26/05/2002 - 10:26 p.m.

But the fate of their baby is many a times worse.

I finished watching The Secret of NIMH just a little bit ago. So few people have ever heard of this movie, which is a pity. It was made by Don Bluth, who was amongst the group of people who broke away from Disney when they realised it was going down the tubes. Don Bluth made NIMH and also Land Before Time. The first one, 2-however many sequels they made were made after his death, as was Secret of NIMH II. But, The Secret of NIMH is fantastic- it has fantastic animation reminiscent of Snow White or Bambi, when animated movies were pieces of art, rather than pieces of crap. I don't care what they say about Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King, the animation doesn't touch those others. I never used to appreciate things like quality animation when I was a kid. I never had to think about it, there wasn't a lower standard to compare with.

Although, today, I realise that NIMH could never have been made with a G rating on it. There's rats swordfighting, and one rat says damn, and the death count by the end of the movie is around four, and it deals with moral issues like the importance of love and loyalty and whether stealing and animal testing is wrong. Nope, that could never make it in a Disney movie these days.

Even in the Harry Potter movie the kid didn't get in as much trouble as he did in the book.

My two favourite movies until about the third grade were NIMH, and Darby O'Gill and the Little People. That is a positively terrifying movie, made by Disney back in 1959, when you could put Death in a children's movie and not have the world down your back.

Most of the oldest children's stories are cautionary tales- look out or something bad is going to happen to you. Kid's were taught gently and absolutely that if you messed up, something would come and eat you in the night. The world would let you know it was cruel and harsh. That's the world I was brought up in. I was read "Outside Over There" and fairy tales where Red Riding Hood gets eaten and the first two of the three pigs get eaten.

By the time I was in Kindergarten my dad had begun reading JRR Tolkien to me. The first day he opened The Hobbit I had never been exposed to it before, but we looked at the map, same as we had done with Winnie-the-Pooh, and, at the age of five, I read him off the Moon Runes. Neither one of us has any logical explanation for why I was able to read the Runes, but I can. He tested me with the Tengwar, which I couldn't read, didn't even recognise it as words, but I can still read the Runes.

CS Lewis came after we had finished the Trilogy. My parents have a wardrobe in their room. At the time, I was strongly cautioned not to open the doors for fear of the White Witch. I have since learned that if I were to open the mirrored doors, the entire wardrobe would fall over on top of me because it is empty and the weight of the doors would pull it over. I know that if they simply told me it would probably fall over on me if I opened it, I would've been smashed within the week- there's always the chance that it wouldn't; but the White Witch, she's not something to toy with.

For this reason, I have trouble watching children be made a mockery of. I distrust psychologists who worry about frightening children and giving them violent role models. A child can see the difference, they know that the things that scare them are not good. It's a mechanism that we're all supposed to have: fear stops us doing stupid things. It's when it's made very clear to us that there's nothing to fear that we're in trouble- then we're desensitised.