Bedknobs and Broomsticks: The magical manipulation of dress and the heritage object in the service of wartime fantasy

This article explores how Disney provides a utopian response to the horror and corporeal trauma of warfare through the family musical Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Stevenson, 1971), a film in which amateur sorceress Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) can enchant a museum’s weapons and heritage military wear into battling the Nazis in the place of ageing members from her own community. In this film, the mobilization of and attitudes towards costume and the heritage antiquity can displace human labour in wartime, so that death, destruction and bodily injury are prevented from occurring and families are brought together as opposed to being driven apart. The article ultimately argues that while human unity and the idea of multicultural harmony are celebrated, the enchanted object provides a means of cleansing political struggle in a way that disavows the human cost of warfare rather than serving to question the nature of warfare itself.