for
11/18/2000
In the original release of Disney's The Rescuers, there appeared two photographic frames of a naked woman in the background, as the mice and their albatross friend fly through the city. Disney recalled 1.4 million copies of the video in the 1999, which still contained the offending frames; no one had noticed these since the film was released in the mid seventies. They were apparently inserted during post-production.
"Easter Eggs," or intentionally inserted but hard to find surprises in movies, music and games are a popular topic on the internet, and few things have come under more scrutiny than family-friendly Disney animated movies. It is alleged that numerous sexual items have been hidden in these films.
The Little Mermaid contains two famous "easter eggs," which caused varying levels of public outcry from right-wing groups. In the first, a minister is supposed to be sporting an erection....
This is false; the second angle clearly shows that it is his knee. The other has caused much more controversy, and this is unfortunate. According to rumor, one of the spires on King Triton's tower on the original video cover is a penis....
This, too, is false--or at least, unintentional. As the legend goes, both "irregularities" were done by the same disgruntled artist, who was about to be fired. In reality, the cover art creator was not a member of the animation staff, nor was he fired. He was, however, working very close to deadline, and finished the cover at about four in the morning. The real problem is a logical one of adding organic, irregular curves to a set of long, thin tower spires.
The first question is, of course, does Disney hide things in their movies? Yes, they always have. "Hidden Mickeys"--small silhouettes of the character--have been a staple of the Disney company's animations and theme parks since the very beginning. The ancient Chinese characters in Mulan's leaving-home sequence are the film's credits. Characters from previous films make frequent cameos, though 80% of them go by unnoticed. This is the spirit of Easter Eggs--to reward those paying attention.
Most of the Disney animated movies released in the last 20 years have, in fact, contained no allegedly inappropriate material. Among others, Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, Tarzan and Pocahontas, while based largely around female characters, have withstood the scrutiny of the internet and the Christian right.
The next question is one of motive: why would Disney artists insert sexual references into their films? We have seen, in the last ten years, the birth of the "Golden Age" of Disney animated films; with the release of The Little Mermaid and, more so, Beauty and the Beast, the studio attempted to expand from popcorn children's fare to more universal movies, attempting to gain a much larger audience. The artwork became more detailed, the themes richer, the love stories more three-dimensional--and with adult love stories must come, whether implied, discussed or shown, sex.
The SEX controversy surrounding The Lion King is one of Disney's best known and, probably, one of the most unfortunate. The letters SEX supposedly appear numerous times, sometimes in backgrounds, but often in effects work--clouds of dust, splashes of water, and so forth....
The jury's still partially out on this one, but it appears that the letters represented are not, in fact, S-E-X, but SFX, a sound company that worked on the movie. Notice that the tail that could be the bottom bar of the "E" is also present on the "S." It would seem that an attempt at skillfully hiding credit here went awry.
Sexual relations, and the proper applications there-of, are an important part of maturity. Only the most prudish could deny that if the stories in these films were allowed to run, the main characters would inevitably have sex. (Indeed, in the case of The Lion King and Tarzan, it could have happened within the timeframe of the movie, without upsetting our conceptions of the characters.) If you'll permit me: Belle and "the Beast" would have kept the whole castle awake if Lumier and the maid weren't even louder, and Aladdin and Jasmine must have done it in every part of the ancient world. People have sex.
In the balcony scene in Aladdin, when Aladdin is first confronted with Raja, he (or someone else) is reported to whisper "take off your cloths...."
The actor supposedly whispered something like "don't get too close." Judge for yourselves.
Disney's creative people are top-notch, but as human as the rest of us. The problem with being a sexual being is that if not having sex we tend to find alternative outlets. Pornography is only the most obvious--"absexuality," a sexual perversion characterized by vehemently attacking sexual activities and material as a method of keeping it at "arm's length," is believed to be rampant among the Christian right. Practical jokes with sexual material, too, could be taken as an expression of sexual frustration, as might the obsessive compilation of such work.
It's Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the Disney-animated film with the most overtly sexual character, Jessica Rabbit...
...that has the most likely intentional nudity. The legend goes that two Disney animators, who were later fired, were responsible for this scene where Jessica is thrown from a taxi cab, revealing her vagina as she falls. The "fired animators" rumor is unconfirmed, but may well be the genesis of the Little Mermaid story. The counter-rumor is that it is simply an inking mistake, and that the lines shown are meant to represent her panties--indeed, in the DVD, the area has been colored a much brighter white.
It's through the obsessive work of people at sites like www.Eeggs.com, The Urban Legends Reference Pages, The Internet Movie Database and www.urbanlegends.com, that we know about these things--indeed that we know the truth about any of them--and if this is a sign of sexual frustration then so be it; sexual frustration is no more of a secret than sexual relations. Sex is a part of life, in short, and a good part, when one learns to understand it. In the end, maybe the question is not whether Disney is inserting sexual references into its children's movies, but why such a thing should be a problem.
Touch the Toast