Beginnings

Today I saw an advanced screening of "Meet the Robinsons", a new animated movie from Disney. One of the main characters had a catch phrase he continuously used. It was: "Keep Moving Forward". At the end of the movie, a quote from Walt Disney was put on the screen that included the same phrase: "Keep Moving Forward". It got me to thinking that Disney must be trying to return to its roots. They have had issues over the last several years and the company hasn't performed as well as it could. One of their problems stemmed from the fact that they refused to completely embrace computerized films. They had a partnership with Pixar and came up with Toy Story and several other CGI movies, but they wanted to keep hand-drawn animation at the heart. Though Disney has prospered for fifty years in that format, in goes against the philosophy that you have to keep moving forward. You can create a good, touching film that happens to be in a CGI format. That is the future. At the same time, they can embrace their past and use that, combined with new technologies, to move forward.

I've seen this trend lately with other films. Studios are trying to move forward into the twenty-first century, make things modern, but without forgetting our past. For example, Batman Begins is a new imagining of the Batman franchise. We're trying to take something that is in no way a new concept, and make it new for our audience. The same was done with Casino Royale, making James Bond modern and serious. James is a twenty-first century Bond. Next year Paramount will release Star Trek. There have been ten Trek movies and five series, and now they are starting over. Though I loved the original Trek and the movies and spin-offs, the studio is trying to make Star Trek a new movie. It's not a new concept, but they are trying to make it new for our century.

For my short life each decade has had an identity. The eighties had it's identity, the nineties had their identity. Before I was born, each decade had an identity, the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. So far I think this new decade, this new century, has had a difficulty in finding it's identity. We've had a hard time moving forward. I think a lot of this is to blame on 9/11. We have felt safe in our country for a very long time. The last time our country was attacked was at Pearl Harbor in 1941. More than half of the population of the US do not remember that. Even for those that do, however, that was in Hawaii. It was a safe distance away. Before that, when was the US last attacked? I can only remember the War of 1812. When was the last time there was a war fought on US soil? The Civil War? For a long time we have felt safe. 9/11 changed that for a while. Now we are involved in an unpopular war, our political parties have polarized our nation, and I think a lot of us have forgotten to keep moving forward.

I think, now, we are starting to move in that direction again. We are beginning a new. We have had a new decade, a new century, a new millennium for seven years. It is time now to look to the future. It is time to find our identity and begin again. We need to remember to move forward. We may not get everything right, we will make mistakes, but we need to move forward, otherwise we will lose our identity as a nation, and as a world.