Ian J. Gerig
University of Oregon
June, 2018
ABSTRACT
One could be forgiven for not expecting much out of Walter Elias Disney, but the man’s could be considered the epitome of the “American Dream.” Born the fourth son of a poor family in Chicago in 1901, Walt Disney would become the entrepreneurial equal of “Ford and Edison” (Schickel) by the time of his death due to his creation of the Walt Disney Company, an organization that had $22.45 billion in media revenue in 2016 alone (O’Reilly). Due to the company’s sheer size and cultural reach, it has been the subject of myriad of academic publications discussing the organization’s impact on human society. One area of discussion is that of cultural imperialism. The claim of my project is that the Walt Disney Company engages in cultural imperialism, (that is the imposing of the norms, morals and values of one culture onto another), where it not only appropriates another culture’s stories, but then “Americanizes” these stories by the insertion of characters who are distinctly American in their appearance, motivations and actions. The essential question I will be answering in this paper is: “how does this appropriation and subsequent Americanization of stories from non-American cultures results in furthering the dominance of American hegemonic power?”
Cultural Imperialism
In order to have such a discussion, it’s imperative that we have a strong understanding of both the concept of cultural imperialism and the many forms in which a nation or organization can participate. To Schiller, cultural imperialism “describes the sum of processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced… into shaping institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating center of the system” (Schiller, 1976). This “dominating center” can be many things, but for our purposes it most commonly it refers to a nation who through various means instills its culture, (that is its morals, ideas, norms, etc.), in place of a distinct local culture. While this can be done by violent or legal means, for the purposes of this paper, we will focus on the role that media play in cultural imperialism around the world. The classic Marxist view of the media is explained by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart in their work How to Read Donald Duck, that “in a society where one class controls the means of economic production, that class also controls the means of intellectual production; ideas, institutions… the very meaning of life.” As the world’s societies become further and further connected via travel and technology, this idea of cultural domination and imperialism is becoming a more visible issue for the general public as its process is rather visible. The Marxist argument says that nations that have more economic and technological resources, (e.g. the United States of America), are influencing and Americanizing the culture of the so-called “developing” nations, (and even those of “established” nations of Western Europe). The media studies community takes the Marxist model of economic and cultural power and applies it to the production and consumption, (and the means thereof), of media. As Michael Real discusses in his work Mass Mediated Culture: “the media tell people in the mass who they are… tell people what they want to be… tell people how to get that way… (and) they tell people how to feel they are that way even when they are not.” The media, in a sense, controls a person’s concept of themself. Media acts as the “infrastructure of persuasion” (Schiller, 1976). A person will relate every aspect of their existence to their experiences, and while this includes their “real world” experiences, much of it increasingly comes from the media. As Schiller quotes a TV editor of the Saturday Review: “entertainment programs give audiences cues as to what is valued in our society and how to behave. They’re really forms of education, of indoctrination” (Schiller, 1973). We commonly see this argument in the discussion on the portrayal of beauty standards and body image in media and the effects that these depictions can have on developing minds. For this paper -and indeed the entire field of media studies- we are simply taking this idea one step further and discuss how an entire culture can be transmitted and disseminated through media.
If we accept this dissemination as possible, how and why would such a cultural usurpation occur? To Schiller, there exists an international market for ideas much like any other commodity, and like other commodities, media are subject to the same capitalistic “constraints, or lack of them, as other sectors of industry”(Schiller, 1976). To tie this idea into the classic marxist approach to media, the “class” or country with the means of media production, (the money, equipment, etc.), will also have control over mental production. In a sense, to Schiller, the market of ideas is open to the highest bidder, or in this case the highest producer. In the case of cultural imperialism, these “highest bidders” are hard to pin down due to the abstract nature of ideas and social norms, but we generally focus on nations as a whole as the agents in culture production. It can be argued that this is simply an inevitability amongst nations that hope to have influence on the world stage. As Donald Lazere put it, “the society will develop a state religion which has a number of functions. One of them will be to try and disguise as much as possible the actual reality of the exercise of power and the factors that enter into it; and secondly, it will try to disguise and conceal the motivation that hides behind actions in the international arena — what they are intended to achieve — and what their consequences in fact are… The British Empire had its white man’s burden. The French Empire had its civilising mission, and the United States’ imperial system has had its own system of doctrines which all have to do with the unique benevolence of the United States,” and “its commitments to abstract ideals such as freedom” (Lazere). This sort of association of a nation with abstract ideas is what Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto calls “the nation-state,” from which “invented images” of native culture and national history emerge, (Yoshimoto). It’s these “invented images” which are then distributed around the world as the truth. The media may not say outright that the reality portrayed is the reality as it is, but to quote Bourdieu: “images have the peculiar capacity to produce what literary critics call a reality effect. They show things and make people believe in what they show” (Bourdieu). Reality is what media say it is. Media will self-reinforce by producing more media that reaffirms the reality shown previously, and this could result in the ideas of media-producing nations becoming the realities of the consuming nations. These ideas can have a multitude of effects. For starters, it could result in the replacement of native social norms with those of the colonizing nation, resulting in a hegemonic world culture. As a side effect of this hegemony, critical thinking and mass consciousness can be diminished in the general populace. As Schickel says in The Disney Version, “it is the business of art to expand consciousness, while it is the business of mass media to reduce it” (Schickel). When people are fed a steady stream of self-reinforcing ideas via media, their reality becomes more and more confined to the “reality” they’re presented, full of Baudrillardian simulacra created by media, where the signs and symbols of the real are substituted “for the real itself” (Baudrillard). This substitution will only further entrench the status quo of the conquering culture, and to men like Schiller, this would mean the pacification “of the working-people” and “catering for middle-class status” that is present in “all market societies” (Schiller, 1976). With the United States being the single most powerful and “marketable” culture on Earth, (if measured by means of media production and distribution), the international worry of the “Americanization” of the globe is hardly one to be ignored. To the United States, the pinnacle of human achievement, (or at least the one supported by American media), is the “American way of life” and the “American Dream,” which to Dorfman and Mattelart are simply “the manner in which the U.S. dreams and redeems itself and then imposes that dream upon others for its own salvation” (Dorfman). This image is proliferated through media, which we’ve established are encoded with “belief systems” and “constructions of reality” (Brode), and can influence people and cultures around the world to strive to be “American.”
