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.
It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve - the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman.
You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you're in another world
The actual making of a record is the most exciting part of this business.
If you play music for the right reasons, the rest of the things will come. The right reason to play music is that you love it. That's why I play music. I never imagined that I was going to be doing this, especially because I never thought of myself as an instrumentalist.
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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