Well, personally I always liked the movie. Watched it every year as a kid. It’s subtly sinister message didn’t mess me up in the least. To the contrary. I turned out to be a successful, productive and, dare I say, relatively wealthy citizen. And I *was* Rudolph in grade- and high-school!
Figuratively, of course. But I found my shiny red nose and, despite not having a powerfully influential fat friend like Santa Claus, thrived as a misfit can do only in America....
So what’s your take on “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”?
Rudolf has a very typical problem for “accept the weird kid” stories, by making the weird kids the POV character their acceptance winds up being tied to something external. They always do something that makes one character change their mind, so then everybody does, but looked at straight on that message winds up being “get a powerful friend, get more friends”. If the POV character was one of the bullies, and we got to see them reconsider the oddball it would be a much better message. But also a lot harder to write. Which is why nobody does. I wouldn’t say the message is sinister, it’s just poorly executed and not really what they want it to be. Of course since we all grew up seeing this same message poorly structured the same way we kind of pretend they succeeded, you’ve got a to look at these stories slightly detached to see they really don’t.
Dr Seuss usually more thoroughly considered his messages and how they should be related. Notice in Grinch it’s the POV character who goes through the change, so we get to go through the realization with him and know why it happened. As opposed to Rudolf where the only clue we have to why everybody likes him now is Santa found him useful.