Quote:
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
Did Fantasia even make it to the UK while the war was on?
|
Almost certainly. Most films did as it was seen as very important to keep morale up with a constant stream of entertainments. Gone With The Wind was shown more or less continuously throughout the war, and I remember my nan saying she'd seen it more than a dozen times.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by jallanite
Rupert the Bear first appeared in 1920 and so was probably known to the Tolkien family, but in May 1937 The Dandy and The Beano could not be. The Dandy was first published later that year in December and The Beano was first published the following year. Something in May 1937 or before had made Tolkien think that there was a real danger of American childrens’ book illustrations being influenced by the Disney studios.
Disney films were also not included on North American networks, other than portions of them in some of Disney’s own programs: Disneyland (renamed later) and Micky Mouse Club, and on a few other later Disney programs. Disney, unlike other film production companies, refused to sell any television rights to his older films.
|
Dandy/Beano are examples of types of wildly popular cartoon/comic available in the UK. His children may have been too old by then (though his grandchildren will probably have picked them up later, along with the fantastic Eagle Comic), but there were plenty of other options that were popular. I can't remember the title but my dad, born in the 30s, collected a popular cartoon series at the time, he snipped them out of the Sunday paper and pasted them in a book so he could read them all at once.
There is also a long standing tradition of book illustration in the UK with a lot of highly lauded artists around in the late 19th and early 20th C that Tolkien will have been well aware of. Disney had a lot of competition in a country used to Kate Greenaway, Alfred Bestall, John Tenniel, Beatrix Potter, Randolph Caldecott, etc. And if you look at the art he produced and the art he liked for his own work (e.g. Pauline Baynes and her nice sketchy, inky drawings) then I'm not surprised he didn't go for Disney style which was all about large planes of colour and emphatic shapes - which works very well on screen but wasn't everyone's aesthetic (I can't personally complain about the modern Pixar stuff which is beautiful).