"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 1 The Disney of Your Childhood

 

So, I’m going to put out a somewhat controversial idea here today: The Walt Disney Company has had a tremendous amount of influence in the pop culture landscape, both in recent times and across film history.

Further controversy: a lot of people really resent Disney for this. 

I’ve spent a greater part of this blog’s lifetime tracking this kind of thing. I have only a dozen or so pieces deconstructing the mechanics of these arguments and exposing how baseless these claims tend to be. This sort of thing is never that far from my mind. But my general thoughts on the stigmatization of the Disney fandom have taken a very specific turn in recent times against recent headlines. 

    The Walt Disney Company has had some rather embarrassing box office flops in the last two or three years, and a lot of voices have been eager to link Disney’s recent financial woes to certain choices. Specifically, this idea that Disney has all the sudden “gone woke.” 

Now, said voices are taking certain things for granted. They seem to imagine that anyone in Hollywood is sleeping soundly these days between the double-strikes of 2023, the global shutdown of 2020, and the self-inflicted problem of the streaming wars. I don’t have time to get into most of that right now.

No, what’s most interesting to me is that I’m seeing this attitude from both sides of the political spectrum. Hard-right outlets are obviously gloating over this sort of thing, but even prominent liberal-leaning avenues have been commentating on this crash with this tone of, “Well, what did you expect?” 

    The seed of this rant really took root in me back in November when Variety ran this piece tracking the casualties of the Disney war. This was right after Moana 2’s record breaking opening weekend and back when the Snow White disaster was still on the horizon. After tracing out Disney’s public conflicts over films like Lightyear, the article quotes Guggenheim Securities’ Michael Morris as saying, 

“We just had an election, and in very rough terms, half of the voters supported one side and half supported the other side. And if I am a company that is trying to connect with the broadest potential audience and I cut that addressable market in half before I even release the product, I’m really limiting my ability to maximize the value of the product. That’s why it’s important to entertain first and foremost.”

These kinds of statements are very interesting to me, particularly juxtaposed against the lines peddled out by journalists about Disney’s social obligations from about fifteen years ago–around the time I started entering Adult Disney fandom. The running line around this time was that The Walt Disney Company as an institution was so devoted to upholding the white picket ideal that it deferred to, and even actively preserved, a plastic and regressive worldview. Some fifteen years later, though, The New York Times is shaking their heads over how they should have known better than to cast a Latina actress as a traditionally white princess.

There’s this self-fulfilling prophecy at work concerning The Walt Disney Company: because the films are so "base" and "popularist," trying to apply critical analysis onto these movies is a waste of time and resources. And yet because the films are undeniably popular, they demand some kind of examination. But with no one who really knows how this game works, what we’re stuck with are very crude and ill-conceived attempts at dissecting the Disney library. That’s how we go from “Disney movies are socially tone deaf and need to get with the times,” to “stay in your lane, Mickey.” 

Zootopia (2016)

    Well, as a person who spends quite a bit of time studying Disney movies--as well as the larger film ecosystem--I’m as good a person to uncover this as any, I suppose. So let’s ask: how has the public conversation around the Walt Disney Company impacted their politics across time, and what does that mean for whatever comes next? 

I’m going to look at this in two pieces. The first is going to establish Disney’s history with activism and politics, starting from the days of Walt Disney himself and going through Disney’s hey-day in the 90s. In part two, we’ll unpack Disney’s interaction with these things in the 21st century, surveying its most recent attempts and failures.

    A couple of things ...

The Jungle Book (1967)

This sort of thing naturally lives and dies on a thousand turning points. I cannot survey the political context of every film made by The Walt Disney Company, even in the last ten or so years. This is going to be a streamlined overview. These are the talking points that this Disney scholar thinks are most relevant to how we got where we are.

In a similar way, the social issues discussed in these pieces have long histories and vast complexities that can’t be properly catalogued in this duology. I’d encourage all readers to feed their curiosity and follow-up with their own research. 

