ANADIAN DIMENSION



SNOW WHITEY? STEREOTYPING IN THE MAGICAL KINGDOM

"When You Wish Upon a Star, Makes No Difference Who You Are..."

by Gail Robertson

Through the lyrics of this song, sung by the lovable Jiminy Crickett, Walt Disney and his successors have welcomed viewers into a world of enchantment and fantasy. Yet, who you are makes a world of difference, even in the Magic Kingdom.

So great is the stereotyping in children's animated films that you would think we were living in the United States in the 1940s.

Although it tends to be relatively ignored, this unofficial education system aimed at children is possibly more influential than the school system everyone has been talking about. Television, movies, videos, toys, and, video games, are enveloping our youth, and influencing their impressionable young minds.

Pennsylvania State University professor Henri Giroux focused his attention on Disney films after watching them with his three sons. "This isn't just entertainment," he says. "It's teaching our children. Popular culture is a powerful educational force, regardless of where you are politically. And there are things going on in popular culture that aren't very friendly to kids," he said in an interview.

This is what communications guru Marshall McLuhan had in mind when he wrote almost 50 years ago, about "an unofficial program of public instruction" in the media, which he said "has mainly neutralized the much smaller program of official education with its much smaller budget and much less well-paid brainpower." These words are even more apt now than they were when McLuhan wrote them in The Mechanical Bride, in 1950.

Today, children spend far more time every week with the media than they do in school. And if we're worried about the quality of classroom education, it's decades ahead of the unofficial variety.

Adults would do well to look closely at children's films--a world filled with racism, sexism, ageism and heterosexism. A world with sharply defined classes, where the working class is shown as stupid and incompetent. A world that encourages a sense of powerlessness.

And for Canadians, the programming often stems from the United States. So we're not just adopting their "free market" approach to our social programs, but we're also inundated by their media and products, as a result of integrated global marketing.

For example, Disney owns the Capital Cities/ABC radio and television network, along with film and record companies, book publishing, newspapers, home video, theme parks, magazines, hundreds of Disney retail stores, as well as hockey and baseball teams and insurance companies. In their book on global media, U.S. academics Edward Herman and Robert McChesney say "Disney's stated goal is to expand its non-U.S. share of revenues from 23 per cent in 1995 to 50 per cent by 2000." Disney is no longer going it alone, preferring to gobble up as many joint ventures as possible, including deals with McDonalds for exclusive toy distribution with its kids' Happy Meals, and Pixar (computer animation specialists responsible for the 1995 hit Toy Story).

But beyond the mergers, acquisitions and profits, what's the scoop on Disney films?

In children's animation, females, minorities and workers have few redeeming qualities, says professor Giroux, who lectures and writes extensively in the area of children's education and culture.

"Popular audiences tend to reject any link between ideology and the prolific entertainment world of Disney. And yet Disney's pretense to innocence appears to some critics as little more than a promotional mask that covers over its aggressive marketing techniques and influence in educating children to the virtues of becoming active consumers," Giroux wrote in the 1997 book Kinderculture.

At first blush, movies like Hercules, Pocahontas, The Lion King And Beauty And The Beast are hugely entertaining. They captivate--even enthrall--with songs, slick animation and storytelling. Creatively, they are works of art. Additionally, anything by Disney is viewed as ideal and above suspicion. Criticizing Disney is like questioning motherhood. But check out these scenes the next time your little ones sit down to a Disney video:

• In The Little Mermaid women are either evil or without a life of their own. Ariel not only trades her voice for legs to pursue the handsome Prince Eric, but she gives up her whole undersea world to be with him. Ursula the sea witch tells Ariel that taking away her voice is not so bad because men don't like women who talk too much.

• In Beauty And The Beast you see the very svelte Belle dancing around the countryside, looking down upon townsfolk like the baker and tailor as she yearns "for more than this provincial life." In the end, like Ariel, her aspirations are limited to marrying the bad-tempered and at times violent, prince.

• In Aladdin, Arabic culture is portrayed in the opening song as a faraway place where camels roam and "Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face/It's barbaric, but hey, it's home." And throughout the movie the bad guys have beards, bulbous noses and bodies, evil eyes and heavy accents. Yet the hero Aladdin has a small nose, no beard or turban and no accent. He sounds and looks very American.

• The shapely Pocahontas, with her Asian features, is a strong female role model, but the plot takes huge liberties with Native American culture and history.

• The Lion King is rife with race and sex-role stereotyping. Mufasa, the proud lion ruler, and his son Simba are key characters while mom is relegated to a supporting role. The fair-haired Mufasa is good while his evil brother Scar is the dark-skinned, female-abusing lion "Queen" (with the lisping voice of Jeremy Irons). Scar prefers the company of his blackguard hyena "henchmen," with voices by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin.

