“THE RACIAL POLITICS OF DISNEY ANIMALS”
“Walt Disney had an incredibly conservative framework. He felt that women should be in the home, he felt that there shouldn’t be queer and trans folks in the world, he felt that folks of color should keep to their menial places. He was very clear on this sort of immense, conservative world view. And that world view is infused in all of these Disney films, and I think you can see it, in some ways, most clearly in The Jungle Book…
what comes out so clearly when you watch The Jungle Book is there is a natural order of things. Things have a natural order. Everyone has their place in a hierarchy, and it is once you step out of that place that everything falls apart. And things cannot come back together, and society can’t function unless everyone is in their proper place. And we see that with, especially with the differences between the original book by Kipling and the changes that Disney makes to it…
the more things change, the more they stay the same. And we absolutely see this in The Lion King because again, we have the lions being coded as the top of the hierarchy, the ruling monarchy, and so being coded as white. And we have the hyenas who are voiced by two people of color, and really the main two people of color voices that we hear in that. We see the hyenas being coded as people of color, and they are ghettoized…
The number one way that education happens in this country is not in schools, it’s through entertainment. That’s the way children are learning about themselves, the world, about how the world functions, about who they should be. If they don’t have media literacy, they fall into the trap of them accepting what’s being given to them as the way that things are, instead of saying, “No, I don’t want to accept this.””
Lion King :’(
Related: “Who Would Be the Worst White Mulan?” that has my reactions to The Princess and the Frog (I can’t understand why they thought it would be okay to make the *black princess* movie one in which the characters are animals most of the time)
