All children grow up, except one. And Peter Pan, eternally young in Never Land, has another sort of immortality in the real world. Everyone knows who Peter Pan is.
Of all the re-tellings of Peter Pan over the years, Disney’s 1953 film may well be the most famous. A skilled artistry underlies the whole movie. The animation shows an expert hand. The writers wove together a complete story, with a villain and resolution and change, and sprinkled it generously with humor. The composers contributed a few lively songs, as well as the classic “Second Star to the Right” and the tender “Your Mother and Mine”.
While the Darling family is sympathetic and more or less normal, the denizens of Never Land have a strange tendency to seesaw in their natures. Captain Hook is sometimes a villain of brute and even senseless force, sometimes a villain of considerable cunning. At some points in the movie he’s a dapper sophisticate, and more often he’s a victim of comic mischance and the sort of slapstick only an animated movie could pull off. (I recently watched the movie with a small child, and apparently the slapstick sequences are hilarious.)
Tinker Bell spends the first half of the story in a fit of such burning jealousy that she actually tries to engineer Wendy’s death. But if she, among all the protagonists of the story, commits the most ignoble act, she also commits the most noble one. Her self-sacrificial rescue of Peter Pan grows into the only tender scene that revolves around Peter.
Which leads me to Peter Pan, the title character who is so much at the center of the action and so much on the edges of the film’s emotion. He whisks Wendy and her brothers to Never Land, and he sets off Captain Hook’s aggravated quest to get him. Though he readily engages Hook, all the life-and-death passion is on the captain’s side; Peter Pan plays the game with zest, but no gravity. And though he brings Wendy to Never Land to be his mother and the Lost Boys’ mother, he begins to forget about her shortly after they arrive. First the mermaids, then Tiger Lily draw his attention away.
In addition to this forgetfulness, Peter Pan showed a streak of mean-spiritedness – laughing as the mermaids ganged up on Wendy, humiliating Hook after defeating him.
Yet there is the scene of Tinker Bell’s rescue, which takes Peter Pan out of himself and his own self-enjoyment. And there is a poignant moment where he – listening alone to Wendy’s song about mothers – snaps his arrow in half.
Walt Disney was dissatisfied with Peter Pan when his company finally finished it, finding Peter Pan cold and unlikable. But there’s no greater tribute to Disney’s success than calling Peter Pan one of his failures. It’s a fun movie, an adventure filled with memorable and sometimes charming characters. Even Captain Hook is entertaining; even Peter Pan is fascinating.