But if we are going to dissect this beast, we might as well start all the way from the top, beginning with … 

Walter Elias Disney

Reviewing PBS’s overview of Walt Disney’s life, Neil Genzlinger wrote for The New York Times, “Before his name became synonymous with a staid, whitewashed version of Americana, Walt Disney was considered a boundary pusher, expanding the possibilities and ambitions of his art form.” 

And Walt Disney’s influence was wide and profound. Somehow even the pop culture parody of the Disney image doesn’t really capture it. The man was the central turn point in breaking animation into feature filmmaking, to start, as well as the man’s influence on the theme park business. 

Peter Pan (1953)

So much of the Disney mythology is anchored on the willful participation in fantasy and imagination. The whole Disney ethos is about choosing to see through the eyes of a child and opening your heart in a cold and unforgiving world. By all means, this is not an easy thing to do. It goes against powerful capitalistic undercurrents that demand that a person deaden their reverence for the enchanting things of the world in pursuit of more practical applications. This isn’t so different from what we discussed in the Charlie Chaplin piece.

    And sure, you could argue that a person can go overboard with that coping mechanism (I have written at least one essay about this), but nostalgia can actually have measurable health benefits. Dr. Clay Routledge, North Dakota State University, says that nostalgia, “increases positive mood, self-esteem, feelings of social connectedness, optimism about the future, and perceptions of meaning in life. Furthermore, nostalgia motivates people to focus on cultivating meaningful relationships and pursue important life goals. In addition, as people get older, nostalgia makes them feel youthful and energetic. Nostalgia also reduces existential fears about death."

    A version of this essay series that was, believe it or not, even larger had a wider analysis on the perception of that group we'd call "Disney Adults." I had to jettison a lot of that to keep these pieces somewhat focused, though that starting point no doubt still informs the final shape of these pieces. But I feel that the subject does bear some mention because a lot of the discussion about Disney and its relationship to social activism is directly echoed in whether Disney is an acceptable subject of fandom.

    So, I guess I will say upfront that ... the people I know within the Disney community are smart. They are discerning. They are well-adjusted. If seeing a 30-year-old tearing up at the Disneyland fireworks show freaks you out a little, maybe let yourself get curious before you get judgmental. (Also, go to a professional football game with a packed stadium sometime--see the grown-men crying over other grown-men tossing around this giant rubber egg, behold the aberrant body formations and bizarre coordinated movements unfolding atop the bleachers, witness the brawls breaking out under the parking lot because someone wore the wrong color shirt--and you tell me which crowd is doing more to confuse the aliens.)

        This impulse to depict something as being more fantastical, more spectacular than it is in real life has been a part of the artistic fabric long before Walt Disney entered the game. There’s nothing heretical about the Disney promise or how it manifests in the media it creates.

         But that seems to be the cardinal sin with which critics take issue with Disney. The common perception within academia sees the Disney company as amassing loyalty from the proletariat by dazzling them with nostalgic imagery to lull them into a state of intellectual stagnation and capitalistic compliance.

The Jungle Book (1967)

         Take, for example, Richard Schickel and his work, The Disney Version, released two years after the death of Walt and widely considered one of the first published works to take a largely negative view of the Disney Company and Walt Disney himself. I’ve included my favorite passage from his final chapter here,

“All commanders leave their victims with the memory of this threat, the commander knows this and sees, growing up around him, an ever-increasing number of people who he knows nurture this memory in common; there is always the possibility of revolt should they unite against him. He has no choice but to do ‘everything can to make such a reversal impossible.’

“If this seems a somewhat melodramatic description to apply to an entrepreneur of entertainment [oh, you noticed that too?], it should be remembered that Disney did everything possible to build a closed world, an empire masquerading as a magic kingdom. The construction of such a place represents, of course, a recognition that in the larger world a man’s power is necessarily limited, that even absolute dictators cannot control everything or have everything their hearts desire […] That was, to him, the insuperable advantage his little world had over the great world. He could order it precisely as he wanted to. Compared to the mayor of a modern city, who must feel his way through the traps set for him by what one municipal executive calls ‘the power brokers,’ ruling Disney’s land—or at least its outer aspects—was easy.”        

