Gilliatt's review of Animal House is not so kind. She claims that the movie hurls a vast array of insults at America's educational system. (53) The acting in the film is of the "rolling-eye sort," and the attempted satire of college life is forced upon the audience with "smothered laughs." (54) The movie ignores major aspects of any campus by not including any black undergraduates and ignoring the "intellectually under endowed." (54) The movie is without wit, and its lampooning of college does a poor job because it does not depict any people with a sense of conflicted morality; all of the characters simply disregard all morals. (54) The movie is not merely antiacademic, but if someone did not know what real education was, one would think it "hermetic from the rest of the world to the point of hygienic refrigeration." (54) She believes the film shows "social untruths" and an almost "criminally false idea of the national sense of the comedic." (54)
    This review is a good argument against Animal House being the turning point. Gilliatt does immediately recognize the film's attack on the institution of college, especially the extent to which it does so in a lowbrow fashion. Education takes a brutal beating from which it seems it could never recover. Unlike Rich, however, her analysis is framed in the fact that she does not believe this depiction to be reality. She yearns for viewers to remember that it does not show any of the moral hesitation she assumes all experienced in college. However, her point here can be easily rebutted. It does not matter that Animal House does not accurately portray real college life. The idea that college is a place for academic pursuit by the pure at heart is no longer portrayed in film, even if that may be what it is in reality. Despite all of her criticism, Gilliatt senses the drastic changes Animal House brought to the depiction of higher learning.