Books, Arts & Manners: The Mouse That Ate France

`WHEN YOU wish upon a star, the last thing you want to hear is sneering from French intellectuals. Makes no difference who you are. But for the senior Disney executives who, last weekend, opened Euro Disneyland, a $4-billion Enchanted Kingdom on the flat farmlands of the Seine-et-Marne to the east of Paris, the disdain of the French chattering classes was particularly unwelcome.

It was a Parisian theater director, Ariane Mnouchkine, who was the first aux armes. Euro Disneyland, she declared, is a “cultural Chernobyl.” In Le Figaro last week, her colleague, Jean Cau of the Académie Française, wrote of “this horror of cardboard, plastic, atrocious colors, solidified chewing-gum constructions, and idiotic folk stories that come straight out of cartoon books for fat Americans. It is going to wipe out millions of children . . . muti-litate their imaginations.” The London Daily Telegraph reported that some French intellectuals have gone even further and demanded that the whole thing be burned to the ground. But the hostility has come not only from intellectuals.

JR

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Jenny Rees

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`WHEN YOU wish upon a star, the last thing you want to hear is sneering from French intellectuals. Makes no difference who you are. But for the senior Disney executives who, last weekend, opened Euro Disneyland, a $4-billion Enchanted Kingdom on the flat farmlands of the Seine-et-Marne to the east of Paris, the disdain of the French chattering classes was particularly unwelcome.

It was a Parisian theater director, Ariane Mnouchkine, who was the first aux armes. Euro Disneyland, she declared, is a “cultural Chernobyl.” In Le Figaro last week, her colleague, Jean Cau of the Académie Française, wrote of “this horror of cardboard, plastic, atrocious colors, solidified chewing-gum constructions, and idiotic folk stories that come straight out of cartoon books for fat Americans. It is going to wipe out millions of children . . . muti-litate their imaginations.” The London Daily Telegraph reported that some French intellectuals have gone even further and demanded that the whole thing be burned to the ground. But the hostility has come not only from intellectuals.