“Once upon a time there lived a dreamer. The kind who kept their head in the clouds, love above the stars and left regret beneath the earth they walked on” ~ Robert Drake
Much like the sounds of tolling bells in churches, “Once upon a time” always brought back a flurry of nostalgia, one steeped in colourful images of princess figures running among lush fields of green, giddy, and delirious with what life had bestowed on her. This world always had hope, love and beauty strongly embedded in its narrative, promising its viewers that it always ends “happily ever after.” For many of us, this vision of a perfect world shaped our childhoods, our heads were up in the clouds too, right?
And, for many of us, Walt Disney created this world. Don’t be like Walt Disney.
As Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (in Disney’s 1937 adaptation) flitted through thick woods, her flowing cloak and hair vaguely reminding audiences of her German origin, Disney was building its less-than-perfect universe.
Published in 1812, the original story of a beautiful, innocent princess banished to the forest by her cruel stepmother (a witch), had graver intentions. Contextually, the fable was released at a time when Germany was grappling with social instability and peasant revolutions. In fact, Grimms’ Snow White was not even meant for children, but for respectable, middle-class people, hoping to inculcate in them a deep-rooted sense of a nationalist identity. Yet, this deliberate simplification of complex and culturally-rich narratives was only too typical of Disney’s early years.
But as multiculturalism positioned itself as a major framework of understanding intergroup relations in the 1990s, Disney’s earlier-simplistic stance came under understandable threat.
For example, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs itself received considerable flak for establishing conservative gender roles. Snow would cook and clean all day while her dwarf compatriots worked the long hours in the outside world. Undeniable patriarchal undertones with tracks like ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ hinted at an obvious disparity in the agency a man could exercise as opposed to his female counterpart.
Minorities were increasingly gaining spotlight in the early 1990s, with the likes of Whoopi Goldberg and Denzel Washington becoming superstar icons. In fact, the decade began with the Oscar-winning (yet, also commercially successful) Dances with Wolves, an epic detailing the unlikely friendship that developed between a Civil War veteran and a Native Indian community.
The general enhancement of cultural awareness and political correctness was a seemingly profitable bandwagon to jump on at the time. Moreover, it made complete economic sense too. Given the inevitable growth in the marginalised population and their disposable income, it was only logical for a capitalist institution to bolster recognition and audience loyalty through all-inclusive representations in their films.
And thus began the saga of Disney’s (albeit self-imposed) rebranding regime with projects like Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1996), and Mulan (1998). Mulan followed its titular protagonist impersonating a man and joining the Chinese military in order to fill in for her ailing father.
Though Disney’s attempt at multiethnicity was no longer overtly racist, they were still composites on stereotypes, fantasies, and images of the ‘Other.’ Disney was found guilty of promoting racist and colourist ideals in Mulan. Many critics pointed out how the fighters in the Mongolian army had skin tones evidently darker than their fellow Chinese soldiers. Moreover, the same Mongolians were depicted as animalistic and almost subhuman.
Years of cultural appropriation and subtle racism later, Disney has now turned a new corner with claims of “diversification” and “inclusiveness” again. Almost like the Second Coming, Disney reacted to recent backlash about becoming “all too white” and chose to invest in regionalised storytelling. In a world gradually being consumed by Fascist mores, Disney’s uncharacteristic progressiveness to churn out content that depicts multiple marginalised communities had to be praiseworthy.
With a keen urge to include films like Croods, Mulan (2020), The Lion King remake, Aladdin, Moana, Coco, Soul, Raya and the Last Dragon, or the more recently released Luca to their slate, Disney displayed a serious investment in multicultural storytelling.
Legends from indigenous Hawaiian islands, Italian villages tucked away in the North West Riviera, bustling Arabian marketplaces overlooking the opulent palace walls, or even the less-explored wonders behind Southeast Asian cultures of Brunei, Singapore, Laos, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar, meant that Disney was actively trying to branch out in terms of representation.
These films were also amped up by hefty budgets and production costs, involving a plethora of league-A artists from the industry.
Disney films such as Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Tangled (2010) can be characterised by their off-centre culture, and deregionalised portrayal of international women whose Germanness and Frenchness is markedly compromised in the process of being Americanised. Similarly, in films like Brave (2012) and Frozen (2013), the Scottish and Scandinavian ethos comes to the fore but not without its faults.
These recent films mark Disney Studios’ digital-era strategy to rebrand regionality and associated “cultural authenticity” as part of its worldwide women’s ideology. For example, Disney’s animated feature film Moana (2016) continues this indigenous trend but in more problematic ways.
A shift in the Disney Gaze?
As part of the “glocal” overhaul at Disney, the production house made a June announcement that Colombian-American actor Rachel Zegler will play Snow White in a live-action adaptation of the fairytale.
Belonging to Polish and Columbian heritage, Zegler is about to enter a space in Disney universe largely occupied by white actors. In fact, Zegler’s casting was hailed as a watershed moment considering Disney was entrusting a newcomer with a tentpole project. Moreover, the conscious decision to position an actor of colour for the role of a protagonist hailed “fairest of them all”, is certain to lay the foundation of debates galore. Not only in terms of casting Zelger, but Disney’s confidence in her as a performer hints at the production house’s attempt at humanising these once-holy and culturally exclusive children’s stories.
