The Walt Disney Company was founded on October 16, 1923, in Hollywood, California by brothers Walt and Roy Disney and immediately gained massive attention. Their animated shorts captivated the world, the character Mickey Mouse released in 1928 became a household staple, and their first feature length film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), was a revolutionary feat of animation technology, (History.com Editors, 2019). Disney still stands today as one of the most beloved companies in the world with hundreds of titles available on Disney+ as well as ownership of companies such as Pixar, Marvel, ABC and more. The stories that Disney has told through their films and shorts have shaped the world, just as stories passed down by the Māori and Pakeha shape their culture and remembered history. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, not every piece in Disney’s repertoire is as fondly remembered; a history of racist depictions of Africans, Asians, and Native Americans surrounds the Walt Disney Company, which rose to popularity in a time of particularly intense racism towards African Americans in the US. If, “Black people don’t go around telling stories about their family,” (Ghansah, 2012), then who does? The answer is major media corporations such as Disney who push a racist agenda out to an impressionable world, which has at length contributed to harmful racial stereotypes of African Americans in particular.
The 1940 release of Disney’s Fantasia, just three years after their very first feature film, includes a cast of fantastical creatures such as unicorns, cupids, centaurs and “centaurettes”, two of which are confirmed to be “colored”, (Korkis, 2020). Each white centaur and centaurette gets their own unique design and color scheme, but the only feature to distinguish Sunflower from the other Black centaurette, Atika, is their hair, as Sunflower has her hair in a very stereotypical fashion with four spikes of hair whilst Atika has hers in pigtails. Otherwise, the two look exactly alike and many do not even know that they are two different characters. What they have in common is large, pink lips, golden hoop earrings, dark skin, happy faces, and the lower halves of donkeys rather than horses like the white centaurs, (Demneri, 2023). This is all very akin to the “pickaninny” portrayal of Black children, a very common and distasteful depiction that characterized Black parents as neglectful because their children were dirty. The harm that comes from their physical appearance lies in the fact that so many depictions of African Americans of the time were so similar in their exaggerated features and characteristics and were used to degrade and dehumanize African Americans. Additionally, in every scene they are featured in, the two black centaurettes are serving another character beginning with Sunflower polishing a white centaurettes hooves, very reminiscent of an African American shoe-shine boy, followed by scenes of Atika decorating another white centaurette’s tail and carrying a flower train for her, then Sunflower rolling out a red carpet for the other characters to walk on. Neither Sunflower nor Atika ever partake in the festivities themselves but simply prepare the other characters for them. Every aspect of their portrayal indicates subservience; this implies that African Americans are only present for the benefit and comfort of the white population and falsely portrays contentedness and even happiness with that fact.
Very similarly, Disney’s 1946 film “Song of the South” features a Black protagonist named Uncle Remus played by James Baskett whose primary function in the film is as a caretaker and fatherly figure to a young white boy. While his compassion towards the white boy, Johnny, played by Bobby Driscoll, is positive in the respect that it portrays a Black man being friends with a young white boy when the stereotype has so often been that African American men are aggressive, it has its own harms as well. The film is once again characterizing African Americans as servants, “human only insofar as they serve the needs and destinies of the white characters,” (Tobias, 2019). In addition, the setting of the film is a Georgia plantation owned by a white family where several African Americans including Uncle Remus live as sharecroppers- a system that would “keep most Black Southerners impoverished and immobile for decades to come,” (American Experience, 2023). Even though the system of sharecropping was truly adjacent to slavery in the fact that it largely did not allow African Americans any economic freedom, the film absolutely sanitizes that reality and makes the plantation seem like a place where everyone is happy-go-lucky without an issue in the world. The film even goes so far as to glorify slavery with Uncle Remus himself giving narration that refers to “a long time ago … [when] every day was mighty satisfactual … ‘twas better all around,” (Tobias, 2019). Obviously, it is not directly stated that Uncle Remus is referring to slavery, but it is largely implied given the setting and time. The film’s entirety reinforces stereotypes of improper African Americans in the stories that Uncle Remus tells of the Br’er animals, subordination of African Americans, and nostalgia for a time that was so intensely cruel towards people of color.
