Analyzing Halberstam's Criticisms Of Animated Films

Art has a unique property. If you gave a hundred different people the same work of art and asked them all to interpret it, you would likely get a hundred different responses. All of which would likely be different from what the artist intended. But none of which would be any righter or truer than any other. Because of this, any particular piece of artwork is solely defined by what others think of it.
In her essay, Halberstam discusses the idea that things can have multiple forms of being. This is to say that everything exists slightly differently for different people, depending on their interpretation. Her critiques with animated films are that regardless of how the creators of a film intend their movies to come across, they often can be perceived

Many of the unintentional themes present in films, television, and books can give the audience an idea of what was going on during the time and place in which that piece of work was created.
Take, for example, the early 1990s. A period that I didn’t live through, but is recent enough that it still feels very tangible. What could we learn about the popular movies of that period that would give us a better idea of the culture and societal issues at the time? Using Halberstam’s idea of multiple forms of being to critically look at a set of films released within the same time frame we can get a feel for social issues of the time. The movies we will be looking at are the three top grossing films of the 1992 holiday season: "Aladdin," "Home Alone 2" and "A Few Good Men."
Popular movies almost always reflect the cultural currents of their times, if only unintentionally. While these three films may seem to have little in common, they share common themes that helped them strike a chord with the audiences of the time. Some of the themes that I will identify throughout these films are the dysfunctional or absent family, the search for a father, and the beginning of the Clinton

Her talk show was the first of it’s kind and sparked a wave of imitators, from the civil (Dr. Phil) to the not-so-civil (Jerry Springer). This is highlighted in a number of 1990s movies, in everything from "The Prince of Tides" to "The Addams Family." Though the subject is depicted humorously in "Home Alone 2," there has to be something terribly wrong with a family that abandons a child at Christmastime, not once, but twice. As noted before, the film is a metaphor for a larger cultural reality: In an era in which both parents tend to work and far more children grow up in single-parent households, a lot more children were abandoned in the 1990s, both literally and figuratively, than in just a generation earlier. As for "Aladdin," the princess grows up in a single-parent home which obviously isn't functioning quite right. Aladdin, like Kevin McAllister, is home alone, or better yet, homeless alone. And "A Few Good Men"? Well, it may be a stretch, but many have compared the military to a surrogate family. How would you like to come home to that group of Marines every