Why Disney?
Up to this point, we have mainly focused on a broad, theoretical view of cultural imperialism instead of focusing on specific examples of media or organizations. While it is important that we established a general overview and base of understanding as to what cultural imperialism and the mechanisms by which it works, it is not some theoretical abstraction of a country that produces media but rather the companies and people within a nation that create and dictate cultural norms via their media creations. As previously discussed, it is the wealthier, more powerful nations whose media creators have the necessary means at their disposal to impart their nation’s cultural norms onto a foreign culture and in much the same way it is the wealthier, more powerful companies within these nations that hold the greatest potential influence over their own and foreign cultures. Ergo the single greatest reason that the Walt Disney Company is so frequently discussed as one of the chief cultural imperializers is simply the monetary power and diversity of media that are at the company’s disposal. Cypher and Higgs said that the Disney Company is engaged in “a colonization of imagination,” and when the true reach of the Disney Company is discussed, it is easy to see just how a conclusion can be reached, (and indeed how it is hard to come to any other conclusion). It begins when children are young with channels such as Disney Junior and Disney XD. In his book Disney Culture, John Willis claims that: “spoon-fed from birth on such programming, children no longer learn to imagine for themselves… Starting as a culture of distraction and escape, Disney becomes the mainstream reality” (Willis). This complete stranglehold is not solely because of programming aimed at the very young; rather, its strength comes from constant reinforcement and an inability to escape the company’s approved programming. After a child grows out of programming such as that seen on Disney Junior, (and in such characters as Winnie the Pooh), the company’s expansive feature-length animation becomes a highly popular, (and profitable), entertainment option. The key to the company’s complete control over the media market is that it does not limit itself solely to the child demographic. Do you like science fiction? No worry, the Disney company provides the Star Wars franchise for your enjoyment. Prefer comic books? The expansive Marvel franchise has released 20 movies and television shows since its acquisition by Disney in 2009, (IMDB “All Marvel”). Would you simply like to watch a less “categorized” film? Touchstone Pictures provides a wide-range of films for your enjoyment, (and will soon be joined by 20th Century Fox under the Disney umbrella). Are you a sports person? Disney owns ABC and ESPN, the self-proclaimed “worldwide leader in sports.” All this is simply to say that the Disney Company has become a media giant in any audience demographic that you could imagine, and as such wields an immense amount of power in the minds of a populace that could conceivably be entertained at every phase of their life by this singular company. As Schickel said, the company “has placed a Mickey Mouse hat on every developing personality in America. As capitalism, it is a work of genius; as culture, it is mostly a horror” (Schickel).
But how has one company achieved such control over the entertainment of so many different demographics? Credit must be given where credit is due, and the Disney Company’s products have long been considered as entertaining and high quality, but this same quality is part of the reason the company is so frequently accused of furthering American cultural imperialism. The company has made a concerted effort to make their products accessible to people in foreign markets. Their movie Tarzan was dubbed in over 35 languages, (Wasko), and this “localization” is credited by a Buena Vista (a Disney-owned distributor) executive as allowing the Disney Company “to take our movies around the world and make them sound like local movies” (Wasko, “Understanding”). As such, Disney products “don’t appear as an imposition from outside the local system but rather as a prolongation or continuation, as something that naturally adheres to fit within local culture” (Wasko, 2006). While one cannot necessarily fault the Disney Company for trying to expand its consumer base, this expansion has placed the Disney Company as “the standard by which local and regional productions are judged” (Wasko, 2006). This can not only lead to a stunting of developing local media producers that cannot compete with the Disney giant, but can also cause harm to the traditional stories that the Disney Company has reinterpreted to better suit the American palate. Then, due to “Disney’s technical wizardry,” these “reinterpreted” tales become the “definitive accounts” of the story, (Bryman). Not only that, they influence the very way we look at the medium of the fairy tale. In his work Breaking the Disney Spell, Jack Zipes said: “It was not once upon a time, but at a certain time in history… that Walt Disney cast a spell on the fairy tale, and he has held it captive ever since… Walt Disney imprinted ‘a particular American vision on the fairy tale through his animated films that dominates our perspective today’ because of which we ‘see and read classical tales through his lens,’” (Zipes). The sheer popularity of Disney’s films, a result of decades of cutting edge technical mastery and reputation, “has obfuscated the names of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Carlo Collodi,” in favor of Walt Disney, (Zipes). “Appropriation does not occur without violence to the rhetorical text created in the oral tales” (Zipes) and by reinterpreting the stories, the damage the Disney Company has done to the original texts has, in effect, destroyed the original or “classic” versions in favor of their own. As Zipes said in his work, Happily Ever After: “the Disney Studios have been able to retain a market stranglehold on fairy-tale films up to the present. Any filmmaker who has endeavored to adapt a fairy tale for the screen… has had to live up to the Disney standard and try to go beyond it” (De Graaf).
