FilmFisher Undefended Lists of 2019

While writing for FilmFisher regularly a few years back, I contributed to a monthly feature called “Undefended,” where each writer submitted a top-five list based on a themed prompt. As you can see below, I really got into making these. With the recent relaunch of FilmFisher and its migration to Substack, I thought it would be nice to revisit my Undefended lists and put them all in one place. Here are the ones I created in 2019. Click on the list titles to see the original articles with the other contributors’ lists.

P.S.: Spider-Man and other Marvel projects, and Westerns by the Coen Brothers and others, make multiple appearances on these lists.

Best of 2018 (January 2019)

1. Best Picture: Mission: Impossible – Fallout

2. Best Director: Bob Persichetti Jr., Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

3. Best Actor: Josh Brolin, Avengers: Infinity War

4. Best Actress: Zoe Kazan, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

5. Best Screenplay: Ethan and Joel Coen, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Marriage (February 2019)

Conventional wisdom would say that most movies either end with the euphoric beginning of a marriage or begin with its bitter end. I wanted to challenge that narrative by highlighting some movies that portray marriages in the middle that are healthy and instructive:

1. William Powell and Myrna Loy’s legendary chemistry would make any of the six Thin Man films worth watching, but the third one, Another Thin Man (1939), has this added bonus: it lifts a scene right out of Chesterton’s Manalive (probably accidentally). One of the ways Nick and Nora Charles stay in love is by pretending they’ve never met before.

2. In It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), George Bailey (James Stewart) discovers that his marriage to Mary Hatch (Donna Reed), far from distracting him from his sense of mission and vocation, is actually one of the key reasons he is able to do real good in the world. [To a lesser extent—but I’d hate to leave it out—the same idea is at play in 2006’s Amazing Grace. In it William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffud) regains his resolve to fight the slave trade (and recovers his singing voice, literally at the altar) when he marries Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai). After the wedding, however, the marriage subplot largely recedes into the background, hence the bracketing of this example.]

3. In A Beautiful Mind (2001), the courtship of John and Alicia Nash (Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly) is sparked by the volatile fuel of eros, but through adversity their marriage matures and is sustained by agape.

4. In The New World (2005), John Rolfe (Christian Bale) marries Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), even though she is still in love with Captain Smith (Colin Farrell). When Smith reappears, their commitment to each other is tested and confirmed. Ultimately it is death and not another lover that severs their bond, all too soon – yet neither of them parts with any regrets.

5. Tie: In Disney movies it is hard to find a functional nuclear family, and in superhero movies the heroes rarely ever get married or have kids. But in The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), the marriages and households of Pacha and Chicha (John Goodman and Wendie Malick) and Clint and Laura Barton (Jeremy Renner and Linda Cardellini) serve as oases of stability and joy in the midst of worlds turned upside down by self-love and self-reliance. (Surely it isn’t a coincidence that Tony Stark is a less over-the-top version of Kuzco, or that both families live in the countryside, have two young kids (a boy and a girl), and are expecting a third.)

Double Features (March 2019)

I have ordered my choices by the time gap between the films’ releases, from the shortest to the longest.

1. Ratatouille (2007) and The Wind Rises (2013) — 6 years: Legendary auteurs in animation meditate on the meaning and value of the creative life by telling the stories of craftsmen who work in non-artistic mediums. (Fun Fact: Both craftsmen are coached by imaginary personifications of their European-accented idols.)

2. A Civil Action (1998) and Amazing Grace (2006) — 8 years: A life spent and a career risked showing mercy and seeking justice can never, in the grand scheme of things, be considered wasted. (Consider this: Amazing Grace is one of the best films about Christians ever made, but the people most responsible for its excellence are probably not Christians. And A Civil Action arguably has a more compelling conversion story or moment than any movie by or about Christians.)

3. Citizen Kane (1941) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) — 21 years: Somehow two of the most towering achievements in the history of cinema are also two of cinema’s most terrifying indictments of the hollowness of human greatness. Life is hell when we try to be our own gods, let alone the gods of others.

4. Triple Feature (I had to break the rules somewhere): The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), and Where the Wild Things Are (2009) — 32 years: Our imaginary friends are among our earliest teachers. They helped us know ourselves, understand our worlds, cope with our earliest traumas, and ultimately grow up. Perhaps our imaginary friends also taught us to love our real ones, and prepared us to seek after the friend who, though invisible, is more real than anything we see.

5. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and The Truman Show (1998) — 52 years: While we pursue the American Dream of comfort and respect, what we really need is to be a part of a genuine, interdependent community, and to know the God who is both sovereign and good.

Heroes (April 2019)

5. Tie: Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2011-2019) and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) in the Mission: Impossible franchise (1996-2018—minus M:I:2). Two mythic American boy scouts who sacrifice their personal lives for the sake of what they hope is the greater good. Two men who, in their commitment to protecting the little guy, often find themselves at odds with the institutions that enlisted them for that very purpose. “I’m with you till the end of the line.”

4. Frodo, Sam, Pippin, Merry, Éowyn, Théoden, Faramir, and Aragorn (to name a few) in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Although I could have listed the entire trilogy, Return of the King particularly strikes me as a film about a host of heroes. “My friends: you bow to no one.”

3. Neville, Lupin, the Weasleys, and Snape (and many others) in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II (2011). Same principle as with #4. It’s no accident I failed to put Harry on the list. It’s not that Harry isn’t heroic, but what is significant about his story is just how many people are willing to lay down their lives to help him, and how he would have utterly failed if they hadn’t. “I’m sorry. I never wanted any of you to die for me.” “Others will tell [my son] what his mother and father died for. One day, he’ll understand.”

2. The farmers and the gunslingers in The Magnificent Seven (1960). One of the gunslingers, Bernardo O’Reilly (Charles Bronson), insists he is not a hero and points to a deeper, truer version of heroism. But even he becomes a true hero in the end. “Responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists [your fathers] until finally it buries them under the ground. And there’s nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage.”

1. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) in the Spider-Man Trilogy (2002-2007). It’s not just predictable, it’s almost mandatory. I can’t think of any other film or franchise, superhero-based or otherwise, that deals with heroism so directly or profoundly. “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

Honorable Mention: The multiple Spider-Folk of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018).

Summer Break Movies (June 2019)

1. High Noon (Fred Zimmermann, 1952) – Before Star Wars and superheroes, Westerns were the genre of summer. As in 12 Angry Men, it is also a blazing hot summer day, but here Gary Cooper fails to convince even one person to take his side. Figuring out why that is the case would make for a fantastic post-movie discussion.

2. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) – The epitome of the brainy blockbuster that doesn’t skimp on thrills or on thoughtfulness. It is also a great present-day follow-up to High Noon. Make it a double feature.

3. Treasure Planet (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2003) – I associate the summers of my youth with reading adventure novels, watching epic films, traveling, and growing up. Treasure Planet takes all these things and melds them into a near-perfect package. (Ironically, the film was released in November – but that might help explain why it flopped at the box office.)

4. The Sandlot (David Mickey Evans, 1993) – This list would be incomplete without at least one baseball movie, and Sandlot is about what summer means to us when we are growing up. But if you are looking for a baseball film that is more substantial (and less given to juvenile humor), Field of Dreams or Moneyball would also do.

5. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) – The earliest definitive summer blockbuster, and still one of the best.

The Best Trailers of the Decade (July 2019)

1. Trailer, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012). The Hobbit films went from being disappointing to being outright terrible, but this trailer is still a perfect encapsulation and wistful reminder of all that they could have been. Note to directors: If you can have your composer score your trailer and introduce the leitmotifs of the film, do it.

2. Trailer #1, Foxcatcher (2014). Steve Carell is terrifying.

3. Trailer, Logan (2017). I haven’t even seen this movie, but this trailer is incredible. This is how you use a song to structure your trailer and give it an emotional arc.

4. Trailer, Avengers: Endgame (2019). Sure, much of the trailer is fairly generic, but it opens and ends so well, and Marvel should be credited for how the trailer is 100% emotion and 0% plot. Thanos demanded silence, and he got it.

5. Teaser, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). When you start with a scene that riffs on Wild West showdowns and North by Northwest, use the same tagline as The Phantom Menace teaser, and end with that ominous image and that bombshell, you have figured out the secret to movie trailer alchemy.

The Best Film Music of the Decade (August 2019)

The hymn-inspired True Grit and hip-hop-infused Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse would have been on my list, but since they’ve already been claimed I’ll put two honorable mentions as my #5 and #4.

