Neo-Disneyism

Figures

Figure 2.1. Designer doll collection based on the Official Princess Line. This image does not include the last two princesses Merida and Moana. <https://wordpress.org/openverse/image/fa5dd4bb-891b-4956-94d0-b2619cfdaf80/>.

Figure 2.2. Merida in the film. <https://wordpress.org/openverse/image/41e33bfd-6e2f-4200-b129-3e0840ecade5>.

Figure 2.3. Merida in the merchandise. <https://search.openverse.engineering/image/c9170c8e-3efb-429d-9547-ce95457d2ee6>.

Figure 2.4. Classic Pocahontas collectible doll. <https://wordpress.org/openverse/image/484168bf-aec3-49e0-ae92-ac0cb0e94f05>.

Figure 2.5. Mulan in 1998 animation film. <https://search.openverse.engineering/image/ad93cc40-577b-4a64-b968-90788543ed2b>.

Figure 2.6. Mulan and Li Shang doll set. <https://wordpress.org/openverse/image/0989937c-8f0f-4f96-98df-f73befc55fa9/>.

Figure 3.1. The Haunted House at Disneyland by SolarSurfer, public domain. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5633174>.

Figure 3.2. The Liberty Square Haunted Mansion, Magic Kingdom by mttbme, public domain. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_Mansion#/media/File:Magic_Kingdom_Haunted_Mansion_January_2011.JPG>.←xi | xii→

Figure 3.3. Haunted Mansion, Tokyo Disneyland by Rob Young, public domain. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haunted_Mansion,_Tokyo_Disneyland_(9407212583).jpg#/media/File:Haunted_Mansion,_Tokyo_Disneyland_(9407212583).jpg.

Figure 3.4. Phantom Manor, Disneyland Paris by David Jafra. <https://www.flickr.com/photos/bartworldv6/5281983135/>.

Figure 3.5. Mystic Manor, Hong Kong Disneyland Park by Katelulu. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mystic_Manor.jpg>.

Figure 5.1. The shaman or “Great Wizard” in Matchless Mulan.

Figure 5.2. Hawk urges Mulan to join forces in Niki Caro’s Mulan.

Figure 5.3. Hawk’s dart is stuck in Mulan’s tight, breast-flattening wrapping.

Figure 5.4. Hawk dives down to take the arrow in order to save Mulan.

Figure 5.5. The phoenix rises up with wings extending from Mulan’s shoulders.

Figure 12.1. Maleficent as a child fae (00:02:08).

Figure 12.2. Maleficent at approximately age 16 (00:09:02).

Figure 12.3. Angelina Jolie as Maleficent at the moment of waking into trauma in Maleficent (00:18:40).

Figure 12.4. Maleficent as she appears to King Stefan at the christening (00:31:43).

Figure 12.5. The crowning of Aurora as Queen of the Moors before Maleficent and Diaval (01:27:14).←xii | xiii→

Figure 13.1. Moana. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moana_(character>).

Figure 13.2. Namaari. <https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/ Namaari>.

Figure 13.3. Virana. <https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Virana>.

Figure 13.4. Luisa’s muscular figure. <https://culturacolectiva.com/movies/luisa-madrigal-encanto-disney-muscular/>.

Figure 13.5. Isabela. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabela_Madrigal>.

Figure 13.6. Mirabel. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirabel_Madrigal>.

Tables

Table 3.1. Neo-Victorianism in Neo-Disney Parks

Table 9.1. Multi-ethnic Cast of Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Acknowledgments

Our appreciation goes to Sue Greenfield of the Hanover Art Guild in Pennsylvania, for her permission to use her Garden Angel as the cover for this book.

Foremost, we would like to thank the contributors who wrote most of the chapters in this book: Michelle Chan, Amala Charulatha, Dalila Forni, Sheng-mei Ma, Elaine Morton, Korine Powers, Rritwika Roychowdhury, and Taylor Tomko. There were others who began this project but who had to withdraw because of dealing with COVID in their families. We appreciate the initial interest that we received when we placed calls for papers. Moreover, we really appreciate the contributors whose hard work and enthusiasm for Disney, informed by perspectives perhaps from those with non-Western ethnicities, have created a volume that we feel will be illuminating for readers and fans of Disney.

I (Brenda Ayres) want to thank the Penn State Library for its liberal access to material that expanded my research on Disney scholarship. I am also grateful to the Kaltreider-Benfer Library of Red Lion, Pennsylvania, for its loan of Disney films and books. As always, it has been a great boon to work with Sarah Maier. We are two editors that complement each other, and as a team, it is our hope that we have produced a collection of essays that will demonstrate both our appreciation and concern for Disney’s evolving multiculturalism and multigenderism.

I (Sarah E. Maier) want to thank the Hans W. Klohn Commons Library staff at UNB Saint John who chase down books and bits of ephemera when I go off on a tangent much like Dory; and, as always, to my daughter and father who remind me to stop “blue fishing” when I am lost among too many ideas at once and forget where I started—my gratitude for reminding me to focus! I am always thankful for Brenda who is a fairy godmother of a friend who works her bibbidi-bobbedi-boo on our work; she is a magical woman full of kindness and intelligence.