Now, one may question how the Disney Company’s reinterpretation differs from the work of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. After all, the works of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm were not original works but rather adaptations of European folklore. Kay Stone relates the effect that print and film have on oral tales, saying they both “combine text and texture in an unchanging unity,” that strips the oral tale of the direct human context that is present in each retelling of an oral tale (Stone). However, there are two major differences between the work of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm and that of Walt Disney. First, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm were adapting stories that were a part of their own native culture, while Disney was adapting foreign tales to better suit American sensibilities, stripping them of their cultural context and stripping the story from the culture itself. “Seldom did (Walt Disney) reflect the book’s theme or original characters with accuracy… He was simply concerned with finding a good story that could be simplified and Americanized for his audience” (May). Second, Disney’s chosen medium of film fully removes the intimate and unique process of imagination that reading provides despite its seeming rigidity. Instead of a viewer producing a character’s image in their minds, they are given the exact character that the Disney Company felt appropriate. This severance of the last personal connection and context to story provides simply one version to viewers, the Disney version.
Despite any ill-effects that may come about by the practices of the Disney Company, the company enjoys a relatively unsullied and pristine reputation as the paragon of family-friendly entertainment. “Disney is universal,” a Greek participant in the Global Disney Audiences Project (G.D.A.P.) said. “It belongs to (and promotes) the little souls of the children in the world” (Wasko, 2006). This Greek participant certainly is not alone in their optimistic view of the Disney Company. According to Mark Phillips, “the vast majority” of participants in the G.D.A.P. “remain loyal to Disney. They compartmentalize different aspects of Disney and while they may disdain one part they continue to embrace other Disney offerings” (Wasko, 2006). A final finding from the G.D.A.P. was that “more than 93 percent of the respondents agreed that Disney promoted fun and fantasy, while more than 88 percent agreed on happiness, magic and good over evil” (Wasko,“Challenging”). In the mind of public opinion, the Disney Company is different, and while there may be strong evidence to the contrary, it is not so much reality that matters as it is perceived reality. To most, Disney is wholesome, a shining light in the sea of modern media depravity. As Dorfman and Mattelart put it, “there are automagic antibodies in Disney. They tend to neutralize criticism because they are the same values already instilled into people” (Dorfman). Through the lifelong consumption of media discussed earlier, the Disney Company has imprinted the idea of Disney virtue onto the public consciousness both at home and abroad.
If I am correct in claiming that the Disney Company is no less wholesome than any other media producer, then how did they earn that reputation? While the lifelong consumption of Disney media is a part of it, it does not tell the whole story. The Disney Company was at one point controlled by Walt Disney himself, and was highly influenced by the man’s personal views of values, ethics and of America itself. To Brockway, “Disney was attuned to the soul of Middle America; he shared its values himself and was exceptionally sensitive to its changing moods” (Brockway). Disney certainly felt a deep love for his country, saying that “I believe in emphasizing the story of what made America great” (Willis). A man who detested communism, Disney “emerged as champion of conservatism and McCarthyism,” going so far as to become an “FBI informant” and testify “before the House of Un-American Activities Committee… smearing a range of organizations and employees as enemies of the state” (Willis). To Taxel, Disney’s value system is one of “individualism, advancement through self-help, strict adherence to the work ethic, and the supreme optimism in the possibility of the ultimate improvement of society through the progressive improvement of humankind” (Wasko, “Understanding”). These all-American values are present in Disney films with Schickel calling them “clean, moral, simple and innocent stories,” but to some the repercussions of these stories are anything but innocent and stress “the evisceration of social meaning and the reinforcement of the status quo” (Schiller, 1973). One only needs to take a quick stroll down Main Street USA in Disneyland to see a world of false nostalgia and saccharine sentimentality towards a reality that never truly existed. It is a world of “Disney realism.” As one imagineer explained, “what we create is ‘Disney realism,’ sort of utopian in nature where we carefully program out all the negative, unwanted elements and program in all the positive elements” (Wasko, “Understanding”). As unpleasant as these negatives are, they are reality, and to ignore or otherwise minimize their impact is to further them. As we have discussed, media determine reality, and so for a first-world company such as Disney to present such a romanticised and idealistic world in its media is highly problematic as it furthers the status quo in nations with high economic and social disparities. Schiller’s “transcendent Disney message” of “behold a world in which there is no social conflict” (Bryman) joins the Disney Company’s “traditional American values” as the ammo for cultural imperialism.
Foreign Stories, American Characters
This realm of pleasantness and American values may not have much of a base in reality, but it is the very foundation of the image the Disney Company has based itself upon. To fulfill the company’s mission of creating a “small, small world” of media consumers, they need to round out the edges of cultural reality to make a more hegemonic populace. While the basic underlying idea may be considered utopian, (“we’re all the same”), it becomes problematic when the harsh realities of the human existence, (the effects of racism, slavery, discrimination on modern populations), is cast aside in an attempt at reconciliation. It can be seen as a form of rationalization for the sins of the past without the recognition that such sins occured, and that is viewing the thought with the benefit of the doubt. Viewed more cynically, the Disney Company’s softening of culture can be seen as simply cultural imperialism. Greg Metcalf said that the Disney Company sees history and non-American cultures “as a raw material to be shaped into a Disney product. Historical fact or cultural specificity is jettisoned if it impedes the formula or might challenge the audience’s presumptions. The end result is that the films teach their audiences that everyone across time and cultures is essentially American, sharing the same values as those in the U.S.” (Metcalf, 2010). Rather than divide and conquer, the Disney Company has chosen the route of combining the world into one homogenous population. Dorfman speculated that the Disney empire was attempting to absorb Latin America by “diluting its identity, reducing it from being the ‘other’ to being ‘just like us,” (Nuhfer-Halten). Considering that Dorfman and Mattelart’s work How To Read Donald Duck was banned in Chile after an American-backed regime change, they might have been on to something. Regardless, one facet of the the embracement of the world into the American cultural hegemony by the Disney Company is through their Americanized retellings of classic tales from foreign cultures in the company’s media. One technique that the Disney Company uses to adapt these foreign stories to American tastes is by the insertion of one or more distinctly “American” characters into these non-American stories. What makes a character “American” can be any number of things. It could be the way they look, the clothes they wear, the way they talk, the words they speak, their motivations, their moral inclinations, or any other number of traits that, and this is key, when viewed in the context of a foreign story appear unmistakably American. To illustrate this idea, we will discuss American characters that the Disney Company has placed into three originally culturally non-American tales throughout the company’s history and examine the effect that these characters have on the characters around them and the story into which they have been inserted. The characters chosen have been chosen to fully represent the decades-long Disney Company practice of cultural appropriation. The first character, Jiminy Cricket appears in 1940’s Pinocchio, Walt Disney’s second feature-length animated film. Secondly, we’ll look at Baloo from Disney’s The Jungle Book, (1967), which was the last film produced by Walt Disney himself before his death; and lastly, we will examine the Genie and the titular character from Disney’s Aladdin, (1992), which was produced near the beginning of Disney’s foray into computer animation. One important note is that we will not bog ourselves down in the comparisons between the original stories and their Disneyfied counterparts beyond a rather superficial level. Instead, we will focus on the individual characters in the Disney versions of the stories.
The story of Pinocchio first appeared in a serial that ran from 1881 to 1882 by an Italian author named Carlo Collodi and in 1983 the story was completed and made into a novel titled “The Adventures of Pinocchio.” In Collodi’s original, there is indeed a cricket who warns Pinocchio about the dangers of disobedience and indulgence, but the cricket remains unnamed and is promptly killed by Pinocchio after he insults the puppet, (Collodi). Though the cricket does return briefly as a ghost to warn Pinocchio of his actions, the character is quite limited and could hardly be considered a major character in the story. In contrast, in Disney’s Pinocchio, the cricket is arguably more important than the titular puppet as he serves as the audience’s guide to the story through narration and frequent fourth-wall breaking. In Disney’s version, he is named Jiminy Cricket, (a minced oath that can be heard in Disney’s 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), and is given the role of Pinocchio’s conscience by The Blue Fairy. The movie begins with Jiminy singing “When You Wish Upon a Star” followed by his asking the audience: “I bet a lot of you folks don’t believe that about a wish coming true. Well I didn’t either.” To William Paul, this establishes Jiminy as the audience’s surrogate in the story, as the audience’s “identification figure.” He’s “urban, rational, skeptical, he is our guide through a world of magic, natural and supernatural” (Paul). Jiminy Cricket is immediately seen as “one of us” in a strange European-inspired world. This dichotomy is further driven home when one considers that the two human antagonists, (Stromboli and the Coachman), are both demonstrably European. Stromboli talks in a thick Italian accent and uses laughably over-animated gestures while the Coachman’s plump appearance, cherry nose, small hat, and red jacket would brand him as British even without his English accent. These details were not lost to Peter Schweizer who called this portrayal of Europeans “submerged nationalistic propaganda” (Schweizer). We then compare these to Jiminy Cricket, (who was voiced by Cliff Edwards, an American jazz musician), and their stereotypical depictions become all the more pronounced. Jiminy Cricket, the “chatty insect with Chaplinesque behaviors” (Willis), is the all-American tramp, and it appears that he wasn’t meant to be much of a cricket at all. Jiminy’s designer Ward Kimball remarked that he had drawn “a little man, really, wearing spats and a tailcoat… the audience accepts him as a cricket because the other characters say he is” (Kanfer). This rather upper class appearance, (Kimball said Jiminy “looked like Mr. Pickwick” (Kanfer)) is not Jiminy’s only look. In the first scene Jiminy wears a weird amalgamation of ratty clothes. His feet stick through his torn shoes, he wears a decrepit top hat, fingerless gloves, a frequently patched jacket, and a faded pink umbrella which he uses as a cane in the manner of Chaplin’s tramp persona. In fact, Paul says Jiminy “recalls Chaplin’s tramp, but a hint of a brighter urban past also marks him as a depression hobo” (Paul). When Jiminy speaks, he sticks out his chest, speaks loudly and gestures like a carnival barker. “A wanderer easily distracted from his set goals” (Paul), Jiminy flirts with the wood carver’s female figures and is generally the victim of slapstick gags throughout the film. He frequently broadcasts his frustration to the audience, becoming a lovable and relatable character. He’s the bumbling tramp, a victim of circumstance but picks himself up time and again. For a nation just years removed from the Great Depression, Jiminy was a beacon of American optimism in a time of rising conflict in Europe. “When You Wish Upon a Star served as a Disneyfied national anthem” (Willis), and while in its time the movie did not gain traction in Europe due to the war, the movie’s portrayal of the American Jiminy, especially in contrast to the European Stromboli and Coachmen, furthered the notion of American exceptionalism and the cause of cultural imperialism, to the extent that Collodi’s nephew “tried unsuccessfully to bring action against Walt Disney due to the Americanization of Pinocchio” (Consolo).
