I find this particular avenue of research really fascinating. Especially looking at a company like disney, which (when looking at old movies) can quickly become incredibly problematic. And yet a lot of the problematic movies are ones I love—the emperor’s new groove is one of my favorite movies, and yet there’s no doubt it trivializes incan culture. Groove is a kind of movie where the setting doesn’t matter, it could have been set in China, or Peru, or ireland—the setting is irrelevant to the plot of the story. I also found the whole “recognizable voice actor” part interesting when the author was discussing the jungle book. For my CEAS proseminar class, I’m writing my research proposal on Miyazaki’s Ghibli Movies—and it’s really interesting when you take a look at the English dubs of them. Disney was the one who got the dubbing rights to these movies, and when you listen to them you’ll hear some pretty recognizable voices. Some prominent ones include Christain Bale, Lauren Bacall, Micheal Keaton, Anne Hathaway, Kirsten Steward, Cary Elwes, and Billy Crystal, to name a few. Disney, as the text mentioned, is primarily concerned with profit, and so they needed to make these otherwise culturally unfamiliar stories more comfortable to an American audience—and they did that through the one thing they could change: the voices. An American watching “The Cat Returns’ ‘ which starts with a Japanese high school student’s daily life may feel disconnected from the foreign experience until she talks and they realize— hey that’s Anne Hathaway!
I was reminded of our talk with Mr. Corvin when the text mentioned how the privileged have standardized ideologies to call upon when the conflict becomes too visible for comfort. It reminded me of how educational institutions tend to reply to equity issues with a cultural response, as facing the equity issues directly may be uncomfortable for the more privileged there. Protecting the comfort of the privileged becomes more important than facing the real issue at hand—I see this everywhere. From holocaust deniers to those trying to get CRT banned from schools. In my CEAS class we recently learned about the Pacific war and there are Japanese people out there who were simply not educated in the history of the war properly or simply deny the fact Japan committed innumerable atrocities across the entirety of the pacific for years. I feel like this is a prime example of trying to protect your own sense of comfort by denying the issues,
I wonder what these researchers would say about the modern Disney movies that are renowned as more culturally sensitive such as Coco, Moana, and most recently, Encanto. I for one love all of these movies and love the displays of culture throughout them. Though I am not Mexican, Polynesian, nor Colombian so I can’t really comment on whether these are necessarily accurate portrayals of the cultures in question.
