After watching today's class videos, I found the last one - the Critical Look at Disney the most interesting, so this is the one I would like to focus on. I really found the analysis of disney movies and their "monopoly" on the children's market. They really do dictate how children consider and view our history and what seems to be important in our society. For example, skinniness for girls and relying on men and not being able to be dependent, men to be all muscles, that the English got back on the boat to go back to their main land and leave the new found land for Indians, the lack of African American presence in cartoons, and the use of the chihahua as the latin character. These are just some of the examples that the people interviewed in the video pointed out and are all really good points. I know myself that I have heard little white kids that I was babysitting to pass the "skin colored" crayon (and it just so happens to be peach - indicating light colored skin) which they obviously have no way of knowing how incredibly offensive it is. As sad as this is, it is the reality we live in today. It was just this year (some almost 80 years after Disney was started) that they just came out with their first movie starring a black child from New Orleans (Princess and the Frog). Even though in this movie, the black female (the main star) is the hard working independent girl, yet she still falls in love and ends up marrying a prince.
Although I realize how true these observations are of Disney and the pattern in which they occur in, when I first heard such suspessions I thought they were totally ridiculous. The most publicized problems I have heard of with Disney until today's class is the sex undertones in the cartoons and in the muppets. I realize that I had simply dismissed these allegations as many people had done with the examples I had mentioned above from the video. I guess I cannot help but wonder what would happen if disney focused more efforts on truer storytelling and less racist and sexist movies. What would cause Disney to ever head down this direction?
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