The Mouse Must Die
Last time, we covered how American parents have been trained like lab rats to assume that animation is a juvenile art form. That misperception isn't just a harmless error; it’s cultural deformity. No serious civilization treats its mythic traditions as disposable commodities.
But Disney conditioned Americans to do just that, and the results have been catastrophic.
Most people think of Walt Disney as a harmless showman; a P.T. Barnum of cartoons with a castle instead of a circus tent. In reality, he was more like a cultural conquistador. Uncle Walt didn't just make movies, he replaced longstanding stories.
You can see the bait and switch in real time. Ask a child—or an adult, for that matter—to describe the main plot and themes of The Little Mermaid. You won’t hear a word about Hans Christian Andersen’s deep Christian allegory or its tragic ending. You’ll get a pitch for Disney’s 1989 cartoon musical, complete with talking crabs and a happy ending. And you’ll see an iconic tale’s total replacement with a corporate artifact.
Nor was that usurpation an accident. It was Disney’s business model.
Related: Why Americans Think Cartoons Are for Kids
Disney’s real genius wasn’t animation. It was cultural acquisition. He took European fairy tales, removed centuries of wisdom that were often written in blood, and turned them into intellectual property. Sanitized, stripped of moral complexity, and packaged with a sing-along, he sold them back to us as “classics.”
And Americans bought it.
Disney didn’t just popularize these stories, he displaced them. For over half a century, children were raised not on Grimm or Perrault, but on Disney’s simplified facsimiles. The old tales were meant to teach children that the world is perilous, that evil is real, and that defeating it requires sacrifice. Disney taught them that love means following your heart and singing until your problems go away.
In other words, he turned myth into self-help gruel.
This cultural strip mining has had consequences. When you hollow out your folklore, you gut your civilizational immune system. Because stories are how a people pass on their values; how they teach the next generation to endure, strive, and build. So if your mythology is reduced to stuffed animals parroting ad pitches, you get a society incapable of defending itself. That, by the way, is why supposed culture warriors browbeating you with the hackneyed line that fiction is worthless while insisting that art isn’t real aren’t just wrong; they’re fifth columnists.
It wasn’t always this way. In a Christian culture, children were initiated into the moral order through tales that acknowledged suffering, death, and divine justice. The original Sleeping Beauty isn’t a fashion show about finding your prince. It’s a brutal allegory about temptation, punishment, and redemption. But once Disney got through with Aurora, she was just another dress-up doll in a tiara.
Even the old Disney films paid lip service to tradition. The books opening at their intros were nods to the fact that these were adaptations, not replacements. People retained the cultural memory that these stories came from somewhere, and you could read the original versions in books. But that memory is almost gone now.
Which was the plan.
We are now living in a postliterate society where Disney is the arbiter of culture. Why read the Jungle Book when you can stream the cartoon? Why commit to The Wind in the Willows when there's a slapstick mole driving a car on Disney+? The classics are replaced with simulations, imaginations atrophy, and the megacorp thrives.
Here’s the truth everybody misses: Disney's real product isn't movies; it's memory. Their empire runs on collective amnesia—on swapping out what your great-grandparents knew for whatever the brand managers want you to feel this quarter. They don’t just entertain your children, they mold their worldview. And now, they’re remaking their own cartoons as live-action films, severing the last thread tying them to the original stories. In another generation, there’ll be no trace of the old lore left; just an infinite regress of Disney versions based on Disney versions: photocopies of photocopies until the page turns black.
Contra the MammonCons, this is not just a media problem. It’s a moral and cultural crisis. Because just as you can’t run an economy on counterfeit money, you can’t sustain a civilization with fake myths.
If the West is to be recovered—if there is to be a Christian renewal in art and storytelling—Disneyfied culture must be torn down. The mouse must die.
The first step is for parents to stop outsourcing their kids’ imagination to screens. Read Andersen. Read Grimm. Read Tolkien, Lewis, and Chesterton. Tell your children stories grounded in reality and eternity, not songs about following their personal appetites.
Disney turned classic literature into disposable content. We must recover the mythic heritage they usurped.
That doesn’t mean we need to make “Christian Disney.” It means rejecting their paradigm entirely. Stop trying to redeem the brand. Stop hoping for the right director to make it “based.” You don’t repaint the golden calf. You smash it and look back to the bronze serpent.
We are not here to preserve the status quo. We are here to take back what was stolen.
Watch this video by Cartoon Aesthetics for more:
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