Day: September 19, 2022

I had not seen that movie in at least 10 years, I had forgotten the old Disney style and how beautiful it was. His cartoon studio with his brother started in 1923 that would later become the famous Walt Disney Studios.

Snow White was their first film in 1937 and Walt had planned for Bambi to be their second but it ended up being the fourth, partly because of the amount of work that went into the film. Disney even going as far as to have his animators travel to Maine to photograph a specific kind of deer to replace the Roe deer since roe deer are only found in Europe. During production, his team was not so sure of the timeline for the release because they had to adapt the book to a movie and had trouble creating the plotline from a story they claimed didn’t have one to begin with. So many changes were made to adapt the movie from the original text to make it friendlier to a bigger audience.

Yet the film was still met with criticism from staff as well as the viewers. Partly from the hunting community who claimed it portrayed hunters as irresponsible and cruel for starting of forest fires and use of hunting dogs. And overall people had said it was “too emotional for children.” even when it became one of Disney’s best films at the time, with some of the most beautiful animation that is still appreciated today.

Going through the museum to all the exhibits, you saw the evidence chronologically about Hitler’s rise to power with nazism and then the aftermath. But in the basement, you got to see and interact with the American perspective of the Holocaust. Seeing what the government knew at the time and Americans’ perspectives on the genocide were.

While we couldn’t have stopped the genocide completely, there were several things we could have done and didn’t. The American Jewish population wanted the government to condemn what was happening overseas while disagreeing on what exactly the next step should be to help.

But then on the other side of things, we can also see the uprise of the American nazi movement led by people like Fritz Khun and Charles Lindbergh. While parts of America were working to help allow more german refugees, boycott nazi goods made, and urging the government to do something. At the same time, you had people like Charles Lindbergh who led the group of people with the opinion that the Jewish population of Austria and Germany did this to themselves and that we shouldn’t help. Even today we see Lindbergh as an American hero and pilot and his history of nazism didn’t become readily available till later.