Pete's Dragon (1977)

Pete's Dragon arrives from 1977, a hybrid of live action and hand-drawn animation set in a Maine fishing village in the early 1900s, and it conducts its business entirely without the vocabulary we now bring to such things. The cast is uniformly white. The town is named for a real Native American tribe, a detail the film treats as decoration and nothing more. Nora, the lighthouse keeper's daughter, is kind, competent, and protective of the orphan who washes up in her care, and the film never once asks her to make an argument about her place in the world. No queer characters appear. No climate anxieties intrude on the fishing grounds. No character is diagnosed, celebrated, or otherwise sorted into a category of mind.

There is one point of resistance, and it is small. Dr. Terminus, an itinerant quack with a wagon and a fine line in bombast, discovers in a book that dragon parts can be rendered into remedies and tonics, and he promptly sets about harvesting one. The Gogans, meanwhile, bought the boy Pete for fifty dollars plus fees and arrive in town waving the bill of sale. The film registers a mild objection to greed and to the ownership of children. It does so through musical numbers and slapstick, which thins the complaint to a vapor.

The film has no interest in instructing anyone. It wants to sing, to show a dragon turning invisible and knocking over a schoolhouse, and to send the audience home. Critics at the time found it overlong and the songs perfunctory. It earned two Academy Award nominations, for its score and for a song, and won neither. Elliott, drawn a little paunchy and not always graceful in flight, remains the best of it. The whole enterprise sits at the low end of our scale, not from any failure of craft but from a complete absence of the modern impulse to teach. A dragon flies away over the water. That is the argument.