Aaron Armstrong asks, “Why are we okay with allowing our kids to watch The Chronicles of Narnia, but not okay with The Princess and the Frog?“ I have not seen The Princess and the Frog, but my little family did in the theater for a birthday party. My sweet wife said she was surprised at how evil the bad guy was, not like other Disney villains. As Aaron points out, Dr. Facilier isn’t a funny, magically bad man. He uses tarot cards and voodoo and has demons as sidekicks. It’s too close the real evil, meaning the occult, for a kids movie.
Of course, on the other hand, I can understand how secular writers would look at all magical stuff, regardless the labels, as fantasy and fair game.
Why should that bother you? The old fairy tales intended to be a distillation of the real evil, to teach children from an early age several very important lessons:
1) Evil is real.
2) Heroes are necessary.
3) Even the worst monsters can be beaten if you are brave enough.
The problem is that, for Christians who want to live by the Bible, magic is a forbidden thing. I don’t think magic in a story is necessarily out of order (obviously), but it has to be handled very carefully.
Another problem is one a former hippie once pointed it out to me–The supernatural is “sexy.” When told about it, people tend to say, “I don’t believe in it. Tell me about it.” And since we do believe there is a devil and evil spirits, that can lead to dangerous experimentation.
Yeah, that’s about it. Sarah tells there’s a scary scene very much out of Foust that was too much. It’s one thing for bad guys to fall to their deaths or have a spell catch up with the conjurer, but for demons to drag a man to hell is too real. As Aaron said in his post, it’s not so much magic as the occult that I object to. That’s the complaint some have of Harry Potter, though I don’t see those stories in that way.
I think you’re talking about two different things.
The Princess and the Frog does have a view of magic relatively in line with Christianity (if I remember it correctly.) That is–magic is evil, terrifying, and horrifically self-destructive, so much so that the scintillating temptations it offers pale in comparison. So in that sense, it’s actually in line with Christian views of literal magic–more so than, say, Alladin, or Beauty and the Beast. There may be some good magic–which has to be accepted as a fiction, whereas God is real–but the focus of magic seems to be on the Faustian antihero. (The real force of good isn’t literal magic so much as the hospitality, food, music, and energy of New Orleans, as well as the protags’ Dieney-required inner reservoirs of strength and courage.)
So I guess I’d disagree with Aaron there, to a point.
But just because something is *true*, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is healthy for all individuals at all stages of development. There’s a reason why C.S. Lewis wrote Narnia for kids, but The Screwtape Letters for adults. I’m a huge fan of including some adult material in movies (grief, responsibility, weighty questions–the stuff you see in Finding Nemo or Up), because I felt such stories throughout my life as a goad to maturity and a counter to the silliness of my age. But I’m not certain that sheer unbridled terror is one of those “adult” issues that is important to child development. Probably the opposite.
But I do think it’s important to differentiate between the statement “I’m keeping my kids from this because it’s too intense” and the statement “I’m keeping my kids from this because it will confuse them about the nature of the world.”