Make no mistake, that’s what Disney was dealing with in that carnival of animal dancers, appearance and reality. That’s one of the major themes in cartoons. It is central, for example, in that most austere of cartoon premises, the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons of Chuck Jones. To deny it of Disney in the film he planned as a showcase for this new medium, a film in which, among other things, he showed the origins of life on earth and the death of the dinosaurs, to deny a central interest in the play of appearance and reality is to be deeply and perhaps willfully mistaken about the nature of the medium in which Disney so deliberately and brilliantly worked.

"It takes, say, thousands of person hours spread over a handful of scholars to create and ‘debug’ a single conceptual trope. When that’s done the trope can show up in casebooks and undergraduate texts. And from there, it goes into the knowledge-hungry minds of our students. And when one of them writes reviews for The New York Times, BINGO! a conceptual trope enters the self-styled paper of record. And, from there, the world."

"That’s how culture works."

"Wickus escaped and I remained in my seat, but I will never forget how powerful that emotion was, how I sat there gulping air for the next ten minutes as I tried to regain some kind of equilibrium. This film had put me through something brutal, something I hadn’t been prepared for.

This film was absolutely right to do that.

The direct allegory running through the story is easy to recognize: District 9 is a reference to District 6, an area in South Africa where 60,000 colored Africans were evicted from their homes in during apartheid in the 1970s. The atrocious behavior of MNU’s employees and their thirst for better firepower is a commentary on the private military contractors being used by governments today, specifically Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide). Choosing to zero in on these two topics seems logical: the film was set and shot in South Africa and the potential problems associated with military contractors are a modern concern."

"… Edmundson, similar to some conservative or traditionalist humanists, believes in a command model. The public only valued literature because the critics told them to. The public only understood literature because the critics told them what it meant. The public only read literature because the critics lead them through the reading of it. Once the commandment vanished, so did the Western tradition itself, and with extraordinary rapidity."