1. Hans Zimmer Double Feature: Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014).

2. Michael Giacchino: Dawn of / War for the Planet of the Apes (2014, 2017)

3. John Powell: The How to Train Your Dragon Trilogy (2010, 2014, 2019)

4. Alan Silvestri: Selections from the Marvel Symphonic Universe (2010, 2012, 2018, 2019)

5. Justin Hurwitz, et. al: La La Land (2016)

The Best Scripts of the Decade (September 2019)

1. True Grit (2010). Screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on a novel by Charles Portis.

2. Moneyball (2011). Screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin and story by Stan Chervin, based on a book Michael Lewis.

3. Locke (2013). Screenplay by Steven Knight.

4. The Wind Rises (2013). Screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki.

5. Arrival (2016). Screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based on a short story by Ted Chiang.

Tied Honorable Mentions:

• Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Screenplay by Joss Whedon, based on comics created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

• Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017). Screenplay by Rian Johnson, based on characters created by George Lucas.

The Best Performance of the Decade (October 2019)

In chronological order:

1. Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross in True Grit (2010)

2. Andy Serkis as Caesar in The Planet of the Apes Prequel Trilogy (2011-2017)

3. Chris Evans as Steve Rogers in Marvel’s Infinity Saga (2011-2019)

4. Barkhad Abdi as Muse in Captain Phillips (2013)

5. Adam Driver as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy (2015-2019), or as Paterson in Paterson (2016)

FilmFisher Undefended Lists of 2018

While writing for FilmFisher regularly a few years back, I contributed to a monthly feature called “Undefended,” where each writer submitted a top-five list based on a themed prompt. As you can see below, I really got into making these. With the recent relaunch of FilmFisher and its migration to Substack, I thought it would be nice to revisit my Undefended lists and put them all in one place. Here are the ones I created in 2018. Click on the list titles to see the original articles with the other contributors’ lists.

P.S.: There’s a lot of Harry Potter on these lists.

Action Scenes of the 2000s (July 2018)

1. The Mines of Moria chamber fight (“They have a cave troll.”), then the chase (“to the bridge of Khazad-Dûm!”), then Balrog face-off (“You shall not pass!”) in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

2. Another three-parter, the Geonosis arena battle(s) in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), complete with monsters and men, comic relief and pathos, and every young boy’s wildest dream come true: hundreds of Jedi with lightsabers going into battle together.

3. Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and James Norrington sword-fighting on a runaway mill wheel in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006).

4. With the help of only a feather, tiger villain Tai Lung escapes from an underground prison and defeats hundreds of rhino guards in Kung Fu Panda (2008).

5. One last three-parter: Tom Cruise survives drowning, then survives a car chase and crash, then survives a motorcycle chase and crash in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015).

Truths and Lies (August 2018)

1. “Mr. Carter, if the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.” (Citizen Kane, 1941)

2. “Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” (Return of the Jedi, 1983)

3. “Will I lie to myself to be happy? In your case, Teddy, yes. I will.” (Memento, 2000)

4. “We have protected innocence that I’m not willing to give up.” (The Village, 2004)

5. “Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” (The Dark Knight, 2008) / “It is time to trust the people of Gotham with the truth.” (The Dark Knight Rises, 2012)

Teachers (September 2018)

I hope the examples are so similar and specific you won’t mind me listing double. 5 Common Teacher Archetypes:

1. The Gifted “Chosen One” Student Turned Novice Teacher of an Unlikely Resistance: Jack Black’s Po (Kung Fu Panda 3, 2016), and Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2007)

2. The Truly Awful Principal with Cruel and Unusual Punishments for Students Who Use Magic: Pam Ferris’s Trunchbull (Matilda, 1996), and Imelda Staunton’s Dolores Umbridge (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2007)

3. The Hapless, Lanky, and Paranoid Disney Cartoon Teacher Who Should Not Be Teaching: Lou Romano’s Bernie Kropp (The Incredibles, 2004), and Ichabod Crane (The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, 1949)

4. The Morally Ambiguous, Rough-Around-the-Edges Teacher (Complete with Peg Leg and Artificial Eye) Who Mentors the Protagonist Under False Pretenses: Brian Murray’s John Silver (Treasure Planet, 2002), and Brendan Gleeson’s Mad-Eye Moody (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2005)

5. The Whimsical Professor (with an Affinity for Magical Furniture) Played by Jim Broadbent: Professor Digory Kirke (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 2005), and Professor Horace Slughorn (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2009)

Scares (October 2018)

1. While Jonathan goes outside to move his car, Aunt Abby and Aunt Martha go to check on the window seat… (Arsenic and Old Lace, 1944)

2. After the Halloween party, Ichabod Crane rides into the forest… (The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, 1949)

