|
Author
|
Comment
|
kristiw
Unregistered User
(10/2/05 12:26 pm)
|
Disney
I think it's easy to villainize Disney, but we can't forget that they couldn't sell anything audiences weren't already eager to eat up. If people didn't want it, it wouldn't be dangerous. We might do better to ask what Disney hit upon in their versions of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and so forth that has such persistent and continued resonance.
|
Crceres
Registered
User
(10/2/05 1:37 pm)
|
Overcompensation
Does anyone think Disney has occasionally gone overboard in the other direction? There's the portrayal of the Peter Pan indians, and then there's the native american village full of "noble savages" in Pocahontas, who are pitted against the cruel, greedy, ignorant, etc. white people.
Not that any discussion involving Disney really favors anyone.
|
Veronica
Schanoes
Registered
User
(10/2/05 1:57 pm)
|
Re: Overcompensation
I didn't see Pocahontas, despite a passing interest in how Disney could make her life have a happy ending, but in general I consider the noble savage stuff to be as damaging as...I guess the regular old savage stuff. Both deny fully complex humanity to the people being portrayed as savages. I don't worry too much about how white people end up portrayed; we've got a huge variety of images out there.
|
DerekJ
Unregistered User
(10/2/05 9:20 pm)
|
Re: Overcompensation
Quote:
Does anyone think Disney has occasionally gone overboard in the other direction? There's the portrayal of the Peter Pan indians, and then there's the native american village full of "noble savages" in Pocahontas, who are pitted against the cruel, greedy, ignorant, etc. white people.
In "Pocahontas"'s case, the Disney historical timeliness
of a "message" story about proud Virginia natives learning
to live in peace and understanding with invading white carpetbaggers
who wanted their land was, ahem, noted in rather
suspicious synergy with the Virginia "Disney America"
fiasco...
But to answer the general question, yes, there had been a strategic 90's-multicultural push for the "other" races, to help build down the Ron Miller-era association of "'Disney' = 'Embarrassingly-white'":
"Emperor's New Groove" came out of several failed attempts to do a
serious
Aztec/Mayan story for the Latin audience, and the "John Henry" short that was supposed to accompany a "black historical" spin on a 50th-anniversary "Song of the South" revival never quite made it to theaters beyond some Academy screenings.
(Well, that covers everyone except Eskimos, and...oh, darn, forgot
"Brother Bear".)
|
cwfaerie
Registered
User
(10/2/05 10:28 pm)
|
RE: Overcompensation
I had a student write a very interesting paper about the stereotypes in _Pocahontas_, and how the "noble savage" type was just as damaging as previous stereotypes, mainly because it allows the audience to see Native Americans as inherently different from other groups of people. She also found the romanticizing of the connection to nature to be insulting - again she felt it suggested that Native Americans were more "animal" than "human."
_The New World_ (out this Novemeber) is supposed to be more accurate, especially since the Powhatan Nation was involved in the filming, but I still remember reading about some stereotyping concerns when I lived in Virginia. An internet search on Powhatan and Pocahontas brings up several sites that show the criticisms the Powhatan have of Disney's film.
|
DividedSelf
Registered
User
(10/3/05 5:02 am)
|
Re: RE: Overcompensation
Is it actually possible to tell a story set within another culture without stereotyping...?
Is it possible to do it in a way that's honest and true...?
I don't think these questions are quite the same...
Someone trying to represent a given culture from without is in every case going to get it wrong. If they appear to pull it off, it's just lucky or a clever fake - but still a fake.
Paradoxically, I don't think that means it's wrong to try.
Because I think there are other issues here, about to what extent a story is about a given culture, and to what extent it is about being human.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, I think it is natural and important for different cultures to make stories about each other when those other cultures begin to overlap with their own.
This is when it all gets impossibly complicated. A representing B on grounds that B doesn't recognise and vice versa. Consequent battles over conflicting grounds. The necessity to live on common ground.
Story tellers who involve themselves in this process, from Kipling to Rushdie, always get flack - often from all sides. But without them these sort of conflicts couldn't be resolved.
It's all got a lot more complicated in the last 100 years because the front line of story making has become an extremely expensive and high tech business. And I think this is probably what's behind the original question, and the special hatred people hold in their hearts for Disney.
So cautious answer: stereotyping of other cultures is not only unavoidable but (in the end) positive - when part of an honest process of exploration and mistake learning.
This process in itself ought to be fun. Seeing how other people see us can be hilarious.
But instead of fun, it is life-and-death. Economics has always been the devil here.
|
Writerpatrick
Registered
User
(10/3/05 10:59 am)
|
Re: RE: Overcompensation
It's important to remember that the early Disney movies were made with Walt Disney in control and were made more for the love of animation. The later material, which includes Pocohontas and the politically correct stuff, was made with Eisener in control and was made to appeal more to an international market and were made with money in mind.
|
Eien
Unregistered User
(10/3/05 7:24 pm)
|
As for their TV series...
As much as I love TaleSpin and Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, I couldn't help but also notice that Chinese characters were usually stereotyped as either villains or idiots. I think this also happened on Duck Tales...