←xvii | xviii→Finally, we cannot say how much we treasure the films made by Disney, especially the more recent ones that encourage people to accept and value themselves and others, regardless of physical and mental challenges, body types, religion, gender, race, ethnicity, or any other variant, to appreciate “difference” as a bounty that strengthens the world and should make humanity a better behaved species than what we have been in the past. Disney’s messages to the young gives us hope that future generations will do unto others as they would have done unto themselves. If they do so, they will truly produce a magic kingdom.

Introduction: Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color

In 2003 I generated a collection of essays that criticized the Disney industry for its global marketing of an ideology of Americana that, besides promoting WASP elitism, inculcated a strict adherence to gender binary and heterosexual, nuclear family formations. Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan termed this ideology “duckology,” asserting that “Disney has become synonymous with a certain conservative, patriarchal, heterosexual ideology which is loosely associated with American cultural imperialism” (1999, 2). I called it “The Emperor’s Old Groove.”

I did produce the book with misgivings because I grew up on Disney and have the fondest memories of its films. My all-time favorite movie is Lady and the Tramp (1955), and I am a better human being after having watched Old Yeller (1957) and Pollyanna (1960), to name just a few Disney films. When my family bought its first television in the 1950s, it was The Mickey Mouse Club that I watched. My first movie at a drive-in was Snow White (in 1958). In the 1960s, Sunday evenings always meant Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in front of the TV. In 1964 I traveled with my Girl Scout Troop to New York City for the World’s Fair where I came to sit in a boat and was enthralled by a Disney display of hundreds of dolls dressed in Indigenous costumes, singing “It’s a small world after all” that encouraged us to be friends with everyone. The song was written by a brother team of Robert and Richard Sherman on the heel of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The words were a great comfort to me, for I was still upset over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Disney’s exhibits at the World’s Fair urged peace to hundreds of thousands of attendees from around the world and exuded hope for the future.

Therefore, while rendering The Emperor’s Old Groove, it was often difficult to be critical of Disney but was warranted because of its proliferation ←1 | 2→of gender, racial, and ethnic stereotypes and their negative influence on children (including the adult child). I invited other scholars, who shared my concerns, to contribute essays that analyzed Disney’s colonization tactics. Nearly at the same time, Douglas Brode was working on his From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture (2004), crediting Disney for creating the antiestablishment culture of 1967–72. Brode’s stated “aim” was “to show that Disney’s output—as experienced at the movies, on television, and in person at theme parks—played a major role in transforming mid-1950s white-bread toddlers into the rebellious teenage youth of the late sixties” (x). Brode attempted to argue his theory through identifying the “anti-Establishment values” in Disney (xi; emphasis in the original). He was accurate in making this declaration: “No other single figure of the past century has had such a wide, deep, and pervasive influence on the public imagination as Walt Disney. He did, after all, reach us first (and, therefore, foremost), at that very point in our youthful development when either an individual or a generation is most receptive (and vulnerable) to such forces and ideas” (x). But to say that the counterculture revolution occurred because of Disney’s subliminal cultivation of rebellion against authority in his early films ignores the overwhelming evidence of Disney’s propensity to promote a single conservative image of Americana, one that was deplorable to Hippies. Since I was one of those flower children, I cannot agree with Brode’s theory, and although I love Disney’s old films, I continue to cringe at what I am now calling “Disneyism,” borrowing from Richard Schickel’s description of “Disney’s Americanism” as

of the kind of clean, moral, simple and innocent stories he most often chose to present on the screen, of the right-wing politics of his later years, of his broad, gag-oriented sense of humor, containing no elements of social or self-satire, as entirely typical of the tastes of the region that formed him. The geographic center of the nation is also, broadly speaking, the most passionately American of the American regions. (1968, 72)

Most scholars agree: Disney is a powerful dynamo in its far-reaching proliferation of values especially to children through its films, theme parks, and merchandising. David Kunzle has made the deduction that Disney “may be the most widely known North American name in the world. He is, arguably, the century’s most important figure in the bourgeois popular culture” (1984, ←2 | 3→11). In their now well-known and widely quoted work on Disney, The Mouse that Roared, Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock confirm that Disney entertainment, through its extensive and effective influence, “wages an aggressive campaign to peddle its political and cultural influence” (2010, xiv). More specifically, Julie C. Garlen and Jennifer A. Sandlin, in their study of the influence of Disney on children, pronounce it to be “a major cultural force that shapes everyday life practices and identity formations through its representations of family values, gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, ‘Americanness,’ childhood, pleasure, entertainment, education, and community” (2016, 2). The authors of Animating Difference consider Disney animation as “socializing agents … that guide children (in the United States) through the complexities of highly racialized and sexualized scenarios, normalizing certain dynamics while rendering others invisible” (King et al. 2010, 11).

Scott Schaffer believes that “Disney plays a large part in this boundary denotation by allowing for the perpetration of cultural stereotypes that portray, albeit in a ‘cute’ manner, the otherness of areas of the world the United States has come to dominate politically, culturally, or economically” (2016, 34). Keith Brooker concurs with this elaboration:

That Disney films are so often taken (for better or for ill) to embody typical all-American virtues is a testament to the overall power of American ideology, which has so effectively instilled the vast majority of Americans with a confident belief that all things good and wholesome are associated with Americanness while anything opposed to the American way must be vile and depraved. (2010, 13)