I’m the type of person who feels that animated movies offer extensive life lessons and character development just as well as live action films. Sure, they’re presented in a way that makes them extra silly and less serious, as they can be pretty detached from reality. However, many animated movies also tell valuable life lessons and intricate stories that have made it hard for adults and larger children, such as myself, to cut them out of our lives. On a hazy late night last week, I found that Netflix has a great selection of animated movies, and I couldn’t resist watching The Emperor’s New Groove, an early 2000s childhood classic. Upon watching it, I made connections between the movie’s political themes and the ideals we learned from classic conservative Edmund Burke and liberal Jon Stuart Mill.
The Emperor’s New Groove is about a selfish, frivolous 18-year-old Emperor Kuzco – of some made up kingdom, some irrelevantly long time ago – who embarks on a wild adventure after being turned into a llama, and then spending time with a common village peasant with whom he came into conflict. I realized that in the beginning of the movie, Kuzco was very Burkean in his way of life, as all he cared about was maintaining the groove of his perfect life, and everything he did was motivated by this priority. Plus, his royal subjects had the sole duty of keeping him happy. If someone upset or disrupted Kuzco in any way, they were charged with “throwing off his groove,” and kicked out of the castle immediately. In Kuzco’s mind, he is the almighty wealthy ruler who gets every privilege and that is that.
His royal administrator Yzma has a secret plan to poison him and take the throne, but accidentally gives him a potion that turned him into a llama, creating the greatest life change Kuzco could’ve imagined. He luckily gets help from a villager named Pacha, who lives on a cute hill that Kuzco had planned to steal to build his summer home. By the end of the film, Kuzco realizes that it is okay to change his groove if that entails being a better person and a more caring, reasonable ruler. Additionally, he finds value in treating his royal subjects and the commoners of his kingdom, as real people with feelings and desires, not simply his natural inferiors. Ultimately, Kuzco drops most of his Burkean ideals in favor of Mill’s liberalism, in which he’s okay with trying a new way of life, doesn’t wish to have such a strict daily routine, and understands the need for the rights of his nation’s people.
Making that connection in The Emperor’s New Groove got me thinking about other animated films with Burkean themes. In the more recent movie Wreck-It Ralph the strict set-up of an arcade’s games’ character roles is disrupted by a game’s villain, Ralph, who’s actually a sweet guy when he’s off duty. This movie is kind of like Toy Story with arcade games; when the arcade is closed, the characters of the games come to life in their real personalities and are able to travel through the wires from game to game. In essence, all the game characters are actors who always play the same role when their game is played. In his game, Ralph plays the enormous, ill-tempered freak who wrecks a building filled with townspeople, story by story, and the goal is for the player to control the good guy Fix-It Felix to repair the damage and defeat Wreck-It Ralph. The two have their designated roles that are equally important to the game. Unfortunately, the game’s community treats Ralph as a villain even when they’re off duty and forces him to sleep outside in the dumpster, rendering his life to be quite sucky.
After 30 years, Ralph decides that he doesn’t want to be the bad guy anymore. Upon telling this to the arcade’s other “bad guys,” they respond with terror at the thought that Ralph would want to change the system. In the arcade’s little society, going rogue is dangerous because that puts that character’s game at risk of being deemed “out of order” and ultimately unplugged forever. However, Ralph still keeps his desire to be accepted by his peers in his game, so he travels to other games in pursuit of winning a medal to prove his worth. At the second game, he meets a little girl and later discovers that she is a glitch and she never gets to participate in the races of the game, for the people of her game fear that any player would report a glitchy character. (I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I’ll say her life soon changes and being a slight glitch doesn’t mean she’s not functional.)
Anyway, my point is that Wreck-It Ralph exhibits a society in which a Burkean way of life is necessary for survival. If the characters do not act the way that their designated roles are supposed to, arcade customers are likely to report the game as dysfunctional, and the owners are likely to unplug the game forever. For this reason, the characters of Ralph’s game learn how much they really need him on the day that he is absent; without the villain, they simply do not have a game to play. The townspeople and Fix-It Felix also adopt some liberal values as they learn that Ralph is not defined by his job as the bad guy, so they ought to treat him with respect and allow him to have the same basic rights that they have (okay, they’re an arcade game, so that right is simply a comfortable place to live/sleep).
Think twice before passing off animated movies as childish and trivial, as they are often written with profound themes that carry important morals and ideologies.
Touchdown Theory 