Intellectually, the Avatar stories seem worthless, beneath contempt, indeed, beneath argument. This leads people to underestimate them but also to feel themselves somehow disarmed. One looks ridiculous if one complains that the stories are anti-American. It takes a certain courage to deal with that problem, and courage is in very short supply in our times.

The biggest box office success in cinema history, strictly in dollars taken in, is Avatar, the 2009 movie that made 3D a technology audiences would finally flock to. The movie made some $785 million in America, more than another $2 billion in the rest of the world, adding up to about $2.9 billion. Since then, it’s sold an additional $430 million in DVDs (including 3D Blu-ray editions). We have to use our imaginations when it comes to how much the movie was watched online in pirated copies. One is tempted to say that everyone has seen it. If there’s globalization, Avatar is it.
In 2022 we finally got a sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, which is also an incredible success, having grossed more than $620 million in America in its first month, with another $1.5 billion in the rest of the world. I’m confident it will make more than $700 million in America. Very few movies attain this kind of success, fewer still since the COVID panics have crippled the movie theater business. Three more of these movies are slated to appear and perhaps rather quicker than the 13 years between the first two, given the astonishing success and the technological achievements involved in the production so far.
James Cameron is the man who made this franchise, which married his interest in science fiction, going back to Terminator (1984), and his interest in blockbuster success—that is, strong appeals to American passions—for example, Titanic, the movie he made before Avatar, which also became the most popular movie of its time (1997). One thing that has changed is that Cameron started out trying to appeal to men, then changed to appealing to women, but found astonishing success with a sentimentality missing from his early works, and now wants to appeal to families, to children especially. Some of the more perceptive critics pointed out how simpleminded the original was, even how it functioned as a kind of faux religion all its own. The sequel has also been panned by others as stunningly unoriginal and “full of itself.” This suggests to me they think the Avatar movies themselves to be childish.
The arrival of Avatar: The Way of Water at least makes clear what it is Cameron wants America’s children and, by extension, the world’s children to see and to believe. The first movie was an obvious retelling of Euro-American conflicts with Native Americans in the 19th century. The story summarizes, of course, but it also focuses on a simple teaching: Americans are evil and possibly monstrous. The Natives were innocent and, though proud warriors, peaceful. One may say this is nonsense and historically dubious; one may add that it is unpatriotic. But it may nevertheless be rather persuasive, especially because Cameron makes no arguments and starts no fights—he merely uses images that speak to things most kids are ready to believe.
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As for lessons learned, Pinocchio in 2022 does not turn into the boy that Geppetto had wished for, as in 1940. He remains a puppet, no doubt as a sign of his authenticity and acceptance for himself as is. That suggests an underlying truth—children brought up with such beliefs can never really grow up.

American parents used to trust Disney to charm their kids with beautiful fairy tales. Most such tales were European in origin, but Disney Americanized them, made them more democratic, less bloody minded, and ultimately hopeful. It started with animations, then added amusement parks, then any number of other things that made American technical ingenuity and prosperity gentle and pleasant, until it became the most important educator of the imagination of children in the entire media industry.
Nowadays, Disney is reeducating American children to believe in a woke agenda most Americans don’t share, wouldn’t vote for, but might somehow be tricked into financing when their attention is diverted. It seems to have traded delightful surprises for involvement in political scandals, as in Florida, or media scandals over every aspect of casting and plot. Indeed, it courts scandal as a marketing strategy, dividing Americans rather than uniting them, and using its reputation to make it seem as though the very people who gave Disney their vaunted reputation are immoral. What happened?
There are many aspects to this very important story, and some thoughtful conservative should take the time to elucidate them. All I can do today is point out the educational aspect of this change—What is the role of the imagination in education?—by comparing Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) with the new Disney+ movie directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring none other than America’s last lovable actor, Tom Hanks.
Pinocchio is a story about how children learn to become moral. The puppet is a metaphor not only for helplessness but also for the way children are made to do what they do by their parents—it points to our imitative nature, and much of the comedy depends on the awkwardness of the children, who are self-important without being self-aware in their imitation, and the foibles, to say no more, of the adults, who recognize their faults magnified in the small versions of themselves they have made, the focus of their love and life. The puppeteer Geppetto’s wish upon a star, to have a real boy, is every parent’s wish that their child turn out right.
Walt Disney’s contribution to Carlo Collodi’s original story, Jiminy Cricket, is a metaphor for conscience. Jiminy defines it by an old and trusty adage: “The still, small voice that people won’t listen to. That’s just the problem with the world today!” It’s not hard to know what’s right and wrong in many cases, indeed, but it’s hard to do it, it comes at a cost, and without certainty of reward. That problem of character, rather than of knowledge, might not be solvable. After all, our admiration of good character depends to some extent on our knowledge of its rarity!
But in this moment when Jiminy introduces himself to Pinocchio, he gets so carried away with confidence in the power of morality that he leaves character behind, taking it for granted. Instead, he insists on the intellectual part of morality and quickly gets himself in trouble: “The world is full of temptations. They’re the wrong things that seem right at the time. But even though the right things may seem wrong sometimes, sometimes the wrong things may be right at the wrong time, or vice versa. Understand?”
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