The author is a Reformed Jew who also works with Evangelical Christians in Florida, USA. His obsession with animated features portraying the Gospel was clearly shown in his previous book about ‘The Simpsons’. Pinsky felt that the animated series by writer Matt Groening showed respect for sincerely proclaimed religious beliefs.
In his new book, he found that there was a definite mix of religion and magic within Disney classics. Using “Evangelical eyes”, he testified that he saw in the Disney Gospel that good is rewarded, evil punished, faith in oneself and also in someone greater than you is essential, and also that true love overcomes everything. But worryingly God is never mentioned.
Pinsky said, “It seems a contradiction – portraying consistent Judaeo-Christian values without sectarian, or even a Godly, context – the fruits without the roots.”
He continued, “The Disney Empire, by its founder’s designation, is a Kingdom of magic, almost totally without reference to any kingdom of heaven.” Disney is “the happiest place on earth, not the holiest. There are no churches on Main Street, Disneyland.”
Walt Disney was a Christian, who proudly confessed his faith in God and in prayer, but strangely in the seventy years of animated features from the corporation, God hardly gets a mention, pointed out Pinsky.
Even though God hasn’t been proclaimed, these clear Christian values have been promoted to millions of children for decades through stories such as Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Pinocchio.
The author stated that from these films emerge an “undisguised, if oblique, argument for the eternal promise of resurrection.”
In the Disney story of Sleeping Beauty, the prince as in the book of Ephesians, takes up “the armour of God”, and with “weapons of righteousness”, he fights the dragon with “the sword of truth”. However, it is magic that is the victor in the story – not God.
“Magic is the moving force, for both good and evil, although Christian imagery and symbolism appear at critical moments,” said Pinsky.
He also said that the Disney film, Peter Pan offered the perfect Disney recipe – all it required to fly to Neverland was to “think a wonderful thought and the add faith, trust and pixie dust”.
God does manage top make an appearance in a newer Disney film – Lilo and Stitch. Lilo prays to God for a companion “who won’t run away”.
Pinsky points out that Walt Disney had good commercial evidence to keep arms length from religion in their movies, after the disappointing showing at the box office of Fantasia. In a sequence, Satan falls to a village, and women with flaming hair dance on the edge of a fiery abyss, and demons usher the dead into hell. Then church bells ring out, and “the eternal army” is sent “slinking back into their abode of darkness”, and Pinsky’s description concludes the next day with “shafts of heavenly illumination shine down on a procession of the faithful carrying candles into a neutral, sylvan cathedral.”
Pinsky, however, pessimistically points out that people are forgetting that “Walt Disney created his animated features to entertain people and to make money – not to evangelise.” If in the process of creating all his movies the world became a better place then that was an “unintended by-product”.