Pussyfooting with Evil: Disney and the Other

Historiography

The Walt Disney Corporation has dominated the children’s media market for eight decades, and its programming has influenced how children think about their cultural identity and their relationship to others.  While the $314 billion dollar corporation strives to delight and entertain, it is foremost a market-driven international corporation beholden to its stockholders demanding increased revenues and profits.[1]  Henry Giroux, a cultural critic and leading Disney scholar, posits that Disney has maximized profits by “nurtur[ing] a corporate image that equates the Disney brand with American patriotism.”[2]  This study takes that assertion one step further to suggest the pro-American, jingoist nature of Disney films during times of war, citing Walt Disney, the corporation’s founder as the creative power behind Disney’s “Othering” in feature films during World War II and the Vietnam War.  
While extensive research surrounding racist themes in Disney movies exists, not enough scholarship focuses on its treatment of “Other” from a war and society perspective, highlighting the evolution of portrayals of Indigenous Americans, Latinx, and those of Middle Eastern and Asian origin, in Disney’s movies.  Although many of these groups constituted significant parts of the American population, historically the American media treated them as “Others,” an early attitude informing American identity.  This sentiment transferred to the silver screen.  Disney actively participated in such “Othering” in many of their mainstream cinematic productions in the last eighty years.   
 
[1]  “The Walt Disney Company,” Yahoo Finance, Accessed December 16th, 2020. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DIS/
[2] Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock, The Mouse that Roared (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2010), 31.

 

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