I could hardly sit through 'Frozen.' There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes the prioritization of moral messaging over storytelling in art.
Jordan Peterson argues that in the film 'Frozen', the creators focused too heavily on imparting a moral lesson rather than constructing a compelling narrative. This detracts from the artistic value of storytelling, as he believes that a story should naturally convey its themes rather than have them imposed upon it, leading to the idea that art should not be compromised by overt propaganda.
In practice
In a debate about the importance of storytelling in children's films, this quote highlights the pitfalls of moralizing art.
Part of the reason there's an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.
I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'
Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.
If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
I hate the idea of theatre just being an evening pastime. It should be emotionally and intellectually demanding. I love football. The level of analysis that you listen to on the terraces is astonishing. If people did that in the theatre... but they don't. They expect to sit back and not participate.
I can't be alone among fiction writers in regarding the world, so much weirder than anything we could make up, as beating us at our own game or in racking my brains over what could possibly constitute a contribution when novels pale before the newspaper.
I'd like to get something together - like a Handel, Bach, Muddy waters, flamenco type of thing. If I could get that sound, I'd be happy
To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.
Hip-Hop isn't just music, it is also a spiritual movement of the blacks! You can't just call Hip-Hop a trend!
Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.
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