The American cartoonist and director Walt Disney with a plush puppet of Mickey Mouse in the 1950s. Photo / Getty
The American cartoonist and director Walt Disney with a plush puppet of Mickey Mouse in the 1950s. Photo / Getty
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were close frenemies when they were both still alive and kicking, operating within the same dusty Oxford literature circles and bantering over lofty subjects like theology, personal faith and their own fantastical writing.
But if there was one subject that truly brought them together, itwas their shared dislike of Walt Disney.
In private letters published in 2006's J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide and recently unearthed by Atlas Obscura, the fantasy legends sling bitchy insults and put-downs like a stuffy, academic Gossip Girl, decrying Disney's creative choices in 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and referring to the man himself as an ill-educated "boob".
2nd December 1955: British writer J R R Tolkien (1892 - 1973), enjoying a pipe in his study. Photo / Getty
"Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way," Lewis wrote in a correspondence to Tolkien shortly after they attended a screening of the film together. "And the dwarfs' jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music."
"But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated-or even brought up in a decent society?"
Lewis also condemned the dwarfs' "bloated, drunken, low comedy faces," and criticised the design of the Evil Queen as being "unoriginal."
Tolkien, who took a far more mythical approach with his own dwarves in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was similarly unimpressed by Disney, so much that he pledged to never work with him or his company.
"I recognise his talent, but it has always seemed to me hopelessly corrupted," he wrote in a letter to a Stanford University student named Miss J.L. Curry several years later.
Educator C. S. Lewis dragging on cigarette during interview. Photo / Getty
"Though in most of the 'pictures' proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea..."
So while both authors are renowned for creating elaborately surreal universes of magical wardrobes and Middle-Earth, Tolkien and Lewis also appear to have invented the sort of shady, Twitter-friendly hate-watch we all take for granted today.