The Jungle Book holds the peculiar distinction of being a product of imperialism in its truest form. Written in 1894, the series of short stories that comprised The Jungle Book were authored by Rudyard Kipling, a man who George Orwell called “a jingo imperialist… morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting” (Orwell). Kipling was himself a product and actor of British imperialism in India around the turn of the century, and so Disney’s 1967 film The Jungle Book, while being a work of American cultural imperialism on India, is appropriating an imperially anglicised story set in India. Much like the Disney adaptation of Pinocchio, The Jungle Book, (which will from hereon refer to the Disney film unless noted), is only tenuously related to its source material. According to Allan, the movie “owes little to Kipling’s original,” and that “Disney told his artists to forget the book and get on with their own version” (Allan). As P.L. Travers concisely put it: “it is as though they took a sausage, threw away the contents but kept the skin, and filled that skin with their own ideas very far away from the original substance” (Allan). One of these Disney, (i.e. American), ideas is the character of Baloo. While there was a bear in Kipling’s original that shared the same name, Disney’s Baloo is a quintessentially American character. Much like Jiminy Cricket, Baloo is a surrogate caretaker for the film’s child protagonist, (an Indian child named Mowgli). In fact, Greg Metcalf makes this connection claiming that Mowgli can be seen as Pinocchio “sans shellac” (Metcalf, 1991). To further the Baloo — Jiminy Cricket comparison, Baloo’s voice actor, (Phil Harris), was also an American jazz musician, a fact that was not lost on Richard Schickel, who was clearly referring to Baloo when he said: “the jungle animals are, in the film, turned into familiar American types making familiar American jokes and singing songs intended for the top of the pop charts” (Schickel). Indeed, Baloo’s song “The Bare Necessities” was nominated for an Academy Award in 1968 (IMDB, “Awards”). The song, (a jazzy arraignment much more suitable for New Orleans than India), stresses appreciating the small things in life, which could be construed as a message of “be happy with what you have” from the bourgeoise media producers to the general public. More likely, the song is meant to emphasize the “hipness” of Baloo, who despite being from the jungles of India is the embodiment of the hepcat character. Baloo is the only character who frequently uses nicknames for other characters in the film, referring to the rather uptight Bagheera as “Baggy” and to Mowgli as “Little Britches.” Indeed, the contrast between the American hepcat Baloo and the uptight British Bagheera is impossible to miss. In his work It’s a Jungle Book Out There Kid!: The Sixties in Walt Disney’s “The Jungle Book,” Greg Metcalf examines Disney’s 1967 film as an allegory to the politics and culture of the 1960s. To Metcalf, the free-spirited Baloo and the dour Bagheera serve as examples of different parenting types present in the real world. Baloo is the overly permissive father, “as much as a pal as a parent to Mowgli,” who “likes the monkeys’ jazz music and hip speech as much as they do,” while Bagheera “is the stern parent who wants what is best for the child” (Metcalf, 1991). For a Goldwater Republican such as Disney, the hepcat Baloo is not an example of parenting that is to be emulated, and throughout The Jungle Book it is made quite clear that “stern, not overly rigid parenting, triumphs” (Metcalf, 1991). It is “Baloo’s permissiveness that allows Mowgli to be captured by the monkeys,” and it is Bagheera who intervenes to save the boy, (Metcalf, 1991). To Metcalf, the monkeys that capture Baloo are caricatures of African Americans as evidenced by their accents, speech patterns and overall designs, and Bagheera’s rescue of Mowgli from the monkeys brings to mind the saving of white youth from the influence of non-white, non-American middle class value systems. This condemnation of the permissive, socially liberal hepcat Baloo furthers the cause of the typical American value of self-reliance so frequently praised in Disney media and results in a story so far removed from its setting that one consciously forgets its Asian location. The main characters speak with either American, (e.g. Baloo, Mowgli), or British, (Shere Khan, Bagheera), accents, and fit into standard American character types. These objectively “white” characters are brought to the forefront while more native characters are nowhere to be found in the generic jungle setting. This is simply a continuation of the trend in American media where “underdeveloped countries exist only as a backdrop for the heroic adventures or exotic vacations of white Americans” (Lazere). Disney’s Baloo is nothing like Kipling’s. Disney has made him American, and in so doing made the story American.
The Jungle Book would be the last Disney film that Walt Disney would ever work on as he died several months before it was released in theaters. The company though would move on without the man whose been called “the most significant figure in graphic art since Leonardo” (Waller) into what has been dubbed the “Disney Dark Age” which generally is considered to have lasted from 1970 to around 1990. During these two decades, the Disney Company released a series of films that never quite met the standards set by their predecessors, and while some films earned at least modest critical and commercial success, ( e.g. 1986’s The Great Mouse Detective), some were abject failures, (e.g. 1985’s The Black Cauldron). At the turn of the decade, the fortunes of Disney animation were on the rise with animated classics such as The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast being critical and box office hits, and it was in this environment that Disney’s Aladdin was born. Very loosely based on a traditional Arabic folktale, the film deals with the story of a street urchin named Aladdin who, with the help of a genie, wins the heart of Princess Jasmine. Despite the film’s critical and financial success, many have criticised the film for stereotypical and offensive depictions of Arabs and Islam and for being “a bigoted and quite traditional European reading/writing of the medieval Persian story” (Addison). The titular character Aladdin “exemplifies swagger, spunk and optimism,” was “modeled on the Tom Cruise character in the patriotic film Top Gun” (Cooperson) and is referred to as the notably anglicised “Al” by the genie. A young, handsome, clean-shaven man with perfect teeth and an American accent, he stands in complete contrast with the rest of the men shown in the movie who, with very, very few exceptions, speak with a foreign accents, possess facial hair and incredibly large noses. One could argue that the accents and facial hair design choices were simply meant as a more accurate representation of Middle Eastern culture. After all, Walt Disney himself said “rather than a caricature of individuals, our work is a caricature of life” (Brode). However, if the Disney Company was simply going for a more realistically designed cartoon, why didn’t the main character receive such a treatment? Why does Aladdin appear as a slightly darker version of your typical American boy-next-door? The easy answer is also the most likely: it’s to provide to the viewer an eastern flavor in an otherwise familiar and easily digestible American story. To Bezhani, Aladdin’s appearance underlines “how much more an Americanized character is perceived as a hero in contrast to a foreign character by Disney’s standards” (Bezhani). The entirety of the Disney version of the story and its depictions of Arabic/Islamic life are written from the point of view of American cultural exceptionalism. In the opening scene, a traveling merchant is singing about the “faraway place” in which the story occurs “where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” Unsurprisingly, the lyrics offended many viewers and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee “insisted that Disney change the lyrics,” and “after some consideration, two of the three lines were changed to: ‘where it’s flat and immense, and the heat is intense, it’s barbaric, but hey, it‟s home’” (Setiawati). Notably, Disney kept the “barbaric” line in the film which suggests that they truly do view the land and culture as “barbaric.” Also notable is the seemingly innocuous line of the merchant singing of his “faraway” home. Faraway from what, exactly? Certainly not his physical location in the film, so it’s to be assumed that he’s referring to the location’s distance to the American audience, disconnecting them further from the depictions in the film. This “faraway” and “barbaric” land is where we find our all-American hero Aladdin who faces the rather cliched task of winning the hand of the princess.
In order to do so, our hero teams up with the wisecracking Genie voiced by Robin Williams. To Metcalf, Genie “is a narratively unexplained spectacle of decontextualized media reflecting the manner in which a djinni, (a spirit life form that exists on a parallel plane in a complex social existence according to Islamic tradition), is stripped of historical and social context to become a source of entertainment that promises to satisfy the viewer’s wishes” (Metcalf, 2010). Metcalf goes even further than this saying that “Genie is the physical manifestation of the contemporary American mediated culture, the McWorld promise of instant gratification and constant simulation that ultimately refers only back to itself” (Metcalf, 2010). The Genie is the movie’s comic relief character, and with the indomitable Robin Williams as the voice actor, Genie runs through a veritable gauntlet of pop-culture references and imitations of icons such as “Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arsenio Hall, Groucho Marx (in black and white), Robert De Niro, Peter Lorre, and William F. Buckley Jr., who shows up to explain a few Latinate limitations on Aladdin’s wishes” (Daly). By Metcalf’s count, there are no fewer than 52 characters performed by the Genie throughout the film, constantly reinforcing the idea that American media and values transcend time and culture. Genie is not so much a specific American character type as he is the physical embodiment of American media at large interacting with the strange, foreign backdrop of Agrabah as he helps the all-American kid overcome “barbaric” customs to win the girl of his dreams.
Is it a Small World After All?
For over 80 years the Walt Disney Company has been producing cutting-edge feature-length animated films that have allowed the company to become the media giant it is today. Due to the company’s size and influence, it has been the subject of many a discussion on its cultural impact both in the United States and abroad. With the Disney Company’s Americanization of foreign stories, the company stands as one of the foremost culprits in the expansion of American cultural imperialism. Throughout this paper, we’ve discussed how the Disney Company’s insertion of typical American characters into foreign stories not only damages the validity of the original, but strips the story of its cultural context and replaces it with American values, ideals and social norms. As Schaffer states: “the United States government no longer has the monopoly on the touting of America’s conquest of the world; Mickey Mouse and the other Disney characters do it for them, making imperialism that much cuter” (Schaffer). Despite the harm to foreign cultures brought about by the Disney Company, I feel that it is important to note though that outside of the value of consumerism, (a value that next to every company intentionally promotes), there probably is not a conscious effort by the Disney Company to promote American ideals at the expense of foreign ones through their character design and story alterations. As Walt Disney once stated, “we just try to make a good picture, and then the professors come along and tell us what we do” (Bryman). Disney also said that “we have but one thought, and that is for good entertainment” (Schickel). Now this is by no means saying that the damage done to foreign cultures and their peoples by the Disney Company is diminished simply because cultural imperialism wasn’t Disney’s main intent. As Wasko states: “even though creators of popular cultural products may have admirable, non-racist goals, nevertheless, we are left with their creations, not their intentions” (Wasko, “Understanding”). It is also not saying that the company did not/does not insert American values and characters into their media and that these insertions further the spread of American cultural imperialism. It does, and they do. Rather, this defense of the Disney Company is saying that the value changes made simply reflect those values that were socially ingrained in Walt Disney, his writers, his animators, the employees at the Disney Company and the American populace at large. As Schickel once said of Walt Disney: “he came always as a conqueror, never as a servant. It is a trait, as many have observed, that many Americans share when they venture into foreign lands hoping to do good but equipped only with knowhow instead of sympathy and respect for alien traditions” (Shickel). “The flaws in the Disney version of the American vision were hardly unique to him. They are flaws that have crept into it over the decades and they are the flaws almost universally shared by the masses of the nation’s citizens” (Schickel). The Disnification of foreign stories and cultures is both a symptom and a cause of American cultural imperialism, and as Dorfman and Mattelart said: “Disnification is dollarfication” (Dorfman). A true shift in American cultural imperialism would include media producers like the Disney Company, but it would also necessitate a complete social reconditioning of the American populace. Once the genie’s out of the lamp, it’s hard to stuff it back in.
Bibliography
Addison, E. (1993). Saving Other Women from Other Men: Disney’s Aladdin. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 11(1 (31)), 4–25.
Addison’s work discusses the problematic portrayals of Arabs, Islam and the Middle East in Disney’s Aladdin. In addition to the topic of racism and traditional east vs west cultural conflict, the essay examines the portrayal of women in the film especially in the context of Aladdin as an “American” character winning the “Eastern” Princess Jasmine.
Allan, R. (1999). Walt Disney and Europe. Visual Resources, 14(3), 275–295.
This book by Robin Allan takes a look at how Disney Company films were influenced by the European stories they were based upon and includes first-hand accounts from ex-Disney employees.
Baudrillard, J. (1988). Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster. Cambridge and Stanford Polity and Stanford University Press, UK.
This collection of Baudrillard’s writings includes his discussion of simulacra and simulations, a subject I discuss in my paper. Baudrillard, a French sociologist, theorist and cultural critic, is one of more well known postmodernist writers.
Bezhani, K. (2015, April 10). Walt Disney’s Linguistic Portrayal Of Aladdin and America by Kristi Bezhani (H. Lowe, Ed.). Retrieved March 18, 2018, from: https://sites.temple.edu/americanicons/2015/04/10/walt-disneys-linguistic-portrayal-of-aladdin-and-america-by-kristi-bezhani/
This short piece provides arguments for how the main protagonists in Walt Disney’s film Aladdin were made “American” in contrast to the background characters and how such portrayals are problematic.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). On Television (P. Parkhurst Ferguson, Trans.).
On Television by Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist and philosopher, provides a critique of the power that media can have over the collective mind of a nation. This source will contribute an academic view of how a media giant like Disney can influence culture via media proliferation.
Brockway, R. W. (1993). Myth From the Ice Age to Mickey Mouse. SUNY Press.
This piece by Brockway discusses western myths and conceptions of myth from paleolithic times to the present day.
Brode, D. (2005). Multiculturalism and the mouse: Race and sex in Disney entertainment. University of Texas Press.
Brode’s work discusses representation of race, gender and sexual orientation in Disney media.
Bryman, A. (2003). Disney & His Worlds. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
This book gives an overview of the Disney Company with particular emphasis on the theme parks and their relevance to American culture. The book also takes a look into the life and values of Walt Disney and his company.
Collodi, C. (1986). The Adventure of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
This is a translation of the original tale of Pinocchio.
Consolo, S. (2012). The Myth of Pinocchio. In K. Pizzi (Ed.), Pinocchio, Puppets, and Modernity: The Mechanical Body(pp. 163–174). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
This work by Consolo analyzes the character of Pinocchio both in the original Italian story and Disney’s adaptation.
Cooperson, M. (2006). The Monstrous Birth of “Aladdin”. U. Marzolph (Ed.), The Arabian Nights Reader. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
The Arabian Nights Reader is a collection of scholarly work inspired by the work of Arabian folklore One-Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Cooperson’s essay compares and contrasts Disney’s interpretation of the tale of Aladdin with two other earlier western film interpretations and the problematic alterations of the original tale and depictions of the Middle East within.
Cypher, J., & Higgs, E. (2001). Colonizing the Imagination: Disney’s Wilderness Lodge. Critical Studies, 15, 403–424.
This work by Cypher and Higgs investigates how the Disney Company’s creates and sells experiences to its customers, and how it constructs hyper realities that exclude those parts of reality that the company finds unappealing. This ties in with my the idea of the company constructing a “small world” of American ideals that is discussed in my paper.
Daly, Steve (September 4, 1992). “The Aladdin Gamble”. Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved March 16, 2007.
This piece takes a critical look at the characters in Disney’s Aladdin including the titular character and his friend the genie.
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This thesis discusses how Disney adaptations of classic, non-American fairy tales have on the original versions. More specifically, the paper examines whether the Disney name has usurped the original authors’ in the mind of the general public. The paper also examines the field of Disney studies and the critiques leveled at the company throughout its existence.
Dorfman, A., & Mattelart, A. (1991). How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney comic. Intl General.
This book-length essay is a Marxist discussion on Disney comics being used as an instrument of cultural imperialism. Dorfman, a Chilean author and academic, and Mattelart, a Belgian scholar and sociologist, both have the academic understanding to make informed judgements on the matter of cultural imperialism and media and both bring a non-American cultural perspective. As such, I feel this is potentially the most relevant source possible on this subject.
IMDB. All Marvel Movies in Chronological Order. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/list/ls020525837/
This website lists all Marvel films in chronological order, allowing us to pinpoint how many have been made since the Disney Company acquired the franchise in 2009.
IMDB. Awards. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061852/awards
This website shows that the song “The Bare Necessities” was nominated for an academy Award in 1968.
Kanfer, S. (2000). Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story. Da Capo Press.
Kanfer’s book discusses the history of animation and its cultural impact throughout history. The book dedicates a good portion of the book to Walt Disney and includes discussion of harmful stereotypes in Disney media along with a discussion of Walt Disney’s personality and values.
Lazere, D. (Ed.). (1987) From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli. In D. Lazere (Ed.), American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives. Berkeley, CA: Univ of California Press.
This book contains discussion on cultural imperialism writ large and is a good source for the background context needed for my paper. This collection contains essays that discuss the effects that media and culture have on each other.
May, J. (1981). Walt Disney’s Interpretation of Children’s Literature. Language Arts, 58(4), 463–472. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41961352
In this work, Jill P. May discusses Disney’s adaptations of stories and how Disney’s “formula,” (which covers everything from general story themes to character designs to dialogue), could do damage to the original story. In addition, this piece is a general critique of the Disney catalogue, the man and company behind it, and the effect they had on the American literary consciousness.
Metcalf, G. (1991). It’s A Jungle Book Out There, Kid!”: The Sixties in Walt Disney’s” The Jungle Book. Studies in Popular Culture, 14(1), 85–97.
Written by Greg Metcalf, this article argues that the differences between Disney’s 1967 film The Jungle Book and Rudyard Kipling’s original collection of stories are intentional allegories to Walt Disney’s views of the world of the sixties. This piece provides arguments for how Disney appropriated and changed the stories of another culture to match his American cultural values.
Metcalf, G. (2010). Them Like Us, Then Like Now: The Translation of the Historical And the Non-U.S. in Disney’s Animated Films. In K. McDonald (Ed.), Americanization of History: Conflation of Time and Culture in Film and Television. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
In this essay, Metcalf discusses how Disney has transformed “stories from other times and other cultures into ‘timeless’ stories grounded in the personalities and values of the American present.” Metcalf also discusses how in many Disney films there is an American character acting as the American audience’s surrogate in the foreign world they find themselves in, (e.g. the American-accented Arthur in The Sword and the Stone’s Arthurian Dark Aged England setting). This piece’s central argument is incredibly similar to mine, and as such the essay helped strengthen the arguments used in my paper.
Musker, J., & Clements, R. (Directors), Musker, J., & Clements, R. (Producers), & Musker, J., Clements, R., Menken, A., Ashman, H., Rice, T., Weinger, S., . . . Larkin, L. (Writers). (1992). Aladdin.
Aladdin was one of the films I discussed in the paper.
