disney, oy vey!!

So, the word on the street is that the Walt Disney Company has supposedly bought the rights to the literary classic 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The company plans on making a cartoon (yes, I said cartoon) for children based on the book.

Let me just repeat that in case it didn't sink in the first time.

Disney is going to make a cartoon about the Holocaust.

Does anyone else find something terribly, horribly and awfully disturbing/wrong/bizarre about this picture?

I cringe to think of the mockery Disney will make of such an important piece of history. Are they going to make it into a musical? No Disney film is complete without a few song and dance numbers. Is Anne Frank going to have some sort of furry sidekick who sits around with her in their little attic? Is Anne going to be drawn as a buxom maiden with a tiny waist and distinctly non-ethnic features like the dames of Disney past?

I'm still pissed at everyone involved in creating the inaccurate and possibly borderline racist 'Pocahontas', and now they're tackling the topic of a Jewish and Dutch icon who died in a concentration camp? How does one explain 'gas the Jews' and 'death ovens' to little kids? What the hell, Disney?!

To add insult to injury, Walt Disney was a well known anti-semite in his day.

This is a recipe for disaster.

Disney has been spewing out pure crap since Aladdin, but the concept of making an animated film about the Holocaust just about takes the cake. It's so disrespectful, it's beyond the pale.

Disturbingly, the man Disney picked to direct the movie, David Mamet, has said he may "reframe" the original story to make it more about a tale of a young girl's "rite of passage" (quotes from Yahoo! News.)

RITE OF PASSAGE? The girl was 15 when she died. Her goal was survival, not a rite of passage, which suggests she lived on to the adult part of her life. What is WRONG with these people?!

And another thing ... what child can handle learning about the true horrors of the Holocaust? I remember doing a project in school on the topic when I was in 4th grade or so, and it was the first time I ever learned about the evil of humanity. After looking at pages and pages of emaciated camp victims, I felt physically sick. Never in my life had I seen anything as horrible on such a massive scale.

I really don't think small children can handle it. I could barely handle it as a 4th grader ... and children much younger than that attend Disney films.

All in all, this is a terrible idea and David Mamet & Disney are going on my shit list unless I'm proven otherwise. But honestly, I hope this stupid idea never makes it past the planning stages. It smacks of disrespect, anti-semitism and corporate greed.