Disney: Reflections of History

In my last entry I touched upon the commercialisation of children and the family values that Disney has undertaken since the reign of Michael Eisner, former CEO of The Walt Disney Company. As mentioned before, Disney holds a worldwide reputation built upon, since its inception, for being family friendly and being a main value of American culture. However the past has shown through their animated feature films that the company values may have changed under Eisner and in particular have led to mixed feelings to how softly parts of American history are represented (Bryman, p. 6).

Disney’s widespread influence, particularly to children through animations, offers an entertainment based media with educational traits (Giroux, p. 18) which Walt Disney intended to focus on to prove the media’s influence can be educational (Giroux, p. 18). However when Eisner took over Disney there were certain films like Pocahontas (1995) that could be considered racist and untruthful as Disney changed the seriousness of the White Colonisation and turned it into a fantasy-romance story (Budd and Kirsch, p. 170). With films like Pocahontas Disney has been accused of ‘sweetening’ the story and changing the history (Bryman, p.6). When Eisner took over the company, the values became about the profits, a fact that Eisner cannot deny, instead he implies his own ideas to the extent Disney’s influence can reach (Giroux, p. 28). Eisner can be quoted saying:

“The Berlin wall was destroyed not by the force of western arms but by the force of western ideas. And what was the delivery system of those ideas? It has to be admitted to an important degree it was by American entertainment” (Giroux, p. 28)

The idea is that through entertainment, underlying messages can be passed across which brings up the argument that if Michael Eisner and Disney knew of how powerful their influence really was to children, then the representations of race and historical inequalities become deliberate. However, it is not just American representations we have seen through the years. Under Eisner there have been multiple identity representations whether it is racial, ethnical, gendered or religious, they have all been considered.

References:

Bryman, Alan. The Disneyization of Society. London: Sage. 2004.

Budd, Mike. and Kirsch, Max.H. Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions. USA: Wesleyan University Press. 2005.

Giroux, Henry.A. The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2001.

Image: 'Pocahontas' copyrighted Disney Enterprises Inc.