The Mouse Must Die

It wasn’t always this way. In a Christian culture, children were initiated into the moral order through tales that acknowledged suffering, death, and divine justice. The original Sleeping Beauty isn’t a fashion show about finding your prince. It’s a brutal allegory about temptation, punishment, and redemption. But once Disney got through with Aurora, she was just another dress-up doll in a tiara.

Even the old Disney films paid lip service to tradition. The books opening at their intros were nods to the fact that these were adaptations, not replacements. People retained the cultural memory that these stories came from somewhere, and you could read the original versions in books. But that memory is almost gone now.

Which was the plan.

We are now living in a postliterate society where Disney is the arbiter of culture. Why read the Jungle Book when you can stream the cartoon? Why commit to The Wind in the Willows when there’s a slapstick mole driving a car on Disney+? The classics are replaced with simulations, imaginations atrophy, and the megacorp thrives.

Here’s the truth everybody misses: Disney’s real product isn’t movies; it’s memory. Their empire runs on collective amnesia—on swapping out what your great-grandparents knew for whatever the brand managers want you to feel this quarter. They don’t just entertain your children, they mold their worldview. And now, they’re remaking their own cartoons as live-action films, severing the last thread tying them to the original stories. In another generation, there’ll be no trace of the old lore left; just an infinite regress of Disney versions based on Disney versions: photocopies of photocopies until the page turns black.

Contra the MammonCons, this is not just a media problem. It’s a moral and cultural crisis. Because just as you can’t run an economy on counterfeit money, you can’t sustain a civilization with fake myths.

If the West is to be recovered—if there is to be a Christian renewal in art and storytelling—Disneyfied culture must be torn down. The mouse must die.

The first step is for parents to stop outsourcing their kids’ imagination to screens. Read Andersen. Read Grimm. Read Tolkien, Lewis, and Chesterton. Tell your children stories grounded in reality and eternity, not songs about following their personal appetites.

Disney turned classic literature into disposable content. We must recover the mythic heritage they usurped.

That doesn’t mean we need to make “Christian Disney.” It means rejecting their paradigm entirely. Stop trying to redeem the brand. Stop hoping for the right director to make it “based.” You don’t repaint the golden calf. You smash it and look back to the bronze serpent.

We are not here to preserve the status quo. We are here to take back what was stolen.

Watch this video by Cartoon Aesthetics for more: