JOHNSON CHEU
In 2011, Disney unveiled Annie Liebowitz photos from their Disney Dreams campaign featuring celebrities in “classic” Disney film poses such as Roger Federer as King Arthur from The Sword in the Stone (1963), Scarlett Johansson as Cinderella (1950) running away from the ball, Penelope Cruz and Jeff Bridges as Belle and the Beast, Mark Anthony and Jennifer Lopez as Jasmine and Aladdin, Whoopi Goldberg as the Genie from Aladdin (1992), and Queen Latifah as Ursula from The Little Mermaid (1989).1 The inclusion of international as well as ethnic celebrities perhaps signifies very little in our multicultural and global world at present. Yet, it’s hard to believe that Disney, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, was not aware of such shrewd marketing, for the re-casting of Disney characters largely identified as Caucasian (Aladdin [1992] notwithstanding) with mostly celebrities of color can clearly be seen as a nod toward a more inclusive pluralistic society.
Whether or not Disney intended from the start a more muticultural outlook and representation in its films and ads is debatable (and depends perhaps on how well the Dreams campaign is ultimately received), but there can be no doubt that with such characters and films as the Asian American boy Russell in Up (2009)—a film that also contains an explicit reference to divorce—Princess Tiana, the first African American princess introduced in The Princess and the Frog (2009), Pocahontas (1995), Mulan (1998), and Aladdin, Disney is, in fact, becoming more multicultural in its filmic fare and its image. The latest Toy Story installment, Toy Story 3 (2010), contains “Spanish–mode” Buzz Lightyear, a futuristic Latin-Lover-type-Tim Allen/Antonio Banderas hybrid, meant to assuage Woody’s fears of leaving Annie, as Annie gushes to Woody, “It’s all right Woody, now that I know about Buzz’s Spanish switch.” Toy Story 3 also has what one might call “ambiguously gay Ken” or, at least, “metro-sexual Ken,” a Ken more into clothes than Barbie (the scene where she’s about to tear apart his Nehru jacket), and who signs his letters with hearts and flowers. In the age where so-called “children’s movies” have become more infused with humor aimed at adults—Mike Meyers’ Cat in the Hat (2003) holding a rake and breaking the fourth wall proclaiming “dirty hoe” or a panning of Fiona’s room in Shrek 2 (2004) showing a drawing of Sir Justin on the wall, alluding to the then-real-life Justin Timberlake/Cameron Diaz romance—such wink-wink humor aimed at adults in Toy Story 3 seems like a bit of harmless fun to keep the adults entertained while they sit through yet another viewing of Toy Story 3. Yet these representations of minority groups, of diversity, are anything but mindless fun in our digital-download-video-streaming age where these images can be viewed repeatedly. The critic Jack Zipes, in “Breaking the Disney Spell,” states that Disney has replaced the original fairy tales in our popular and collective imaginations; Disney has become the cultural touchstone (an apropos reference to its Touchstone film division) for generations. Zipes writes, “If children or adults think of the great, classic fairy tales today ... they will think of Walt Disney. Their first and perhaps lasting impression of these tales and others will have emanated from a Disney film, book, or artifact.”2 With the premiere of two new television series—Grimm and Once Upon a Time—on United States television networks in the fall of 2011 as well as two large-screen adaptations of Snow White premiering in 2012, popular interest in fairy tales, the cornerstone upon which Walt Disney built his empire beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, has grown and so has consumption of Disney and Disney–esque media.
I was surprised to see how little critical attention has been paid to the preeminent thing that Disney made: his films. Doing research for a class I was putting together in 2008, I found that the vast majority of our university’s holdings on Disney concerned his business practices or the global impact of his empire. Relative to the fifty or so books on business and commercialism and childhood psychology, little attention had been paid to his films, and books that did, such as Ward and Christian’s Mouse Morality, were out of print. To be sure, some books such as Janet Wasko’s Understanding Disney contained film criticism and certainly specialized books such as Amy Davis’s Good Girls and Wicked Witches and Sean Griffin’s Tinkerbells and Evil Queens existed, as well as the Bell et al. collection From Mouse to Mermaid, but still, it seemed as though Disney the Man/Mogul or Disney the global conglomerate loomed large in scholarship while scholarship on his artistic output remained relatively scant.
Within the film scholarship that was in print, the amount that concerned representations of diversity were largely located in specialized books such as the ones mentioned above or in specialized journal issues. There could be a myriad of reasons for this, none the least of which is academia’s current push toward STEM research and, within film and animation studies, toward production. Whatever the reason or reasons for the trends in film and animation studies that seem to be occurring, the reality is that within academia and outside of it, there remains a growing emphasis on globalization. Yet, the fact that that emphasis requires more interest and attention paid to issues of diversity rather than less, seems somehow lost in the swirl of things, as though bibbity, boppity boo, and we all just know how to get along, how to act as global citizens.
Disney’s global empire and reach and its commercialization of world ethnic cultures via its EPCOT centers around the globe are already well documented and critiqued so I will not advance those arguments here.3 In looking at the Disney company’s filmic output in regards to ethnic and other kinds of cultural diversity, there were holes in the critical scholarship which this collection seeks to address.
This book really begins with Peter Pan and the childhood game of Cowboys and Indians. In searching for scholarly criticism to address the depiction of the “Red Man,” a.k.a. Native Americans, in both song and character, neither I nor the university librarians could find any. An email and phone buzz of Native American specialist colleagues at various universities across the U.S. yielded nothing. Nothing on Disney’s 1958 Sal Mineo film Tonka, in which Mineo plays a Sioux who tames a stallion named Tonka, turned up. Yet, there were articles critiquing Pocahontas. In looking further, I discovered something similar with Mulan, for which there were a number of scholarly articles, including some in Chinese, and yet there was nothing about the Siamese Cats in Lady and the Tramp (1955), which, as mentioned in the documentary Mickey Mouse Monopoly (2002) are commonly held to be stereotypes of Asian Americans. Likewise, when it came to gender, there was much criticism on the Princess phenomenon (everything from more mainstream criticism such as Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter, to more traditional academic scholarship in journals such as Woman’s Communication Quarterly), but relatively scant scholarship on masculinity studies. Though princes are relatively one-note characters in many of Disney’s films, there can be little doubt that without the presence of princes, the princesses and the growth and change one sees from Snow White to Tangled in character development would not be possible. When it came to coverage of newer fields of scholarship such as queer studies, critical whiteness studies and disability studies respectively, the coverage and range of topics was even more narrow.
Even the abstracts and proposals submitted for this collection exhibited certain trends. There were, for example, many proposals about Mulan but little else concerning Asian American representations. Likewise with disability: much on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but little else. Perhaps academicians are swayed by their childhoods, by the most obvious kinds of representations and impressions, just as much as everyone else? Perhaps it is a calculation of what seems publishable, as something more obscure might not be. Or perhaps it’s as simple as personal interest. Whatever the reason or reasons, the necessity for examining diversity and a wider range of it within Disney appears pertinent in our age of globalization. For my part as editor, I’ve chosen essays which encompass a wide range of films as well as being cognizant of fresh theoretical approaches.
Every author in the collection has his or her own approach to the filmic history of Disney as it relates to the films they are examining. A broad overview of who Disney is or a chronological overview of the nearly hundred years of Disney’s filmic output is unnecessary here. There are also, it should be noted, differences in formality of tone among the essays, some being more formal or personal than others. Letting the authors’ unique voices shine through helps, I would suggest, to show the authors’ perspective and relationship to the films. In the end, cohesiveness of argument won out over tone.
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The essays in Section I, on issues of race and ethnicity, challenge older representations of ethnicity as well as looking at newer fare. Some of Disney’s earliest depictions of race occurred in his Oswald the Rabbit (pre–Mickey Mouse) shorts, and beyond with his employment of blackface. Kheli R. Willetts’ essay, “Cannibals and Coons: Blackness in the Early Days of Walt Disney,” gives a historical overview of Disney’s early representations of blacks and blackness and looks at reverberations of such portrayals to the present day. The essay also breaks new ground as little critical attention has been paid to race in these early works. Karen S. Goldman in her essay, “Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros: The Representation of Latin America in Disney’s ‘Good Neighbor’ Films,” looks anew at Disney’s travelogue films (1942 and 1944) from his journey to Latin America during the unionization strife at his studio. The 1950s saw a return to more traditional fare with Peter Pan (1953). Prajna Parasher’s essay, “Mapping the Imaginary: The Neverland of Disney Indians,” examines portrayals of American Indians in Peter Pan and Brother Bear (2003). Both Goldman and Parasher use the iconography of maps and mapping to trace historical understandings of Latin American and American Indian identity and their impact on current popular culture. While Parasher’s essay uses Orientalist theory to understand American Indian imagery, Kimiko Akita and Rick Kenney’s essay, “A ‘Vexing Implication’: Siamese Cats and Orientalist Mischief-Making,” uses Orientalism to dissect depictions of Asian Americans in Lady and the Tramp, The Aristocats (1970) and others. Natchee Blu Barnd’s essay, “White Man’s Best Friend: Race and Privilege in Oliver and Company” (1988), ties together many of the ideas explored in the previous essays and connects them to class and privilege and critical Whiteness studies, tying it to ideas of social justice. And lastly, Sarah E. Turner’s essay, “Blackness, Bayous and Gumbo: Encoding and Decoding Race in a Colorblind World,” looks at Disney’s current portrayal of African Americans in The Princess and the Frog, using the theory of “colorblind racism” to argue that perhaps America has not progressed as much as it may believe regarding issues of race, class and gender.
In examining gender and sexuality, the idea of traditions and transformations that Turner’s essay and others touch upon reverberate as the authors examine and question what it means to be a boy, and what it means to be a girl. Danielle Glassmeyer’s essay, “Fighting the Cold War with Pinocchio, Bambi and Dumbo” (1940, 1942 and 1941, respectively), opens Section II by using classic Disney to make a case for how such films shaped boys into the men who fought the Cold War. Gwendolyn Limbach’s essay, “‘You the Man, Well, Sorta’: Gender Binaries and Liminality in Mulan,” tackles traditional notions of masculinity and femininity by examining issues of cross-dressing in Mulan. Gael Sweeney’s essay, “‘What Do You Want Me to Do? Dress in Drag and Do the Hula?’: Timon and Pumbaa’s Alternative Lifestyle Dilemma in The Lion King,” queers Timon and Pumbaa articulating their life as a couple. Amanda Putnam’s essay, “Mean Ladies: Transgendered Villains in Disney Films,” ties together issues of villainy, and by extension, goodness, with transgenderism, helping us to re-conceptualize all of those issues, creating broader notions of gender, goodness and evilness.
The field of disability studies as a cultural studies discipline is relatively new compared to race, gender, and sexuality. As the essays in Section III reflect, it asks us to re-conceptualize disability beyond medical impairment or bodily materiality to a more socially and culturally constructed definition of Disability Identity, examining, among other things, mainstream representations of disability. As such, a trope disability studies critiques is the idea of disability as punishment for evilness from Oedipus to Richard III and more current representations. Martin F. Norden’s essay, “‘You’re a Surprise from Every Angle’: Disability, Identity and Otherness in The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” looks at Quasimodo from a disability studies perspective, examining the Disney company’s motives and its creation of the character and its impact on both a disabled and nondisabled audience. Karen Schwartz, Zana Marie Lutfiyya and Nancy Hansen’s essay, “Dopey’s Legacy: Stereotypical Portrayals of Intellectual Disability in the Classic Animated Films,” looks at representations of intellectual disability, a subject not often studied from a cultural vantage point, articulating the damage caused by the innocent child-like stereotype. Tammy Berberi and Viktor Berberi’s essay, “A Place at the Table: On Being Human in the Beauty and the Beast Tradition,” compares and contrasts filmic and literary representations of Beauty and the Beast, revealing Disney’s version as sanitized from the French cinema’s classic version by Cocteau.
Finally, the essays in Section IV take on the ideas of reimaginings and new visions in the films they examine, offering glimpses of where Disney may be headed, literally and figuratively, with issues of diversity. All of the essays have to do with traveling, quite literally, as Disney, (re)imagines the past and envisions the future. William Verrone’s essay, “Is Disney Avant-Garde? A Comparative Analysis of Alice in Wonderland and Jan Svankmajer’s Alice,” opens the section looking at Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Svankmajer’s Alice (1989), questioning the popular reception of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland and the subversive nature of both films. Ana Salzberg’s “(Indivi)duality in Return to Oz: Reflection and Revision” takes a lesser-known Disney film, Return to Oz, and looks at the ethereal and the physical world, the bodies and identities within, to understand transformations in identity and memory, while adding to the growing body of Oz–related scholarship. Michael Green’s “Securing the Virtual Frontier for Whiteness in Tron” questions why race (beyond whiteness) is virtually absent in the futuristic world of Tron and what Tron ultimately teaches us about racial issues in our future. (I should note that in Tron: Legacy the one and only time an African American appears on the screen, another character, ostensibly referring to their numerical status, calls the African American the racially-imbued term “primitive.”) Walter C. Metz’s essay, “A Womb with a Phew! Post-Humanist Theory and Pixar’s Wall-E,” looks at disability and the post-human body in the futuristic world of Wall-E. Finally, Dennis Tyler’s “Home Is Where the Heart Is: Pixar’s Up” examines gender, race, and domesticity in Up. Of note is his analysis of the meanings implied in the ways things are literally drawn on the page, citing film theorist Sergi Eisenstein’s essay on Disney and his use of space and movement.
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In Ratatouille (2007), the critic Anton Ego says (in the voice of Peter O’Toole), “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism which is fun to write and to read.... But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and the defense of the new.” Critiquing the work of Disney certainly is not new, but how we look at and understand movies in the wake of the Culture Wars and the Digital Age we are in, in many ways, is. As such, the work of scholars is literally easier, as movies are accessible for repeat viewings via a disc or download, the poor film subjected to endless viewings and arguments. But in ways the work of the critic is harder now, not only because film studies in the academy is creeping towards production and, to some degree, away from criticism, but also because everyone can offer up his or her own critique of the film via a blog, Facebook, or Twitter feed. The voice of the academic critic is diminished perhaps in the cacophony of voices competing for attention, particularly in the backlash against negative criticism. The job of the critic is not simply to be negative, but to help people—students, the public, whomever—discover new ways of seeing and understanding the text at hand, be it print, visual, or digital. The critic and teacher’s job is to offer new ways of seeing to enrich the understanding of the text, to enhance its appreciation. The critics in this volume all share, at their core, a love of Disney, the art that he made, that his company continues to create, the legacy he left behind. Otherwise, we wouldn’t spend time critiquing work that others find trivial, “child’s fare” and unworthy of attention. Sure, we may want the representations of diversity to be different from what we see, but that is only because we understand the reach and impact Disney has, its cultural importance upon shaping our global citizenry. As we move further and further into the 21st century, as technology makes media more accessible to all, it is not far fetched to wish for us all to become more cognizant of what we and our children see and consume. Whether this book enriches or detracts from a reader and viewer’s experience of Disney is beyond the reach of what the writers here can control. We hope, though, that you’ll encounter something new.
1. See http://www.popeater.com/2011/03/03/Annie-Leibovitz-disney-celebrities/
2. Zipes, Jack. “Breaking the Disney Spell”; Sells, et al. From Mouse to Mermaid, 21.
3. See Meehan, et al. Dazzled by Disney? The Global Disney Audiences Project.
Bell, Elizabeth, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells, eds. From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Meehan, Eileen R., Mark Philips, and Janet Wasko, eds. Dazzled by Disney? The Global Audiences Project. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2005.
Von Glinow, Kiki. “Annie Leibovitz Photographs Celebrity Disney Scenes.” http://www.popeater.com/2011/03/03/Annie-Leibovitz-disney-celebrities/ (accessed June 3, 2011)
Zipes, Jack. “Breaking the Disney Spell,” in From Mouse to Mermaid, 21–42.