3. Donovan chooses, poorly… (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989)

4. The drums, the disappearance of Alan Parrish, and the mosquitos… (Jumanji, 1995)

5. Harry and Hermione follow Bathilda Bagshot to her house… (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I, 2010)

America (November 2018)

In order of historical period:

1. John Adams miniseries (Tom Hooper, 2008)

2. Good Night, and Good Luck. (George Clooney, 2005)

3. JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991)

4. Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014)

5. The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

Time (December 2018)

1. In less than an hour and a half, a marriage begins and is severely tested, a career of public service ends in defiant bitterness, and the true character of an entire community is exposed in all its cowardice and pettiness in High Noon (1952, dir. Fred Zinnemann).

2. A time-obsessed, proudly resourceful man is humbled by three years of isolation on an island in Cast Away (2000, dir. Robert Zemeckis).

3. A man and his wife learn the secret to slowing down time, grow old together in a dream, and return to waking life as middle-aged adults, only to be haunted by the repercussions of tampering with time in Inception (2010, dir. Christopher Nolan).

4. The audience witnesses the mundane yet beautiful moments of seven ordinary days in the life of a bus driver/poet and his artist wife in Paterson (2016, dir. Jim Jarmusch).

5. Six parables on the shortness of life and the brutal and banal suddenness of death in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018, dir. Ethan and Joel Coen).

Bonus Round: In what could have been the seventh chapter of Buster Scruggs, with a similar concept as the one found in Inception, three brothers attempt to outwit Death with his own instruments in the animated montage of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I (2010, dir. David Yates).

Reintroducing FilmFisher

I am pleased to announce that the Christian classical film-review website FilmFisher was relaunched recently, now on Substack. Please consider subscribing!

Thanks to then-editor Timothy Lawrence, I wrote a number of reviews and articles for the site from 2018 to 2021, and a few of those pieces have been migrated over to the new site:

• An Ode to Po: Celebrating Goodness in the Kung Fu Panda Trilogy

• Avengers: Endgame

• Wonder Woman and the Bronze Serpent

Plato's Republic and Nolan's Gotham, Part IV

For the past few weeks I’ve been writing posts on ways that I see Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy interacting with Plato’s Republic. I’m sure that next time I watch the films I will see even more connections, but for now I’m ready to move on to other topics. To cap off this series, here are three closing thoughts—or rather, as it turned out, three more posts combined together. 

First, although earlier I had written about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, oddly enough I didn’t think much at all about the literal caves Bruce falls into, first in Batman Begins (the cave that becomes the Bat-Cave) and then in The Dark Knight Rises (the prison pit into which he is cast by Bane). Yet these also fit the allegory. 

The scene where young Bruce falls into the well on his family’s estate, and his father descends by a rope to pull him out, supports my suggestion that Thomas Wayne is the closest thing Gotham City has to a philosopher-king. In pulling his son out of the well, he resembles how the prisoner-turned-philosopher returns to the cave to free others of their ignorance. After all, he tells Bruce in that moment, “Don’t be afraid,” and fear is the result of ignorance. To quote Ducard again, “Men fear most what they cannot see.” 

Speaking of Ducard, this scene of Thomas and Bruce in the cave underlines the fundamental differences between Thomas and Ducard, his foil. Ducard, with his corrupted understanding of justice, cannot really lead anyone out of the cave, and while Thomas dispels fear, Ducard instead preys upon it. When Bruce is in the prison pit in The Dark Knight Rises, he learns that Ducard once descended into that cave to exact vengeance on those who killed his wife. Just as when he attacked Gotham in Batman Begins, he did not descend into the cave to liberate captives but to slaughter them. If Thomas represents the aristocratic soul, Ducard represents the tyrannical one.

As Timothy Lawrence and I discussed in a FilmFisher dialogue some years ago, the tension between Bruce and his alter-ego Batman corresponds to how Bruce is caught between these two mentors. The choice he faces is whether to become more like his father or more like Ducard. I see now that this conflict can be rephrased in Platonic terms: Will Bruce, having a timocratic soul driven by a love of honor, evolve into a wisdom-lover or devolve into someone who is ruled by his appetites? 

