Some kids are just born cynical.

Some of my earliest memories revolve around me side-eyeing various things proffered to me by the adult world. I couldn’t bear watching the disruptive beastie in any monster movie get blown away, and I wept openly when The Creature From The Black Lagoon bit it because I couldn’t understand why loving the swimsuit-clad heroine not of his kind (as perfectly thematic a realization of childhood gayness as you’ll ever get) and defending his own turf marked him for villainy.

For four years in a row my elementary school forced me to sit through a screening of Annie, and I grew to hate that redheaded little bitch; why should she be rewarded with a rich sugary daddy just for being an optimistic simp while all the ethnic girls embittered by poverty and orphanhood are told to go screw in the gutter? To this day, I still think the There’s No Place Home coda from The Wizard of Oz (Dorothy gets wise in the book and emigrates) is bullshit. Kansas could suck my wake.

Few things had more than fairy tales though, the majority of which seemed to be sanitized (as in dumbed down) for the stupidest kids among us. Snow White and the loyal huntsman should’ve just iced the Wicked Stepmother in her sleep and shacked up together. The Princess On The Glass Hill waiting idly for a paladin to rescue her had me yelling “Just slide your dumb ass on down it!” The big reward for the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin is marrying her captor/would-be executioner and getting pregnant by him. Dipshit Rapunzel spent how many years trapped in that tower when all she really had to do was use the shears to shank that lezzie witch, cut off her own hair, climb down it, and make a break for it.

Since Disney became the conglomerate that packages and mainstreams all the tales of The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll off the pages and into the multiplexes, it’s fitting that the studio has fallen under the withering glares of grown-up kids who resent its lame gender paradigms and prostitot tween horrors. Why, I ask you, are all Disney princesses golddigging bimbos? Why can’t animals ever be more than friendly, singing helpmates? And why the hell are all Disney villains so dastardly, flamingly gay?

I’m candidly hard-pressed to name a Disney baddie who isn’t two steps left of Dr. Smith from Lost In Space. Captain Hook was a mincing dandy perv, who — with the help of submissive bottom Smee — was dying to get his hands on Peter Pan (with his mermaid whore harem) and the Lost Boys. Cruella De Vil was practically in drag, and her inspiration was the notorious Hollywood libertine Tallulah Bankhead.

Maleficent was a cock-blocking dragon lady, and don’t let the fact that Snow White’s step bitch was glacially beautifully throw you — she might as well have been Dracula’s Daughter. Male malefactors Jafar from Aladdin and Scar from The Lion King were catty queens in their own right, and the Queen of Hearts – looking like Rosie O’Donnell by way of Danny DeVito — wasn’t exactly the picture of patrician British uppercrustery.

Two events precipitated my parting ways with the Tragic Kingdom. The first was one of Disney’s most successful adventures: The Little Mermaid – a crass skull-fucking of the Andersen source material that had me face-palming as I sat in the audience.

Gone was the cautionary tale of the folly of love and the nobility of self-sacrifice. The ironic (and painful) price tag of the mermaid’s devil’s bargain was blunted, and absent were the sisters trading their hair for the magical dagger, the heroine hurling herself into the sea rather than slaying the man she loved to regain her tail and voice, and the beautiful doom brought down on those who dream too big and love too well.

In its place Diz offered up a doe-eyed cheerleader who trades away her uniqueness to land a big fish and effectively becomes her own conventional rival, more trusty animal mascots, and a sea hag modeled after Divine, which is indicative of the studio’s conception of campy, killer queen villainy. You have only to watch Rankin-Bass’s gorgeous The Last Unicorn — which neither normalizes its weird beast/heroine, nor queerifies the rather pathetic villain out to possess her — to get clued on just how pat and lamely generic Disney’s sexual politics are.

Next came the wave of Anime entries (the best arriving courtesy of Studio Ghibli) that began turning up stateside on video in the mid-’80s and by the close of the ’90s were garnering successful and critically-lauded theatrical releases of their own. It’s tough to feel much pathos for princesses who end up in magical slumbers as they wait out their films’ running times for a guy on horseback to arrive, or who essentially use their looks to trade-up to better digs after seeing these sprawling adventures.

The heroines of Princess Mononoke, Nausicaä of The Valley of the Wind, and Spirited Away ride on wolfback into battle, act as intermediaries between warring factions of nature and technology, and struggle under the bonds of exhausting indentured servitude — real girls (with great hair) testing their mettle and ready to lay down their lives for those they love.

The heroes themselves are often rendered as decidedly boyish (even bordering on the pannsexual at times), and are called upon to meet their complicated heroines halfway, enacting (adult) romances between worlds that don’t end with lavish weddings and a bluebird serenades.

The villains? They are themselves people — not swishy bachelor nemeses and razor blade-cheeked witches — driven by resentment and fear. Convinced that naked, merciless force and unyielding resolve are paramount, they’re misguided zealots (rather like the ones we know in this world) for whom faith in the mission never wavers. Those who reap the worst destruction are not cackling harridans and scenery-chewing heavies. They’re the ones who believe they’re doing the right thing.

Magic slippers, fairy godmothers, and Happily Ever After never flew with me, and as Disney’s only gotten bigger and slicker, its coronet bejeweled with fractured fairy tales is seeming that much more tarnished.

It’s a small, small world.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com