Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (2003):
“Walt Disney’s Snow White has virtues – of kindness and compassion and maternal love – that the Queen never had; she will win a victory of some sort over age, with a beauty of spirit if not of the flesh. Disney thus introduced a note of hope and love into a very stark, elemental story, without violating that story’s basic structure. To do that, he had to deal directly with emotions that most of us are reluctant to express, lest we be embarrassed by their very commonness.”
Those emotions are at their height, of course, in the scene where the Dwarfs mourn Snow White’s apparent death near the very end of the film.
Barrier goes on to quote I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929):
“…these thoughts and feelings, in part because of their significance and their nearness to us, are peculiarly difficult to express without faults of tone. If we are forced to express them we can hardly escape pitching them in a key which ‘overdoes’ them, or we take refuge in an elliptic mode of utterance hinting them rather than rendering them to avoid offence either to others or to ourselves.”
* * *
Today marks ten years since I started my job in BBC presentation. Ten years of directing BBC One and BBC Two, among the BBC’s other domestic channels.
And I think back to my Dad. He died thirty years ago, in 1994. I was just 13. We were just beginning to have the vague stirrings of an adult-adult relationship… and then he was gone. We never truly got to know each other.
But he loved television. I remember him watching, long into the evening, well into the night. And I really, really hope he would have been proud of me.
The specifics might be different, but such feelings are common. They are embarrassingly common, exactly as Barrier describes. You can’t help but wish you had a more original thought. But some of our most important thoughts are some of the least original things in the world.
Such as: thirty years on, I still miss him.
An early version of this post was first published in the January issue of my monthly newsletter.