In more recent years, Disney made strides in their representation with the 2009 release of “The Princess and the Frog”, featuring the first Black Disney princess, although this revolutionary film still has heavy elements of internalized racism. Most obviously, the first Black princess is not even a Black woman for over half the film’s duration- Tiana is in the form of a frog for 57 of the film’s 97 minutes, (Breaux, 2010). The beauty of representation in media is that viewers, particularly young viewers, get to see themselves on screen, but for young Black girls, that screen time is cut short and instead replaced by a fly-eating amphibian that Tiana herself describes as ‘slimy’ and ‘gross’. What viewers see in this film is “a black girl who must hop around like a frog in the way early twentieth century black actors had to don blackface and hop around like dogs” (Gehlawat, 2010), the literal and figurative dehumanization of this Black princess. Animal transformation has historically, even in previous Disney films, been a punishment for misbehavior and wrongdoing, just like Beast and Pinocchio (Gehlawat, 2010), and the film seems to be deeming Tiana a fool because of a misunderstanding. Now, even though Tiana transforms back into a human and gets her “happy ending” as a princess, her ending doesn’t get to be what it is for the white princesses like Cinderella and Belle who become true royalty. Instead, Tiana gets her restaurant where she continues to serve other people just as she did as a struggling waitress and just as her mother did as a seamstress for the rich, white La Bouff family; “where the ceiling on black ambition is firmly set at the service industries,” (Foundas, 2009). An ending meant to be empowering for Black women and women in general instead, once again, reinforces the idea that African Americans are servants by nature and that the best they can do is still limited as compared to what a white person can- that being African is, in and of itself, a glass ceiling capping potential, (Dundes & Streiff, 2016).
The time Tiana spends on screen as a human is also rather questionable considering the film’s setting in 1920s New Orleans. Not once is segregation mentioned or portrayed despite being an aspect heavily incorporated into society in the place and time, a fact that would have made it highly implausible for a Black woman to own her own restaurant where white folks dined. Perhaps segregation would have been too harsh a topic for a G-rated children’s film, but even so, erasing the truth contributes to a sanitized version of history where Disney doesn’t have to have a difficult conversation. It is similar to Song of the South in which plantation life and slavery are made to seem not-so-bad and add again to nostalgia for a time when reality was very cruel to many. Change is never achieved by ignoring the past, and Disney is making a statement in its refusal to acknowledge such.
On a slightly different note, anthropomorphic animals are a staple of Disney films, and The Jungle Book (1967) is no different. The film is full of our favorite animal characters, who Mowgli, the little human boy, lives in the Indian jungle with, but there is one group that stands out as particularly questionable- the monkeys. As according to Greg Metcalf, the monkeys are “Disney’s version of uppity blacks discontent in their “slum”” (Wainer, 2022) which becomes increasingly apparent as one watches the film. In their introduction where the monkeys kidnap Mowgli, it is very clear that they are exhibiting exaggerated impressions of Black voices despite all being voiced by white actors, as well as the scatting, jazz-inspired musical number being incredibly indicative of African Americans. Even their ruler’s name, King Louie, while not directly referring to any particular person, is very much reminiscent of Louis Armstrong, a famous Black jazz musician popular at the time. The insults that Baloo the bear throws at them are entirely centered around physical traits that can arguably also refer to stereotypes of African Americans such as “you flat-nosed, little-eyed, flaky creeps” (The Jungle Book, 1967) as well as “Mangy” and “Flea Picking” (Lund, 2017). Because the monkeys’ characterization is so clearly of African Americans, their “casual violence” (Wainer, 2022) and unruly behavior as compared to any of the other characters in the film becomes a testament to Disney’s racism.
What is most damning about the monkeys’ scenes is the jazz number that King Louie sings, titled, “I Wan’na Be Like You”, in which the lyrics are entirely based around the monkeys’ desire to be human, or to be civilized. The lyrics note that the monkeys want to be able to walk and talk like a civilized man, which has always been by extension the white man. Even though the character singing is a literal monkey who wants to be human, enough context is present to imply that African Americans are not civilized and are not human. This in combination with the choice of animal being apes in specific adds yet another layer, because the narrative for a very long time has been that Africans are closer to apes than are Europeans and are therefore sub-human; a notion that was used for centuries to justify slavery, segregation, and brutal racism, (Bradley, 2013). So, while there may not be any direct portrayal of African Americans in The Jungle Book, the ideas present are very clear.
Overall, Disney films have reinforced existing stereotypes of African American subservience, bestiality, uncivilization, and folly as well as concepts of lesser achievement and erasure of history. Disney is not the only or even the largest perpetrator of this issue, but because of its influence on the public as a major source of popular culture today and for decades, it is a serious one. Deleting scenes and problematic pieces of media is not exactly the solution, but mere warnings suggesting that content may be inaccurate are not either. Instead, meaningful recognition of past harms coupled with educating Disney employees to ensure that internalized racisms are exempt from future projects must be achieved.
References
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Wainer, A. (2022, April 3). Reversal of Roles: Subversion and Reaffirmation of Racial Stereotypes in Dumbo and The Jungle Book – Scholarly Essays – Jim Crow Museum. Jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu. https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/links/essays/reversal.htm