Gender, Class and Ethnicity in the Disney Princesses Series – Kirsten Malfroid 1
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Universiteit Gent Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in the Disney Princesses Series Kirsten Malfroid Promotor: Masterproef ingediend met het oog op het behalen van de graad van Dr. Katrien De Moor Master in de Vergelijkende Moderne Letterkunde Academiejaar 2008 - 2009 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Real heroes and heroines stay in anonymity, but I would still like to extend some words of thankfulness to my family and friends, who “simply” were there with ceaseless support. I would also like to thank the Walt Disney Company, for releasing the movies that became my current material for analysis; my parents, for once taking me to the theater to see them; and Prof. dr. Àngels Carabí Ribera, who teaches at the University of Barcelona, for introducing me to “a whole new world” of gender studies to analyze them. In addition, Sebastian Loll deserves special mention for pointing to Donald Duck‟s collision with fascism, while Kasper Malfroid has spared me the desperation of trying to subdue Microsoft Office. But most of all, I am indebted to my promoter, dr. Katrien De Moor, who guided me with excellent advice and encouraging words until the end. Ghent, augustus 2009 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................ iii I. Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1 1. Research Question ............................................................................................ 1 2. Limitations ........................................................................................................ 2 3. Methodology ..................................................................................................... 3 II. Disney, Eisner, and the Twentieth Century .......................................................... 5 III. Analysis of the Disney Princesses .................................................................. 22 1. Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)............................. 23 2. Cinderella in Cinderella (1950) ...................................................................... 34 3. Aurora / Briar Rose in Sleeping Beauty (1959) .............................................. 43 4. Ariel in The Little Mermaid (1992) ................................................................ 47 5. Belle in Beauty and the Beast (1991) ............................................................. 56 6. Jasmine in Aladdin (1992) .............................................................................. 71 7. Pocahontas in Pocahontas (1995) .................................................................. 78 8. Mulan in Mulan (1998)................................................................................... 92 IV. Conclusion .................................................................................................... 109 V. Works cited ...................................................................................................... 113 1. Primary Sources ............................................................................................ 113 2. Secondary Sources ........................................................................................ 114 Gender, Class and Ethnicity in the Disney Princesses Series – Kirsten Malfroid 1 I. INTRODUCTION I have some confessions to make. As a prototypical child of the nineties, I was not only guilty of wearing the most hideous fluorescent leggings, or collecting the tackiest house and techno tracks, but also of suffering from a severe Disney addiction. Having personally experienced the 1990s Walt Disney revival – with its accumulation of new feature-length animated movies, and re-release of old Walt Disney “classics” – I remember being able to recite complete dialogues and act out entire scenes from my favourite movies with my brother and sister. Although Disney movies are generally regarded as innocent family entertainment by many parents, it could be frightening to discover the extent to which these scenes, repeatedly reviewed over many years, could have had an influence on and become tangled with millions of children‟s personal conceptions regarding issues such as gender, class, and ethnicity. For what if the content of Disney movies is not so innocent after all? 1. RESEARCH QUESTION What I want to investigate in this study is, foremost, the nature of ideological messages regarding gender, class and ethnicity, conveyed through Disney animated movies. First, I will outline the various possible sources responsible for the content of these movies. The two leading figures of the Walt Disney Company during the twentieth century, Walt Elias Disney and Michael Eisner, are considered as possible influences. In addition, the prevalent ideologies in the United States at the time of production are briefly addressed. The second and main part of this study consists of a detailed analysis of the depiction of the heroines from the Disney Princesses series, containing the movies Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1998). Lastly, I will briefly summarize possible evolutions that can be derived from the analysis, and compare them with the conclusions from previous research and the ideologies of the people that can be held responsible for the content of the movies, as mentioned at the beginning of this study. I will end by suggesting other potentially interesting topics for future analyses. Gender, Class and Ethnicity in the Disney Princesses Series – Kirsten Malfroid 2 2. LIMITATIONS Much scholarly research has already been written on Disney. I deliberately opted for an analysis of the medium of animated movies. George Gerbner and Larry Gross point at the power of the media in general to “[make] people perceive as real and normal and right that which fits the established order” (Gerbner and Gross cited in Hoisington n. pag.). According to Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, films in particular are known to “unconsciously reaffirm the ideological system in which they are created” (Comolli and Narboni cited in Hoisington n. pag.). While De Kuyper claims the medium of film already conveys certain messages by presenting characters first and foremost as physical, bodily entities, Paul Wells argues that animation, or caricature, has even more power in the ability to disproportionately enlarge certain details until reality is blurred (De Kuypercited in De Cuyper 77; Wells cited in De Cuyper 78). Jack Zipes too claims that animation has the power to manipulate the audience and even rob it of its own vision; Disney would have been twice as effective in blurring this aim with visual esthetics, humour and eroticism (Zipes cited in Coppens 58). As Elizabeth Bell observes, “nothing accidental or serendipitous occurs in animation as each second of action on screen is rendered in twenty-four different still paintings” (Bell 108). This I why I chose to focus on the animated Disney movies, instead of the combined animation and live-action movies, the Disney theme parks – as Deane Michelle Hoisington and Lynn E. Weiner did – or the Disney gadgets and consumer objects, as Kent A. Ono and Derek T. Buescher did. In addition, I choose not to include short-films or cartoons in my analysis, as Sam Abel did, nor sequels of previous Disney movies, which were for the most part directly released on home videos or DVDs. I did not try to capture the whole range of movies released by the Walt Disney Company, as Steven Coppens did, nor did I merely focus on the ones released during the last decades, like Veerle Van Oost, Libe Zarranz García, or Ken Gillam (the latter of which examined the masculine characters in Disney‟s Pixar movies). Instead, I opted for the so-called Disney Princesses series, because these are generally regarded as the most popular Disney movies among different generations due to their many re-releases. In addition, they were produced during the most successful decades of the Walt Disney Company. By combining all movies from the same series, instead of elaborately discussing Gender, Class and Ethnicity in the Disney Princesses Series – Kirsten Malfroid 3 one or two movies – like many scholars did1 – I tried to discern if these Disney movies demonstrated an evolution over the years. Within the movies of the Disney Princesses series, I decided to mainly focus on the female, adolescent protagonists, unlike Litsa Renée Tanner, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni Schindler Zimmerman, and Lori K. Lund, who examined the depiction of couples and families; Tom Robinson, Mark Callister, Dawn Magoffin, and Jennifer Moore, who looked at the portrayal of older characters; or Veerle Van Oost, who treated all characters. Other elaborately spun out characters (which mostly means they contribute largely to the movie‟s dialogues) are discussed whenever deemed relevant in relation to these protagonists. Although within Disney‟s fantasy world, the distinction between human characters, animals and animated objects is often unclear, I chose to only take into account the characters that are human or have predominantly human characteristics during most of the movie. Finally, I tried to complement already existing studies on the representation