Wayne Ellwood’s issue on Disney was one to make you stop short and think – especially if, as was the case for me then, you had recently been enjoying watching some of the classic cartoon movies with your own children. Typical killjoy New Internationalist? Well, up to a point. But there’s no harm in asking a few penetrating questions even as you acknowledge the power and skill behind this particular myth-making US corporation. The issue looked at Disney’s dolls – the happy homemakers who lived in suspended animation until a man gave them life – and examined the messages coded into the studio’s latter-day blockbusters such as Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. It talked to Disney’s workers, both in the US and those in factories in Haiti. There were thoughtful pieces about the creeping ‘Disneyfication’ of the Western urban environment and about how the filmmakers’ treatment of animals has altered our sense of the wild. And there was a reader’s guide to the ways the ever-longer tentacles of the Mouse Machine are penetrating our everyday life (nin.tl/H5di9L).
It was a choice between pointing you towards this issue or to the one from five years ago that looked back on a year of crisis in food and finance (nin.tl/H5dC8h) – and, given how little that sense of crisis has lifted in the intervening years, I thought you could do with the distraction of a trip to an alternative Disney World...