I doubt YouTube Tyler has ever heard of Richard Schickel, but you can see how his ideas were able to trickle down to the ground where YouTube Tyler was happy to adopt them: Walt Disney was a business tyrant masquerading as a wholesome dude, and that is how he got so many suckers to pay to ride around on Dumbo. 

  Directly from this same incentive, we also see an agenda to cast Walt Disney as a man of particular social failings–obviously a man like Walt Disney had to be a racist and a chauvinist, and his disciples are just too blind to see it. Detractors will put a lens on things like the treatment of the Indian characters in Peter Pan, the racial coding in Lady & the Tramp or Dumbo, or else the crown jewel of Disney missteps—Song of the South—and try to make a statement about Walt Disney being uniquely bigoted or regressive.

Lady and the Tramp (1955)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

    But these offenses were, regrettably, not at all unique for the time. Hollywood at large was complicit in very sour representations of marginalized groups. Walt Disney passed away right in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, so for most of his career, he was not working in an ecosystem that was kind to these communities. This doesn’t mean that such depictions don’t deserve comment or examination, but there is a ceiling to how socially savvy we could expect his work to be.

         A favorite myth perpetuated about Walt was, of course, that he was antisemitic. This rumor was fueled by speculation that Walt was friendly with prominent nazis and nazi sympathizers, most notably nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, who snuck into the studio in 1938. I'm obviously not privy to the intricate thoughts of Walt's head (which incidentally, is not frozen). I don't know personally know what was in his heart, but I do know some things that are on the official record, starting with the studio’s official statement released a month after Riefenstahl's visit,

"Miss Riefenstahl got into the studio, but she crashed the gate. A Los Angeles man who is known to Disney obtained permission to take a party through the plant. Leni was in the party. If we had known it in advance, she wouldn't have got in.” 

The Los Angeles man in question was Hurbert "Jay" Stowitts, who was friends with both Riefenstahl and Leopold Stokowski, who was collaborating with Walt Disney for Fantasia, in production at the time of Riefenstahl’s visit, and Stowitts may have facilitated this arrangement.

Walt Disney with Richard and Robert Sherman

    The most sympathetic read is probably that Walt was genuinely blindsided by her visitation. The least sympathetic? That Walt was indifferent to these things, but after becoming aware of the potential backlash, he backtracked his participation. Neither scenario would be out of character for either of these fellows. Walt tried to abstain from public political demonstration and Riefenstahl had this habit of worming into places she wasn’t invited.

This rumor was also propagated by a disgruntled former employee, Art Babbit, with whom Disney had parted on unfriendly terms. Babbit would also claim that Disney had attended many pro-Nazi rallies throughout the 1930s, even though, in the words of biographer Neal Gabler, “…Walt had little enough time for his family, much less political meetings.” None of Walt’s other colleagues or subordinates ever gave such reports.

   Disney also employed many people of Jewish identity. Most notably Richard and Robert Sherman, who would pen some of the most iconic songs of Walt’s tenure. Believe it or not, Walt actually won an Oscar for directing a short film in which–and yes, you can look this up–Donald Duck has a nightmare about waking up in Hitler’s Nazi Germany. 

         Of course, ask Cousin Brad how he “knows” that Walt was antisemitic or where he first heard this, and I doubt Riefenstahl’s name even comes up. This is just a fun little plastic factoid that YouTube Tyler likes to drop during his review of Inside Out 2 so he can flex what a knowledgeable source he is. 