Which makes it odd that the Gummi Bears presented a more positive stereotype in one episode. However, like Pocohontas, it was still a sterotype...
|
Veronica
Schanoes
Registered
User
(10/3/05 8:56 pm)
|
Re: As for their TV series...
That reminds me of the evil slant-eyed Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp who wreaked havoc with vaguely faux Asianesque music in the background.
Sadly, it remains my favorite song from the movie.
|
Eien
Unregistered User
(10/3/05 9:07 pm)
|
What really gets me...
What I really don't get is that most of their racisim in the early days was a product of the times. But what was with the Asian sterotypes as recent as the early 90's?
What's also really sad to think is that those are some of my favorite cartoons. Thankfully, they only apply to a few episodes (the one with the car smugglers and the shrink ray wasn't even that good, regardless of stereotypes).
|
akarlui
Registered
User
(10/15/05 10:19 am)
|
darkside of disney documentary?
i was wondering if anyone can help me. I'm looking for a documentary that was made, exploring the dark side of disney. it touch bases on the crows in dumbo (if it was racist), if alice in wonderland dealt in drugs. Those are only 2 examples i have on top of my head that i remember.
|
jbkj
Unregistered User
(10/25/05 7:19 pm)
|
Jim Crow
In the 1941 movie Dumbo, about an elephant with big ears he can fly with, one of the crow is called Jim Crow.
In 1915 the Jim Crow laws separating blacks and white were contrete throughout all the South. They didn’t end until 1954
If he was racially sensitive he wouldn’t of done that, but the question is if he’s racist or just doesn’t care.
|
Oz
Unregistered User
(11/19/05 5:51 pm)
|
Cinderelly...
Did anyone else see a resemblence of the mice in Cinderella to stereotypical black slave behaviour.
|
Chris Peltier
Registered
User
(11/22/05 1:39 pm)
|
Jim Crow
Dumbo is a story about prejudice: Dumbo himself is marginalized by his peers for his abnormally large ears, and his mother is eventually locked up as a "mad elephant" because of her attempts to protect him. It is after the mother and child have been separated, and Dumbo is at his lowest point (ironically up a tree) that the crows come to comfort him and cheer him on.
Could Disney have meant for the audience to draw corollary between Dumbo's sense of social isolation and the marginalization of African Americans (Jim Crow)? After all, Dumbo's other sole support - aside from his mother, mad and female, completely disempowered - comes from literally the least member of the group, a mouse.
~Chandra~
|
curious
incident
Registered
User
(11/23/05 5:11 pm)
|
Lion King
I always saw the Lion King as an anti-communist film.
All the hyenas want, is to be able to leave their elephant graveyard and live on Pride Rock with all the other animals.
What's so wrong with that? What do they actually DO wrong?
But the film is all about the need to put them back in their place, and to retain the (let's face it) dictatorial regime of the lions.
(and don't get me started on the whole Little Mermaid, "in order to open my legs i must sacrifice my voice" thing. But that's not Disney, that goes all the way back to Mr Andersen.)
|
bielie
Unregistered User
(11/25/05 2:53 pm)
|
Lions vs Hyenas
The animosity between lions and hyenas in lionking is actually based on fact. I saw a very interesting nature program once in which the constant conflict between lions and hyenas was shown. Although the lions usually make the kill, the lions and hyenas compete for the same carcass. A troop of hyenas can easily take a carcass from a lonely lions. Lions will kill hyenas when they can, and there was even footage in this film where a group of hyenas killed a lion cub.
If the storyteller goes with the archetype of the lion as king of the beasts, then the hyenas will naturally fall into the archetype of outsider, ursurper, thief. Scar's treachery is so much worse because he sides with the natural enemies of his kind in order to get what he wants: Power.
Sure, any tale that seperates people into "Us" vs "Them" can be seen as racist, divisive, un-pc or whatever. The fact is that any good story has good and bad guys in conflict. The Lion King proved to be one of the most successful stories of our time.
|
Van45us
Registered
User
(12/8/05 11:11 pm)
|
Re: Lions vs Hyenas
Yes. And as much as I have nostalgic longings for the "good" lions of Born Free, I have to remind myself that the happily freed Elsa and her cubs fed on some of the native locals as well as gazelles. Lions are anything but "noble" and "true." They do things many other animals do, and some they don't; kill for the heck of it (including their own cubs), fight for the heck of it, and bogart other animal's kills. Hyenas, in comparison, are much more co-operative, being pack animals.
The Lion King borrowed heavily from Kimba, so much so they had to have serious talks with the Japanese creators of that show in retrospect. I suppose someone can see anything in a story, depending on what their agenda happens to be. Sometimes it is blatant, sometimes it is a stretch. Writers have had to keep in mind the whole PC thing at all times these days whenever they write anything, in fear of offending left-handed people, color blind people, people who part their hair in the middle, etc. Ultimately, the market will tell a writer or filmaker how huge an offense they have committed, or how small, or unwitting.
"What a world. What a world."
-the "Wicked" Witch. (no offense to wicked people, no implying that all witches are wicked, or calling anyone names).
;)
|
