INTRODUCTION
This was a reflection written during the introductory seminar for the GEM minor. We were tasked with responding to an article written by writer and linguist Rosina Lippi-Green that spoke on the phenomenon of making the culturally unfamiliar familiar through things like dubbing or localization. This article got me thinking about the wider concepts I was studying, and so I was able to connect my thinking from this article to other classes I was taking at the time. It made me realize how incredibly interdisciplinary the GEM minor is and how closely it relates to my CEAS Major.
REFLECTION
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 I’m fond of many of these movies—the Emperor’s new groove is one of my favorite films, 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 notion Lippi-Green mentions of casting recognizable voice actors for these roles (specifically in the Jungle Book in her example) in order to draw in a larger audience interesting. For my CEAS proseminar class, I’m writing my research proposal on Miyazaki’s Ghibli Movies. Interestingly, they have the same ‘recognizable voice actor’ phenomenon in their English dubs. 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 the Director of the Resource Center Demetrius 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 is a significant cut of the Japanese population 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 Rosina Lippi-Green 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.