         I also don’t imagine that when Meryl Streep called Walt Disney a “sexist and a bigot” in 2013, she was giving much thought to someone like Mary Blair. A household name among Disney fans, Mary Blair was a lead concept artist within the Walt Disney company, crafting the look for Disney’s most iconic works through the 1950s. She was also key in designing the look for many of the early Disneyland attractions including "it’s a small world" and "The Enchanted Tiki Room," and Walt featured her on his tv program often.

  The basis for Streep’s nine-minute diatribe came from a letter written by Walt to a woman inquiring about an opening in his animation division, and Walt’s reply was a very 1930s, “Animation is man’s work” kind of spiel.

Shall We Dance (1937)

         But again, the “women do their best work in the home” doctrine espoused here was more or less the norm for society back then. Walt would not have been at all unique for this worldview. It wasn’t until WWII when all the men went overseas that Walt, and others like him, became more open to the idea of letting women into key positions. But Streep also kind of danced over the fact that, yes, there absolutely were women working on films like “Snow White” and “Pinocchio” as in-between and clean-up artists. 

         Most of the tomatoes thrown at Mr. Walt Disney are aiming at transgressions that are, charitably, distorted, or else entirely fabricated. Very little of these accusations have any real basis in documented behavior. Instagram commenters like to drop these bombs thinking they are speaking harsh but sobering truths to the masses, but in the process, they only reveal their deference to a different kind of fairy tale. There is, meanwhile, plenty of evidence demonstrating that he was at the very least curious about things like multiculturalism.

         Walt was, for example, a vocal fan of the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, and even arranged to have a private screening of the film for his family at their house. At the end of the film, Walt is quoted as saying, "That was one hell of a picture. That's the kind of film I wish I could make."

         None of this is to imagine that he was a man without fault. The thing that drove a wedge between Disney and Babbit had a lot to do with the wages of the animation department. But in all likelihood, Walt Disney was neither remarkably better nor remarkably worse than the society in which he lived.

And yet his detractors are somehow way more guilty of sensationalizing Walt than his fans ever have been. Fans or employees will sometimes refer to him as like “Uncle Walt.” But compare that to Richard Schickel and his grudge against the “commander,” “master,” or “emperor.” And that has formed the bedrock for how Walter Elias Disney and the Walt Disney Company are discussed in the modern time. 

Disney Renaissance

For whatever commercial heights The Walt Disney Company achieved during his lifetime or in recent years, the groundwork was certainly laid under the tenure of CEO Michael Eisner and Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg during the period that Disney fans call “The Disney Renaissance.”

         Disney animation had the attention of the masses through the 1990s in a way it had not since Walt’s days, and never would again. Because the attention wasn’t just on the larger Disney company or its subsidiaries, but on animated movies like Aladdin and The Lion King, which both became the highest grossing movies of their respective years.

    The 90s were also, at least on the surface, a fairly stable and uneventful period of American history–this was American Beauty’s America. And part of the way Disney secured its place here was by morphing itself into a non-negotiable fixture of middle class Americana, something Aunt Gretchen would never see as offensive or testy. Thus, The Walt Disney Company becomes, as Genzlinger put it, "synonymous with a staid, whitewashed version of Americana.”

    Eisner and Katzenberg brought about the formidable expansion of the Walt Disney company to do this. This would include subsidiaries like Disney Toon Studios, which would oversee them conquering the home media market with properties like A Goofy Movie as well as the infamous direct-to-video sequels. Disney found all sorts of ways to insinuate itself into every inch of '90s middle-class living.

But there was also a big push to make Disney be seen as legitimate among the highbrows. Disney would enjoy a reliable run of critical attention for a period in the early 90s. Disney had basically a yearly appointment at the Oscars for Best Song and/or Score. Composer and songwriter, Alan Menken, would see eight Oscar wins from four different movies, and nominations for two others. When Beauty and the Beast became the first animated movie to ever be nominated for Best Picture, it seemed they had scored the winning ticket.

