Indian Writing

Anthony Lane in the New Yorker on the creations of Walt Disney:

We have all been children, and many of us have children of our own; in the twenty-first century, that puts us squarely in Disney’s debt. We may resent that state of affairs, but to no avail. Although I can open Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” and start to read, in my ear the boom of Phil Harris—Disney’s own choice for the voice of Baloo—is already starting to kick in, blaring “The Bare Necessities” and drowning the original text. Cruella De Vil is my archetype of the knife-thin diva, with a lunatic’s burning eyes. (In the words of Ward Kimball, who worked for Walt over many years, “Almost all of his villains were either women or cats.”) As for Mary Poppins, the gratifying standout of Disney’s final years, she demonstrated his preternatural, Prospero-like knack for conjuring a spirit from thin air (Julie Andrews was nothing like the Mary of the novels) and persuading us that she had always been around. She is the least witchy of his dominatrices, and in her prescription for the pleasures of industry she comes close to the appeal of Disney himself:

In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun;
You find the fun, and—snap—
The job’s a game!

The work ethic transmuted, with a click of the fingers, into a lark: what better alchemy for an America ineluctably on the rise?