With the preview of the teaser trailer for "Beauty and the Beast" premiering this past Monday, following the live-action installments of "Cinderella" and "The Jungle Book," it's time to take a long and hard look at classic Disney films and their role in perpetuating cultural stereotypes.
Try to think of a your favorite female Disney character. Is she a princess? How about a mermaid? Would you consider her a maiden? Now think about the way she looks. Imagine the fluttering eyelashes, coy expressions, large breasts, slender waistlines, flirtatious body language. Perhaps these descriptors ring a bell.
To say the image of females has changed over the course of movie-making would be a generous claim. Even with Disney Pixar’s acclaimed "Brave" we see how little the femininity depiction has evolved. Characters are damsels in distress, subjected to the judgement of the manly men in their lives.
Surely, some female characters are headstrong in their own right. Take Ariel from "The Little Mermaid." She stubbornly rebels against her father’s wishes in becoming human and goes after exactly what she wants. This seems to be an action of a driven, ambitious women. But let's evaluate why it's so important for her to become human. Naturally, it's so she can have a shot at her love -- the handsome, gentle, a little bit too dim-witted for his own good (I mean, can't he get a hint that Ariel's in love with him already?) Prince Eric, a man of course.
Needless to say, women’s features are not the only exaggerated looks in Disney movies. According to "Beauty and the Beast's" Gaston, men have “biceps to spare." And in the wonderful world of Disney, that they do. Picture bulging muscles, hairy chests, protective statures and dominant personalities. The eponymous characters in "Tarzan" and "Hercules" certainly fit the bill.
In addition to gender stereotyping, Disney has a long lineage of racial generalizations that have appeared since its earliest films. Subjected to these generalizations are African Americans, Asians, Middle Easterners, Jamaicans, Native Americans and Latinos. Animation is a perfect platform for caricatures, and such races and ethnicities are displayed with overblown characteristics and embellished diction.
In "The Jungle Book" for example, the orangutan King Louie sings, “I want to be a man, mancub...I wanna be like you.” In an unoriginal twist, the monkeys deviate from the other British-accented animals and instead communicate in swinging gibberish and jive. They live in the ghetto-esque part of the jungle and dream of being real people. So, yes, the monkeys serve as pretty blatant generalizations of African Americans.
"Lady and the Tramp" features a pair of yellow buck-toothed Siamese cats with almond-shaped eyes as quite the manipulative and devious duo. They speak in ridiculous Thai accents, so of course, they stereotype people of Asian background.
And then you have have Arabian people also poorly portrayed in Disney films, particularly in "Aladin". In the opening song “Arabian Nights," a small Arab merchant sang how he came from a land where, “They cut off your ear / If they don’t like your face.” The barbaric undertones did not go unmissed, and the lyric has sense been changed.
Other questions are the crab Sebastian from “The Little Mermaid,” the red Indian Chief from “Peter Pan” and the mischievous chihuahua Tito from “Oliver and Company.”