I think Bruce does become more like his father, and more like a philosopher, in the end. In Rises, he defies his fear in order to climb out of the prison pit; he liberates Gotham from the League of Shadows (again, “Shadows” suggests the shadows of the Plato’s cave); and finally, he passes the mantle of Gotham’s protector to Blake. Significantly, as I pointed out in that FilmFisher dialogue, well before I ever read Plato, “The first scene of the first film has Bruce falling into the cave, and the last shot of the last film has Blake rising on a platform in the cave.” If Thomas descended into the cave to lift out Bruce, Bruce descends into the cave to lift out Blake. Republic envisions a process by which the philosopher-kings would raise up and train their successors, and that succession is reflected in the beginning and end of the trilogy.

Second, for all the similarities between the films and Plato’s Republic, Nolan seems to refute the idea of using myths and useful falsehoods to govern the kallipolis. 

As Plato’s Socrates lays out a theoretical blueprint for the ideal republic, on two occasions Socrates devises a myth that would be used to convince the next generation to abide by the republic’s laws and prefer justice to injustice: The Myth of the Metals in Book III, and the Myth of Er in Book X. The Dark Knight ends and The Dark Knight Rises opens with a myth or useful falsehood invented by Batman. He convinces Jim Gordon to lie about the fate of Harvey Dent, in order to keep the city from being demoralized by Dent’s corruption. The lie does motivate the city to stamp out organized crime, but once the truth is revealed, the results are reversed, and the city is plunged into a worse chaos than before.

In contrast, The Dark Knight Rises concludes with Gotham receiving a true myth to inspire the citizens to justice. The city watches Batman fly the bomb away from the city. Although the audience knows that Bruce somehow escaped the detonation, this doesn’t drain the action of its meaning or nobility. He really did save the city. Blake thinks it unfair that people don’t know it was Bruce Wayne who saved them, but Gordon is right: “They know who it was; it was the Batman.” Earlier in the film, in two different scenes, Bruce/Batman had told Blake and then Gordon that the point of Batman’s secret identity is that “A hero can be anyone.” That is why a statue of Batman—a symbol of justice that can be embodied by anyone—is dedicated at the end of the film, not a statue of Bruce Wayne. This statue represents a better, truer Myth of the Metals or Myth of Er.

Third, I return to the way Plato treats the state of the just/unjust city as analogous to the state of the just/unjust soul. If Bruce becomes more just in the end, does Gotham? 

As I’ve already touched on above, Bruce can be said to become more just because of how he grows to resemble his father, and as I said in the first post, because of how he persists in pursuing justice even when no one rewards him for it. Indeed, when Bruce fakes his own death, for all Gotham City knows, he died a very unjust man. In the Republic, justice is a combination of moderation, courage, and wisdom, but any citizen would be forgiven for thinking Bruce was immoderate (“Look how he wasted his inheritance on pleasures!”) and cowardly (“Look how he ran for cover when the Joker attacked his home!”) and foolish (“Look how poorly he managed his company!”). In reality, the case could be made that Bruce is (or becomes) moderate, courageous, and wise. Moderate, he is never corrupted by the profligate playboy persona he plays before the public. Courageous, he overcomes his fears and holds to his conviction against killing even when he is sorely tempted to abandon it. Wise, he continues to seek after true justice and will not settle for the false alternatives propounded by Ducard (like Polemarchus, that justice involves doing harm to enemies), Falcone (like Thrasymachus, that justice is whatever benefits the strong), the Joker (embracing the view that Glaucon summarizes, that being just isn’t worth the effort), or Dent (that only chance is just).

But what about the city? In the previous post, I closed with the troubling suggestion that, because of its slide from aristocracy to tyranny over the course of three films, “Gotham City would seem to worse off at the end of the trilogy than at the beginning.” And so I find myself in arriving at the same answer as I did at the end of the dialogue I wrote with Tim: it doesn’t seem like Gotham is capable of becoming a just city. Bruce would seem to have failed to make it more just. Maybe Alfred is right and Bruce went about it all wrong, misdirecting his energies to be a guardian of the city as Batman and not doing enough to be a philosopher-king like his father.

However, this may be the result of asking the wrong question, the result of assessing Bruce by the wrong objective. In his own words, Bruce’s objective was never to make the city more just but to give it a vision of justice. He tells Alfred in Batman Begins, before returning to Gotham, that “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I'm flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol—as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.” And if that was the goal, he would seem to have succeeded in the end. Gotham does not become a just city, but with the example and symbol of Batman as its inspiration, it could become one yet.

