How Disney Defines Childhood (Response to Celeste Lacroix's "Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney's Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame)

In the abstract of her article "Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney's Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, LaCroix writes "Disney’s consumerist framework...provides 'dreams and products through forms of popular culture
in which kids are willing to materially and emotionally invest'. It is this idea of children's emotional investment in Disney's "worlds" that I wish to explore. Disney media is incredibly powerful as it is often a child's first representations of a different world. For example, I'm half Nigerian and one of the questions I often got when I was younger was "Oh. Africa...that's like Lion King right? Have you seen a lion?" Now, this is a harmless question, but it does show the pervasiveness of Disney and many children's tendency to conflate the "Disney World" with the real world. Like LaCroix said, kids "emotionally invest"in Disney's products, one of which is media. My personal experience with this phenomenon is vast. For a while, I thought Mulan was a 100% accurate depiction of the Hun Invasion. I wondered if John Smith ever came back to America to meet Pocahantas (I think I once asked a teacher if her tribe was the one the pilgrims ate with during the first Thanksgiving) and I most definitely thought Agrabah was a real place. I had little to no experience with Asian culture, no experience with Native American culture, and no experience with Middle Eastern culture. Disney filled a cultural void that was left by a very white American based media. Disney was all I had to connect to other cultures, but Disney was not really portraying any other culture-it was simply promoting the Disney version of other places, the version that fit into their movies, intrigued, but did not alienate, their viewers, and would make them the most money.

This problem with accurate representation is not Disney specific. Many TV shows and movies portray stereotypes of different people and cultures as the whole truth, in fact I question whether it is even possible to make a very 3D culture or people 2D 100% accurately. But, very view media outlets have the power and scope of Disney and this is where the main issue lies. How do we move past stereotypes and misrepresentations of other people and cultures if we literally grow up on them? This is an essential question because these misrepresentations prevent us both internally and externally. Externally, they can alienate us from other members of this culture because we approach them with stereotypes and internally they prevent us from learning.

While LaCroix focused on Disney's stereotyping and sexualization of ethnic women, I believe the broader issue is with Disney's stereotyping and misrepresentation of various groups and how these misrepresentations stick with children as they become adults and (hopefully) interact with people of different backgrounds. I think it's essential that we teach kids to separate the Lion King from Africa and Aladdin from the Middle East. While they're great movies, parents should remind their children that they're just movies. This is the first step to being able to fully embrace Disney movies and fully embrace other cultures.