Even the music shapes views. In Aladdin we have the street urchin singing about showing the world to the naive princess Jasmine. And in The Lion King, Elton John sings about the Circle of Life as a "wheel of fortune" with winners and losers.

The entertainment factor is almost enough to make us overlook the films' serious shortcomings, says Dr. James Winter, professor of communications at the University of Windsor, who teaches media literacy. "Take a film like The Lion King, which wasn't a fairy tale, Disney invented it from scratch, and it earned them more than $1 billion. Here, they had an opportunity to create what they wanted."

What they produced is a story that, on the surface, is about a lion cub who prevails in the face of adversity. But the real story of The Lion King is the marginalization of females such as Nala and Serabi, the vilification of gays personified by Scar, the ghettoization of Blacks and Hispanics, represented by the dreaded hyenas, and the glorification of hierarchy and paternalism symbolized by Mufasa and Simba. "It's a film whose imbedded messages can only be described as despicable," says Winter, who taught a workshop on media, including children's programming, to a Workers of Colour course at the CAW's Family Education Centre in Port Elgin, Ontario, in April.

In addition to the stereotyping, the films promote American ideals. "It's not just trade agreements that undermine our cultural sovereignty," Winter says. "Our children are repeatedly exposed to American values such as individualism, the glorification of the private at the expense of the public, and so forth."

Movies and children have become as inseparable as the profits they engender. For Disney, kids' flicks bring in hundreds of millions of dollars annually. With 1997 sales of nearly $24 billion, Disney is the closest challenger to Time Warner for the status as the world's largest media firm.

As with television, the marketing and selling of products is far-reaching, from spin-off toys, books and videos to sequels, clothes and jewelry. Such overt commercialism has a great impact on how young minds view the world, says Giroux.

As far back as Dumbo in 1940, blacks were portrayed in two ways: as jivetalking, hip crows, and as-dumb-but-happy workers singing about how "we throw our pay away." For the past 60 years, women have either needed to be rescued (from Faline in Bambi, to princess Jasmine in Aladdin) or play horrific villains such as the wicked stepmother in Snow White (1938) to Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmations, or Ursula the sea witch in The Little Mermaid, which revisited theatres in fall, 1997, and was re-released on video tape this past spring.

For the most part, females are marginalized or non-existent, as the boys take over the screen, in everything from the Muppet movies to Robin Hood and Peter Pan. Even Miss Piggy is played by a man. Where female characters have the lead, as with Thumbelina, Ariel and Belle, their roles are traditional. Belle stands up to Gaston, but aspires only to wed the beast-turned-prince. In this respect, Pocahontas and Esmeralda from The Hunchback Of Notre Dame are partial exceptions.

Disney titles like James And The Giant Peach get good reviews until you watch them closely and see the underlying messages. Meanwhile, children watch them dozens of times, helping even the subtle messages to become ingrained.

After a few weeks watching children's movies with a critical eye, I was discouraged to find so few that avoid racism and/or sexism. As for any positive gay or lesbian characters, forget it!

Parents must reclaim their children from the clutches of film makers like Disney--no matter how much we need a babysitter. Giroux says parents shouldn't blindly accept or ignore these films. Parents need to understand how much of their children's views of the world and their own lives get shaped by animation, he says. It's a powerful tool to teach children right or wrong. Often characters who are not white and middle class are shown as deviant, inferior and ignorant, he says. Parents must watch the movies with their children and address issues of racism, sexism and working-class bias, says Giroux.

"This isn't just about entertainment, it's about education. We have to take pop culture seriously and put it into our curriculums," he says. "Students have to learn to read the culture. We're not just dealing with friendly Walt."

Winter says "parents should minimize children's exposure. When the kids do watch, parents should watch with them and point out the problems, to innoculate the kids against the stereotyped and harmful messages."

But while it's important for parents to act, most of the responsibility should be collective, Winter says. "We must insist that regulations and laws protect citizens, especially the little ones. Our elected representatives should act on our behalf."

The world can be a wonderfully magical and imaginary place in movies. It can also be a violent, angry place, and one that is filled with negative stereotypes.

* * *

Gail Robertson is an entertainment writer with the Windsor Star.

CANADIAN DIMENSION

(Winnipeg, Canada)

Sept./Oct. 1998, pp. 42-44

Reprinted with permission from CANADIAN DIMENSION (CD) magazine, 63 Albert St., Room 301. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3B 1G4. (204) 957-1519.

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