Drawing by animator Glen Keane

    Though even here, the storytellers were aware that not everyone was keen on letting cartoons into the big kid's table. There are all sorts of lines about Beauty and the Beast not being a "real movie" and the actors not being "real actors." Brenda Chapman, who worked on Beauty and the Beast as a storyboard artist, reflected on the backlash, saying, "The animators are actors. Not only do they have to act, they have to draw that acting. And it was just really hard to hear some of the belittling comments that were coming from people we thought were our peers."

    Disney would strike back with a vengeance with Oscar hopefuls, Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame–neither of which really gave Disney what they were hoping for.

         It was Pocahontas, though, that really injured the studio’s chances of being seen as legitimate—and more, culturally progressive. We can imagine that the film was genuinely made with the best of intentions, but ...

         The conceit of the Pocahontas project seemed to be to use the lexicon of Disney Animation to tell not just a good story, but to tap into some deep vein of American mythology and reveal something about the evergreen nature of love between cultures and worlds. Even so, the storytelling team looked at the historical relationship between an 11 year old indigenous girl and a 30 something year-old colonizer and thought “Yeah, I'd ship ‘em.” … 

In fairness to Disney, they were not the first people to have this idea. Pocahontas and her relationship to John Smith has been mythologized and romanticized for centuries. But Disney certainly wasn’t doing anything to deconstruct that. And really, that’s part of why this didn’t have the success Disney was anticipating. They were being really reactive here, drawing the lines based on what they thought other people wanted from them, and the resulting film had some air bubbles in its bloodstream. Angela Aliess wrote at the time for LA Times,

“Trapped within a patriarchal definition, Hollywood’s Indian women are rarely shown as having anything more important in life than their male relationships … But these independent, low-budget films enjoyed only a brief theatrical release and then faded into oblivion. Disney’s animated heroine, however, inhabits a blockbuster that defines a popular legacy of American culture--alas for real Indian women.”

         There are valid critiques to be made of the Pocahontas experiment—more than can be afforded to other prominent Disney outings. 

Even so, the internet is prone to flatten the dialogue and paint over the complexities of the conversation. No one talks about, for example, how this was the rare 90s Hollywood movie centered on a woman of color. Someone had to be the first. It just happened to be Disney. Hanay Geiogamah, a former director of the American Indian Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, served as a consultant for both Pocahontas and its 1998 direct-to-video sequel and said in 2023,

“I understood why people were upset, and, at the time, I made my voice heard, too. But you have to remember, at the end of the day, this was a Disney animated fantasy. I was actually pleasantly surprised with how it turned out. Yes, there was a falsity at its core. But it also gave millions of young people a positive impression of Indian life. It wasn’t all battles and ugliness and harshness.”

   The Pocahontas conundrum marked the first real faltering of Disney in the 90s. Critics who were never really on board with the Disney Renaissance were grateful to have another talking point for why disaster ensued anytime we let Disney try to slide onto city council. "Stick to the VHS pile, guys." Compound that with the internal conflicts within the structure of the Walt Disney company, and the creative output of the studio starts to suffer, and Disney’s influence within the culture starts to go into hibernation for a time.

       By the end of the 1990s, The Academy would actually seek to wean themselves off of Disney by adopting certain stipulations. Submissions for “Best Score” could no longer come from musical pictures—this after Alan Menken was winning so many Oscars it just wasn’t fun anymore. (This stipulation would be lifted some fifteen years later, just in time for La La Land to collect the nomination.) And to keep cartoons away from the big trophy, they decided that animated films would just get their own table at the party. (The first movie that would win this prize, of course, was none other than Shrek, which overtly lampooned the exact kinds of movies that enabled this award to begin with.)

The Lion King (1994)

    The Eisner and Katzenberg era would have tremendous impact on Disney in the modern era, particularly how people viewed its business practices and its obligation to culture. Moreover, that period of prosperity planted the seeds for the wave of Disney nostalgia that would help propel the company back into the public eye in the 2010s. Those kids who grew up wearing out those Disney VHS tapes were the first to start paying attention when the tease of seeing Emma Watson dancing around in Belle’s ballgown hit the internet. That is the first point of discussion for basically anyone who’s ever had an opinion about Disney Adults.

But this kind of dialogue has always been lacking for me in large part because the most formative person behind Disney’s artistic heights during this time was neither Michael Eisner nor Jeffrey Katzenberg.

     Along with his writing partner, Alan Menken, Howard Ashman wrote the music for The Little Mermaid, the movie that got Disney Animation back on track in the late 80s. He would return to supply music for both Beauty and the Beast as well as Aladdin.

    Ashman and Menken’s songwriting vision for Disney was unique for how it drew so clearly from classic and contemporary Broadway. Their music didn’t just comment on the story–it actively propelled it forward. So it wasn’t just that Ashman wrote good songs, even songs that won Disney the first Oscars it had known in years. Ashman knew how to use musical storytelling to take a movie to a place that wasn’t just entertaining, but truly elevating.

And I'm not just picking a random name off the credits sheet. Disney fans know who Howard Ashman is and what he did for Disney animation. He didn't just "write music." Songs were the divining instrument for through which he uncovered the deepest imaginations of both the characters and the audiences he wrote for. And he went to incredible lengths to help all involved to access that same depth of insight. See, Ashman coaching voice actress, Jodi Benson, through the recording process of "Part of Your World." Benson and Ashman had previously worked together during his short-lived Broadway show, Smile, and Ashman would invite her to audition for this new Disney project he had been assigned to.

Benson said in 2020, "If it weren't for [Ashman], Disney Animation would not be where it is today. When you went to the movies, people were applauding like they're watching a Broadway show. I don't think we had had that before at Disney — hardly at all — where you could appeal to all age bracket and still have the humor that the adults could enjoy, over and over again. So the whole thing was just a perfect, perfect, magical moment in time that I don't know we've ever had since." Disney owes every success during this time to this theater kid who "gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul," or so reads the final tribute at the end Beauty and the Beast. Aside from Walt Disney himself, Howard Ashman probably did more to guide the spirit of Disney Animation than any other person. 

         And he might have gone on to have an even greater influence if he had not passed away in March of 1991 during the heat of production for Beauty and the Beast and the early stages of Aladdin. He was one of many members of the gay community who lost their lives during the AIDS crisis, in which the powers in place refused to fund the development and distribution of treatment for this medical emergency because the afflicted were from a stigmatized group. And you see Ashman’s situation echoed in the films made during and following his participation in Disney.

        The Little Mermaid as a story already has a lot of queer subtext, which many scholars attribute to author Hans Christian Andersen’s bisexuality. The Mermaid longs for someone out of her element and goes to incredible lengths to be with them only for that person to reject her in favor of someone else, and all she can do is suffer in silence.

    The Disney adaptation certainly doesn’t shy away from that foundation. The Mermaid’s story follows a very similar trajectory, but the queer coding does not stop there. It is well known that Ursula, for example, was largely inspired by Divine, a popular drag queen at the time.

Beauty and the Beast filled a similar space. That one follows two outcasts who eventually find companionship with one another in a world that rejects them for their differences. Aladdin, also about someone who does not fit into the system he occupies. These movies with all their bold sentimentality, they tend to be absorbed by larger discussions about Disney using hokey-pokey emotion to push Timon and Pumbaa backpacks. 

Aladdin (1992)

But these depictions of sentimentality with ostracized misfits are also how the Disney mythology really took the status quo to task and broadcasted the inner lives of people who felt overlooked. Having spent most of my life in conservative circles, I can testify firsthand to how using 90s Disney as an interface has been good for bringing certain issues to the attention of specific communities that would not receive them otherwise.

         Commentators will disagree about how deliberate this all was. In promoting the 2017 remake of Beauty and the Beast, Disney very much tried to push that line in order to sell how #relevent the movie was. Director Bill Condon would say, “It was a very concrete thing that [Ashman] was doing."

