It has been 111 years since PETER PAN premiered on the stage of an English theater in 1904. During this time, mental health scholars have dared to suggest the existence of a syndrome that bears his name, describing the inability to grow up. In film, there is another reference point, THE TIN DRUM (1979), also based on literature, in which the protagonist doesn't travel to Neverland, but rather finds refuge in the circus from the horrors of war, an extreme manifestation of adult excess.Peter Pan is an adventure story by the English author James Matthew Barrie, reminiscent of Dickens's Oliver Twist, which depicted childhood subjected to the hardships of Industrial Revolution-era England, where the living conditions of the working classes were deplorable. Peter Pan tells of orphaned children who find solace in the world of imagination. This metaphor would be revisited in literature and film in The Chronicles of Narnia, where the only escape from the terror of the Second World War was once again found in imagination. Although children's stories, these are tales in which adults seek to resolve in fiction what is impossible in reality. Positivism is defeated because they demonstrate the inability to resolve social dramas within society itself, leaving the production of temporary balms to fiction.
The new Peter Pan cost an estimated $150 million and has been met with a lukewarm reception at the box office in North America and Europe, although in Latin America, theaters are packed. The question then arises: Who is clamoring to escape the world they live in? Latin America claims the top spot and seizes any opportunity to flee its reality.