Disney Animation and Expressive Individualism

It is often said that Disney films, at least in the past few decades, espouse expressive individualism. I have thought the same thing, and still think it is largely the case. However, over time I have realized that three among my favorite Disney animated films, all three of them from what to me is the most eclectic and daring period in Disney Animation’s recent history—The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), Treasure Planet (2002), and Brother Bear (2003)—each show the dangers of expressive individualism and suggest that maturity involves submitting to community standards and accountability. So, in fairness to the creators of these films, while the generalization is mostly true, we shouldn’t paint all of Disney’s productions with such a broad brush.

First, in my debut article for FilmFisher in 2018, I had this to say about Brother Bear:  

Charles Taylor has described secular individualism this way: “People are called upon to be true of themselves and to seek their own self-fulfillment. What this consists of, each must, in the last instance, determine for him- or herself. No one else can or should try to dictate its content.” [The quotation is from Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard UP, 1992, p. 14.]

This statement could describe the hero’s journey of several Disney protagonists. But Brother Bear subverts Disney’s individualistic mythos. To adapt Taylor’s words: Kenai is never told to be true to himself. That would actually be disastrous, because what Kenai learns about himself is ugly and shameful. In biblical terms, he is a sinner at heart, not a saint. Instead, he is told by Tanana to pattern his life after love, something outside himself. In the end, he does not seek his own fulfillment, but another’s good. If Kenai had had his way, he never would have determined that path for himself. At first, he outright rejected it as folly. Others dictated the content of his attainment of mature manhood. The spirits chose his totem, Tanana and his brothers told him to follow his totem, and the spirits set him on a path to reconciliation when he abandoned his totem. If Taylor is right, and my analysis of Brother Bear is on to something, this truly is a counter-cultural message.

Second, when I wrote an article on Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire in 2020, I argued the former may not be as individualistic as it certainly seems to be:

The trouble with making the moral of the film “chart your own course,” in the individualistic sense, is that the film, intentionally or not, presents strong reasons against that kind of philosophy. Captain Flint charted his own course, and died alone. Silver charts his own course, but realizes “you give up a few things, chasing a dream” — in his case, parts of his own body. Worst of all, Jim’s father, for all we can tell, charted his own course, and he abandoned his wife and son. But the moral exemplars of the film — Sarah, Dr. Doppler, and Captain Amelia — are marked by their principles, discipline, and service. They take initiative and responsibility for themselves, but never without regard for others. Jim matures when he honors his mother, submits to Captain Amelia’s leadership, and follows Silver’s instructions. When Jim does start charting his own course, he fights to protect his friends, not to pursue his own interests. When Silver invites Jim to join him for a life of open, endless possibilities, the course he charts instead is toward a life constrained by limitations. He enrolls in the Naval Academy — and militaries, schools, and military schools especially, are not places for expansive, self-determining individualism.

In the next paragraph, I quoted the same Charles Taylor passage I had used in the Brother Bear article, and then continued: 

Up until I was working on this article, I always thought Silver’s speech exemplified this kind of thinking. That may still be the case. After all, Taylor’s description encapsulates the Disney ethos. But as I now consider the speech within the context of the film, it seems to take on a newer and truer meaning. Perhaps, even as Jim is called to be true to himself, he is also called to be true to others. Perhaps those others still need to tell him who he should be, and even better, help him become who he should be. Otherwise, if Jim pushes everyone away, who will be there to catch the light coming off him?

Third, I haven’t written an article on The Emperor’s New Groove—not yet—but here is the short version of my argument it is not in favor of expressive individualism: Is there any character in all of Disney who is more expressively individualistic than Emperor Kuzco, and isn’t he clearly portrayed as a terribly selfish and destructive person who needs to change and start showing concern for others?

All this leads me to two takeaways: 

One, as seen with Treasure Planet, the characters in these films can say one thing (“chart your own course”) while the story can silently undercut those words (the character saying those words is not a moral exemplar). This is why we have to consider every scene in the context of the whole. We have to consider subtext. 

But, two, this presents a difficulty: the target audience for these films is not very good at detecting subtext. When I grew up watching Silver say “Chart your own course,” I took it as the unchallenged viewpoint of the whole film. Similarly, most of the kids who grow up with Frozen likely do not pick up the irony that “Let It Go” is being sung by someone who, swinging the pendulum too far the other way in a response to a restrictive upbringing, is in danger of hurting herself and others. So, those who are reluctant to show these films to children, lest they encourage them to have a me-first mentality, have a point. However, what if these films could be used to help young viewers, when they are ready for it, learn how to recognize subtext? In the context of a discussion with a parent or teacher, these films that seem to espouse expressive individualism could be used to help inoculate against it.