Nuhfer-Halten, B. (2010). Beyond the Ratoncito. Learning from Mickey, Donald and Walt: Essays on Disney’s Edutainment Films, 209.
This piece discusses the history of the Disney Company and Latin America both in the relation between Disney’s works/actions in the context of the international diplomacy at the time and the goals that the company had for the continent. The work also discusses the cultural affects the company had on the region and on western, (i.e. American) views of its people..
O’Reilly, L. (2016, May 31). The 30 Biggest Media Companies in the World. Retrieved February 20, 2018, from http://www.businessinsider.com/the-30-biggest-media-owners-in-the-world-2016-5
This article provides us with a small peek into the economic side of the Disney Company.
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A writer whose works frequently discussed issues such as social inequality in his work, Orwell was born in India to English parents much like Kipling, and as such has a unique perspective on Kipling’s literary portrayals of India.
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Paul discusses Disney’s use of music and Disney’s portrayals of nature as they relate to the works’ central themes, morals and how these reflect the Disney Company and Walt Disney himself.
Real, M. R. (1977). Mass-Mediated Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Professor Michael Real’s work analyzes the intersection of media, consumption, culture and politics. Mass-Mediated Culture is a common textbook in university media studies courses.
Reitherman, W. (Director), Disney, W. (Producer), & Clemmons, L., Wright, R., Anderson, K., & Gerry, V. (Writers). (1967). The Jungle Book.
Disney’s film The Jungle Book was one of the works discussed.
Schaffer, S. (1996). Disney and the Imagineering of Histories. Postmodern Culture, 6(3).
This essay by Schaffer discusses how Disney “perverts” local histories and stories to suit their own imperialist agenda. He also discusses how certain characters in Disney films were made more “American” by the company.
Schweizer, Peter, and Rochelle Schweizer. 1998. Disney: The Mouse Betrayed: Greed, Corruption, and Children Risk. Washington D.C: Regenery Publishing Inc.
This book is a critique of the Disney Corporation from a socially right-wing point of view. The book discusses how many of the company’s products run antithesis to its unsullied family-friendly image.
Schickel, R. (1985). The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney. Simon & Schuster.
Written by American film historian and critic Richard Schickel, The Disney Version is a biography on Walt Disney and discusses the effects Disney’s life and ideals had on his works, and in turn how those works affected the American populace at large. The book is considered one of the cornerstones of Disney studies literature.
Schiller, H. (1973). The Mind Managers.
Herbert Schiller was a well-known media scholar who wrote about cultural imperialism and the effects that US media dominance can have on other cultures, particularly those of developing countries. The Mind Managers analyzes how information is controlled and manipulated in the United States and by extension how the population is controlled.
Schiller, H. I. (1976). Communication and Cultural Domination.
Communication and Cultural Domination is a highly influential work describing cultural domination and cultural imperialism via media.
Sharpsteen, B., & Luske, H. (Directors), Disney, W. (Producer), & Sears, T., Englander, O., Smith, W., Cottrell, W., Sabbo, J., Penner, E., & Battaglia, A. (Screenwriters). (1940). Pinocchio.
Disney’s film Pinocchio was one of the works discussed in this paper.
Setiawati, B. (2016). Americanization of Non-American Stories in Disney Films. Register Journal, 1(1), 81–114.
In much the same vein as my paper, Setiawati examines how Disney adaptations of foreign stories contain and further American ideals.
Stone, K. (2008). Some Day Your Witch Will Come. Wayne State University Press.
Folklorist Kay Stone discusses fairy tales and storytelling in addition to the study of those subjects. This piece was included as it examines the effects of retellings of fairy tales can have on the original story.
Waller, G. A. (1980). Mickey, Walt and Film Criticism from Steamboat Willie to Bambi (D. Peary & G. Peary, Eds.). In The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology. Boston, MA: EP Dutton.
In this essay, Waller examines the critical reception to Disney’s work during the company’s rise to media prominence in the thirties and forties with particular emphasis put on the difference in reception between “high” and “low” art critics.
Wasko, J. (2001). Challenging Disney Myths. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 25(3), 237–257.
One of the world’s leading scholars in the field of Disney studies, Wasko is also a professor at the University of Oregon. In this work, Wasko discusses the myths surrounding the Disney Company and Walt Disney himself, who both have a public reputation of unsullied wholesomeness.
Wasko, J. (2001). Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Wasko’s book examines the processes by which Disney manufactures the fantasies surrounding their company in addition to the historical expansion of the Disney empire, in addition to cultural imperialism and Disney’s interpretation of children’s literature.
Wasko, J., Phillips, M., & Meehan, E. R. (2006). Dazzled by Disney?: The Global Disney Audiences Project. London: Continuum.
Dazzled by Disney? Is a piece of work that was meant to discuss and measure the cultural reach of the Disney Company around the globe. Written by Disney scholar Janet Wasko, mass communications scholar Eileen Meehan, and Mark Phillips, the work included a study done on over 1,200 people from 53 countries that was meant to international cultural penetration by the Disney Company and the company’s reputation in these nations.
Wills, J. (2017). Disney Culture (Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
This book takes a comprehensive look into the culture of the Disney Company including the values held by Walt Disney himself. This work provides background for the values and motivations of Disney and his company that were reflected in their media. Willis is a senior lecturer in American history and the director of American Studies at the University of Kent in Canterbury.
Yoshimoto, M. (1994). Images of Empire: Tokyo Disneyland and Japanese cultural imperialism. Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, 181–199.
This work provides us with discussion on the culturally imperialistic practices of the Disney Company in relation to its effects on the nation of Japan.
Zipes, J. “Breaking the Disney Spell.” From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture (1995): 21–42.
American academic and folklorist Jack Zipes’ work Breaking the Disney Spell is considered one of the most authoritative works on the effects of the Disney Company on folklore.