Children deserve better than cartoonish culture war

By now, it’s hard to feel surprised when the culture war hollows out another American institution that used to be apolitical: the news media, the corporate boardroom, the football field. But here’s a weird one: how about cartoons? 

Rasmussen Reports just published an eye-opening survey revealing that 23% of Americans "say they’ve chosen not to watch a Disney movie in the past year because of politics." Dissatisfaction with the Mouse breaks down broadly along partisan lines, with 65% of Republicans and 29% of Democrats agreeing that "entertainment from the Disney company is worse than they remember in the past."  

Like everything else in America, childhood has become political. 

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Granted, there have been examples of politically engaged cartoons in the past, even from Disney's own well-regarded library. In Disney's 1942 short, "Der Fuehrer's Face," Donald Duck struggled to maintain his sanity as a Nazi factory worker. Millennials remember the environmentally minded "Captain Planet and the Planeteers," a staple of Saturday morning cartoon blocks in the 1990s. 

Disney was an essential part of childhood for many Americans. Now, it's politically toxic. (Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

But these antecedents tended to reflect a broad national consensus on political and social issues. The thing that's new, the thing that has alienated nearly a quarter of Americans, is an unprecedented fixation on using children's entertainment to wade into the most controversial political debates of our moment. 

This is a hangover from the social justice mania of the Biden years. In a cultural moment when silence was violence, it seemed naive to imagine that animation could remain neutral in the culture wars. Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek learned this the hard way in March 2022, when his hesitation to condemn controversial legislation in Florida led to an employee revolt that forced him into an embarrassing reversal. 

The message was, if you aren’t actively leveraging the trust of American families to advance the progressive agenda, you are on the wrong side of history. 

Under the influence of this zeitgeist, Disney used its animated content as a platform to initiate children into the political controversies of the adult world, covering sexuality, reparations for slavery, and — in "Frozen 2," a film intended to appeal to girls in their princess phase — the dispossession of land from indigenous people. Just what every parent wants to talk about on the drive home from the theater! 

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The audience noticed, and Disney suffered a string of fumbles at the box office, from Pixar’s underperforming "Lightyear" in 2022 to November 2023’s "Wish," which should have been a celebration of Disney’s centennial but ended up losing the studio an estimated $131 million. 

Sensing a market opportunity, some groups on the right have begun to offer counter-programming: children's entertainment with a conservative political spin. But such efforts further accelerate the politicization of childhood. If these trends hold, we may be headed for a future where the toy shelves are not sorted for boys and girls, but for conservatives and progressives. 

Children deserve better than political indoctrination. For one thing, it won't work. We are training children for political battles that will be 20 years old by the time they're able to meaningfully contribute. 

But there’s a deeper problem: in training our kids to fight our battles, we are making them instruments of the adult world. We are subordinating their good to our good, making them a means to our own ends. 

"Lightyear" underperformed at the box office. FILE: Screencap from Pixar's trailer for "Lightyear" (2022) (Disney/Pixar)

All of us want our children to grow up to be leaders: people of integrity with the inner strength to fight for the common good, even against the pull of the crowd. But a child who has not practiced and acquired fortitude won't stand a chance against a cultural headwind as an adult, no matter how pure his political education. 

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The foundation of leadership is virtue. Family entertainment should be focused not outwardly on the controversies of the day, but inward on the development of the child. As J.R.R. Tolkien memorably put it, children’s entertainment "like their clothes should allow for growth." 

It's time for a reinvestment in the child as an end in himself. We've seen this in schools with the recent renaissance in classical education, where the Socratic method shifts the child's focus from getting the right answer to asking the right questions. What would a classical renaissance look like in the world of children's entertainment? 

Children deserve better than political indoctrination. For one thing, it won't work. We are training children for political battles that will be 20 years old by the time they're able to meaningfully contribute.?

We need stories that follow the pattern of the great Western tradition, stories made to last. We need stories that proclaim timeless, universal truths. Stories that depict an exterior world overflowing with beauty and an interior world striving for goodness. 

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Such stories equip children to understand the journey of their own lives. Each of us is endowed with free will. Our lives are poised between good and evil, and the drama of every human story is that we must choose not only what we will do, but also who we will become. 

The next generation of Americans will have to rebuild many of the institutions that make up a thriving and unifying civil society. If we want to raise the kids of today into the leaders of tomorrow, we cannot afford to neglect that venerable institution of American childhood: the animated cartoon. 

Christian McGuigan is an Emmy-nominated producer and a co-founder of Sycamore Studios.