I watched the new Disney film Bolt over the weekend. It was pretty good. I thought Madagascar 2, which I also saw recently and which in ways was less ambitious, was a better kid’s movie.
Both films contrast the city with the natural (African wilderness in Madagascar, rural America in Bolt).
Bolt’s anti-urban bias ticked me off slightly.
Without giving too much away, the movie opens with a cute puppy playing in the "Silverlake Animal Shelter" – or some such phrasing, definitely in Silverlake though. A cute little girl adopts the cute puppy. All is well with the world, right? Well, they end up as animal and kid stars of a TV show, he tricked into thinking he’s a super dog saving his person every episode, she and her mom exploited by her agent and a network exec. When Bolt finds himself in New York City, he has to cross the country to reunite with his best friend with help from a NYC alley cat and a hamster they meet in a trailer park in Ohio. Finally, when everything works out well – it’s a Disney film – they retire from show business and live in a big farm house in some unidentified flat farming zone presumably located somewhere in the middle of the country.
Since this is a kids film, a studio film etc it’s probably a waste of time to be bothered with the way it represents real places. The semiotics of locations in Bolt are basically standard images gone stale with long overuse. Los Angeles is reduced to Hollywood which is reduced to fake, mean people. New York City is reduced to the mean streets of NY, gritty alleys, and tough guys/gals (with hearts of gold). Rural Ohio is reduced to funny looking rednecks (many with hearts of gold).
Now that we have overcome efforts to divide the country into real and fake Americas and elected a president from Chicago, isn’t it time to retire the lame anti-city clichés? Part of what I do at work is try to support local, sustainable agriculture both in traditional rural areas and through expanded urban agriculture, so I don’t want to cast stones at generic flat farmland either. But what’s with the assumption that the idyllic place for a girl and animals to grow up in once they get their FU-to-Hollywood money is in a place with lots of pesticide drift and exploited labor and confined animal operations and animals getting slaughtered on national television in front of ms. real america.
I’m not sure what the new myths could be but I bet there are lots of creative people who could invent them.