Disney Does Huck Finn: Never the Twain Shall Meet
1993; Salisbury University; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoHollywood loves to exploit the classics and the Disney studio has recently had its way with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, originally published in 1884 and set in the Valley during the early nineteenth century. It's not the first time. Jackie Coogan played Huck in 1931, Mickey Rooney in 1939. J. Lee Thompson directed a musical version in 1974; a television version was completed in 1975, and now we've got the Disney version for the politically correct 1990s, minus Mark Twain's sharp satire, and minus the N word. The temptation is to treat this as a children's story in a family entertainment frame, to turn Huck Finn into hick fun. Director Stephen Sommers describes what he calls the line here: about a kid who risks his life to save a runaway slave and it's about the slave who teaches the kid to grow Sommers told the New York Times (25 March 1993). But listen to Mark Twain: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished: persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. Is this ironic advice for the latter-day bottom liners? Disney may attempt to exploit this book, but never the Twain shall meet. Huck is a feral version of Tom Sawyer, with whom he is sometimes confused and without whom he would not have been imagined, a roustabout wanderer seeking freedom from his sinister father, on the one hand, and from those who want to civilize him, on the other, drifting down the with his friend Jim, who seeks freedom of another order. The Disney version tends to sanitize both Jim and Huck, as played by Elijah Wood, a very successful eleven-year-old, and opts for cuteness whenever possible. This Huck is not ragged and skeptical enough, though Huck's father, as played by Ron Perlman, is sufficiently sinister in this illustrated classic, marketed as family entertainment. Meanwhile, the film wants to portray Jim, nicely represented by Broadway actor Courtney B. Vance, with as much dignity as possible. Listen to Twain's character telling Muck about his father: Doan' you 'member de house dat was float'c down de river, en dey wuz a man in dah, kivered up, en 1 went in en unkivered him and didn't let you come in? The Disney Jim does not speak in what Twain calls the Mississippi Negro dialect. Minority stereotypes are not in fashion these days, nor to be tolerated. Even so, Washington Times critic Gary Arnold considered the movie an appropriate introduction to the novel and a defensible diminution of the original. …
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