who is not Peter Pan tries to murder her, except for Captain Hook, actually. Tinkerbell tells the lost boys to shoot at her, some mermaids she meets try to drown her, and this is all played off as some kind of joke. The Lost Boys themselves are these weird sort of hostages who have been kidnapped from their real families and start to or rather have forgotten their families. One of Wendy's brothers also starts to forget his mom and Wendy reminds him of her, and so they want to go back home and in the end of the movie they go back home but what about the Lost Boys? So yeah I would say there have been much better adaptations of the play than this one. You're not really missing out on anything if you don't watch it. 

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