Similarly, Disney showed another instance of inclusive casting with R&B singer Halley Bailey. The Black actress is headlining the cast of The Little Mermaid, as Ariel, another role traditionally portrayed by white actors.
Almost to complete the holy tripartite, news broke of American-Cuban singer Camilla Cabello playing the affable cinder-girl in Cinderella. Though not a product out of Disney’s stable (the film will be backed by Sony-owned Columbia Pictures and set for release on Amazon Prime Video), the idea that a non-white pop icon could take on the intrinsic childhood legacy manifested by a primarily white gaze is fascinating, not to mention the widespread fanfare that Cabello’s own person guarantees due to her prolific music career.
Disney: A Longstanding Cultural Appropriator
Yet, at the wake of such inclusive measures, one cannot help but look back at Disney’s history of overt racism. Certain films under the Disney banner have aged dismally in retrospect. Whether it’s Peter Pan (1953) and the insensitive portrayal of the Native people in the film, or Dumbo’s (1941) scene with the crows and a musical number which is particularly racist. The entire routine pays homage to racist minstrel shows, where white performers with blackened faces and tattered clothing imitated and ridiculed enslaved Africans on Southern Plantations. In fact, the character was also called Jim Crow, a name typically used to name laws that enforced racial segregation in the US.
Song of the South (1946) is yet another feature that successfully set the conversation on inclusivity several decades back. Since it was released at a tumultuous time like the Second World War, it could have contributed something towards the general voice against humanity. But instead, it chose to focus on the thematic return to a Gone With the Wind model. This model turned a sympathetic gaze on the privileged, focusing on how their world was “inconvenienced” in the wake of the Civil War that potentially ended years of Black slavery.
Examples like Song of the South imbued in its supposedly ‘idyllic’ setup, references of the Antebellum and Reconstruction periods in history. These historical eras were associated with African Americans being docile, subservient, and a transport for the white man’s wish-fulfilment.
Disney: A Place Where Dreams Come True (?)
Disney is no stranger to historically misplaced notions that have cost the company and the brand name associated with it, quite a bit of social ire.
Peter Pan (1953) began Disney’s diminutive depiction of natives, exposing the production house to a plethora of criticism. The coloured characters in the film were shown talking in gibberish, and indulging in incessant tobacco smoking, both of which were considered uncouth. The same strain was observed in Pocahontas (1995) where the protagonist undergoes a “makeover” to fit European standards of beauty.
Even though certain pessimists (read realists) may term it a PR strategy, Disney’s recent change of heart at least has a positive outcome. But in some instances, Disney missed the mark by a mile.
The films reflected amateur treatment and a lack of in-depth understanding of customs prevalent in second and third tier countries.
However, Disney’s intention was anything but.
They wanted to create mouthpieces of lesser-known (often endangered, in the case of Moana) communities with optimum representation and agency.
For instance, the references of pan-Polynesian deity Maui (Dwayne Johnson), Moana’s apprehensive travel companion and eventual maritime mentor, are steeped in problematic ideologies. As industry talk went, it was known that in the course of the film’s evolution, the scripting team changed the demigod’s shape from classically lean to comically large (Ito)—a mutation condemned by indigenous Oceanic leaders and scholars as replaying racist tropes of obese Polynesian bodies. Or even that Moana’s version of Maui was an insecure, comically pathetic excuse of a God while in the Native Hawaiian religion, he is the most-revered anti-God. Hence, the depiction is not only reductive but playing into the prototypes of a regressive, superstitious people.
In 2018, Disney came under criticism for “whitewashing” Princess Tiana in the cartoon movie Ralph Breaks the Internet, and hastily redrawing the character with darker features just months before the film’s release. Tiana was till recently the only African-American princess to take up Disney’s mantle, till Beyoncé broke the net with news of her joining the live-action adaptation of The Lion King.
After the trailer reveal, fans of the “Frog Princess” pointed out that her comeback was not without its share of makeovers. Princess Tiana’s skin tone appeared “lighter,” many observed, with her features becoming sharper and not akin to the roundish traits generally seen in African-American visages.
Often, less-than-nuanced storytelling such as these may not only evoke mistrust from the people the films claim to represent, but also widen the chasm between the white masses and such disenfranchised communities.
It can be asserted that in more ways than one, the Disney Corp institution has marketed psychologically manipulative narratives as fiction to young minds who lap it up without better judgement. Disney’s long history is checkered by a systemic exclusion of the “different” if not overt racism. Its recent and rather sudden need to be ‘woke ’may not duly compensate for the fundamentally exclusionary stance embodied by a production house driven by capitalist avarice pandering to whichever voice is de rigeur in a particular era.
Whether socially relevant or not, Disney’s colonial gaze had to be obliterated one day or the other and these films could be seen as an attempt towards the same. Here’s pinning our hopes that this one’s not a tokenist move.