The fairest of them all... Snow White.
Photograph: (c) Walt Disney Co
Poor Walt. The creator of Mickey Mouse may have had his faults - including anti-semitism, according to one hostile biographer - but surely neither Disney nor the vast entertainment corporation that bears his name can be directly blamed for Guantanamo Bay.
Banksy, the British "street artist", went to Disneyland the other day and placed a life-sized sculpture of a Guantanamo prisoner by a ride. The logic is so cliched it doesn't need much explanation. Disney stands for banal and kitsch images of a consumerist childhood and for the unthinking supremacy of middle America, and the children and parents queuing at Disneyland deserve to have their noses rubbed in the reality of America now.
It's a point made before by better artists than Banksy, including Paul McCarthy, whose grotesque installations ludicrously subvert everything Disney has come to stand for. But is any of this really fair? Is Walt Disney really the father of banal Americana that contemporary artists love to mock?
Sit down with a young child to watch any of his original films and that hostile assumption won't last long. You'll see rapt wonder and delight - and, if you're honest, this will remind you of your own wonder, not to mention terror, the first time you saw a Disney animated fairytale. I still shiver when I recall my first visit to a cinema, to be awed by the forest of thorns in Sleeping Beauty.
Today, there's a universe of children's entertainment and a lot of it is bland, stupid fare. I disconnected digital TV after seeing the pap put out by CBeebies. Books are obviously better. But when the siren screen is unavoidable, better Dumbo than the Tweenies. Why? There's authentic imagination in Disney classics. They are brilliant adaptations of universal human stories. I can't separate Snow White in my mind from the Disney version, and wouldn't want to.
Disney was one of the great American visual artists, ranking with Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper. But where their art is local, his has conquered the world, apparently for all time, or as long as children watch moving images. Does this scare you? It honestly doesn't scare me.
