Jim on Film
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Disney’s Significant Themes
To me, the most important element of any book, movie, or play is the story. If there aren’t plot and characters to interest me, I’m not going to stick around for anything else. One of Walt Disney’s dominate traits was an interest in great storytelling, something I have studied with great interest for many years. Looking closely at films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, and Cinderella, we see masterpieces of character and plot development.
Since Walt Disney was a great entertainer, he was never overly focused on telling stories with strong themes or ideals. As a result of this, only in recent years, more by coincidence rather than as a trend, has there been Disney films with lasting themes that go beyond the storybook variety, an actual message that the filmmakers appear to be presenting through their work.
In two previous columns, I have detailed themes in Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but in addition to those two films, there are four other Disney films that have broken the mold with significant themes, themes which have resonated with me over the years.
(c) Disney
The Rookie
As a dreamer myself, The Rookie taught me a lot about dreaming. Based on
a true story, in the film, Jim Morris is a man whose big dreams fall by the
wayside courtesy of an injury, a mortgage, and a family. When he gets the chance
to go for the big leagues, Morris risks his financial status to find out if he
can really reach his dream. As the outlook gets bleaker, Morris is nearing the
breaking point when he gets his call to head up to the major league.
Major League Baseball is a farfetched dream for millions of little boys across this country. Not only does it take talent, but it requires determination and hard work. For a man in his late thirties, that dream couldn’t have seemed further away, but Jim Morris fought for it, and he got it.
In my life, I have had my own dreams of success. Two years after college, I quit my job teaching and directing at a local high school because I was working and working for everyone else but not for me and not for my own dreams. That summer, as I sat on my bed, looking at the Broadway posters staring down at me, I realized that I had two choices. I knew that fighting for my dreams of being produced on a Broadway stage would be uphill the whole way. It would require far more than talent but also determination and mental sweat as I fought to get anywhere near Broadway from my Midwestern home. I’m still a long ways away from the two producing capitals of the world, but The Rookie and Jim Morris’ story reminds us that the world is open to the dreamer. I still remember the chills it gave me on that first viewing.