    Meanwhile, Alan Menken seems to buy into the idea that his experiences certainly informed his work, but has hesitated to suggest that he was doing so deliberately. Howard’s partner, Bill Lauch, insists that he was never about making “political theater,” though he did use his platform to highlight the experience of the marginalized. His sister, Sarah Gillespie, seems pretty adamant that Ashman wasn’t that type of artist, attributing this all to Howard’s own natural empathy.

         The only one who could give a straight answer to whether Howard Ashman was knowingly leaving a trail of bread crumbs would be Howard Ashman. But the connections themselves are very clear. No, that’s not the only way to read his movies. That’s just not how metaphor works. But neither are we free to just ignore patterns between art and the real-world context from which it emerges.

    Really, I think that vagueness is a huge part of why this display of marginalization works better than the Pocahontas experiment. This wasn't "political theater." This was just a person opening his heart and saying something that revealed the unspoken universality of human longing and imagination.

    Howard Ashman only worked on the first three hits of the Disney Renaissance—The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin—but Disney and audiences alike really connected to the kind of protagonist he designed. Thus, we get Pocahontas, Quasimodo, Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan—all displaced misfits who went on to achieve greatness and/or find happiness and acceptance. This was the defining arc for Disney Animation during the time in which it had the widest influence.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

 

    When did Disney get so woke? I think the answer is a lot more complicated than any single spot on the timeline, but if I had to pick a single turning point, I'd have to say Howard Ashman, the central architect of Disney Animation's most successful period. (Though are we all going to pretend that if Walt had been alive during the YouTube era that we wouldn't be seeing Twitter alight with all sorts of white male rage over "it's a small world" and Walt selling out to the woke mob?) I bring Howard Ashman for a couple of reasons.

         One, it flies right in the face of the idea that Disney’s conservative userbase cannot consume "woke" content. Disney’s most lucrative period came during the time it was most aggressively gay. Two, it debunks this idea that Disney ever really existed in this state of apoliticality that both conservatives and liberals like to imagine. 

The plight of systemically oppressed groups is absolutely a key thread within the Disney culture and those who have participated in it. People who imagine that Disney just walked up to the big kid’s table one day trying to show off how many adult words he knew, they show a supreme lack of curiosity for the place Disney has had in the hearts of people who feel marginalized.

So, some patterns to note before we move on: 

The Walt Disney Company built its operations on the appeal to a fabricated but benign fantasy about happiness and goodness. This proved immensely popular with a lot of people, and that is how it became so popular, such that many individuals would try hard to project blemishes or injuries onto the Walt Disney Company--anything to keep them away from the big kid's table.

When Disney tried to step ahead of the conversation and be socially mindful (i.e. Pocahontas), they flubbed really hard--in part because they did not do a sufficient job at anticipating the full implications of the subject they were depicting or how they were depicting it. The narrative that larger journalism and criticism has always defaulted to has cast The Walt Disney Company as this hermetic island detached from the real world.

Wreck-it Ralph (2012)

    But we also see how this narrative hasn’t really given credit to how these films–especially those held most dear by the crowd we’d call “Disney adults”–have actually helped humanize outcasts or oddballs. There’s no consideration that the Walt Disney Company may have earned much of its loyalty by accurately reflecting the concerns and hopes of people who stand in need of recognition. That is all washed away as nostalgic programming.

    That’s the hitch with using “sentimentality” as a catch-all to explain consumerist behaviors, and also the irony of that line about Disney weaponizing nostalgia for profit. It has us forget how choosing to delight in things that serve no pragmatic purpose is actually part of how you hold on to your humanity and perhaps serves a greater social directive than just capital.

So, for most of its lifetime, journalists, especially those of the liberal persuasion, have basically been daring The Walt Disney Company to get with the program and start pulling their weight. Disney would spend the greater part of this first quarter of the 21st century answering that dare, and Hollywood would never be the same.

To Be Continued ...

--The Professor