I read this paper, titled "The Disneyfication of Folklore: Adolescents and Archetypes"
http://www.teachingliterature.org/teachingliterature/pdf/story/disneyfication_friedmeyer.pdf
The author says that one of the main inspirations of Disney was the classic Grimm fairly tales. However, Disney perverted the original message to adapt them to a certain audience and for purely economic reasons. Grimm's fairly tales are dark while the classic Disney princess stories always end "happily ever after."
The problem with the adaptations of the original fairly tales to the mellowed Disney version is that young people are presented with messages that are completely unrealistic and also demote women to a lower class. The author notes that the forces of good and evil fight over sleeping beauty, which makes it seem like sleeping beauty cannot fight for herself and must instead have a man do her bidding. The author also charges that Beauty and the Beast references an abusive relationship that is fixed through the loving and caring nature of Belle. This might tell young girls that they can fix abusive relationships and that it is their own fault if the can't do so.
Overall, the paper is criticizing Disney for taking some of the most important and influential fairy tales and turning them into something that sends the completely wrong message to impressionable youth. Disney took the fairy tales out of their original context and morphed them into something completely different and possibly malicious.
in addition to the difference between high and popular culture that came up in class, I'm also thinking about the "malicious" messages of Disney: popular culture sending "messages." He denied this: see Watts, and a good potential thread for your next post!
ReplyDeleteStarting on page 448 of the Watts book he starts ripping into Disney in terms of cultural value and public responses. It's right at the very end of the book, with the epilogue ending only 5 pages later, but for those five pages he's talking to your topic.
ReplyDeleteOn a more personal note, I think that the accusations of movies influencing young children to such a degree through subtleties is a stretch to say the least. A quote I've heard goes like this: "Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." I think the same thing applies to movies. If movies affected us that significantly as kids, we would have serious deficiencies. I can't think of anything witty to say that we'd do, so I'll settle for that.
Collin points us to an academic and ideological debate on the influence of popular culture. Does it directly shape behavior (very unlikely); does it have no influence (also unlikely). So if it somewhere in between (subtle influences), what are those influences? Suggestion: look for ways it shapes assumptions, tastes, likes and dislikes; these are precursors to shaping of ideas and behavior, but more, well, subtle....
ReplyDeleteEvery time I hear someone talk about this I automatically think of The Little Mermaid - it's my favorite example of how radically different the original story is from the Disney version. I've read a few interesting articles about it and other children's adaptations on Cracked.com; they are very good about citing their sources and correcting mistakes they make in their articles, but as a humor website the language used isn't exactly suitable for this course, so I'll leave that with a mention rather than linking anything.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Collin, though. I'd like to mention that the quote itself is quite interesting, as no one can seem to legitimately track down its author. It was allegedly said by the Vice President of Nintendo among others, potentially even Mario Bros. creator Shigeru Miyamoto - but I digress.
This sort of psychological aspect of Disney is something I hope we can look at from a film perspective and an enterprise perspective, like comparing the impact of a film versus the impact of a theme park (not in magnitude perhaps, but in substance).
I'm also of the camp which argues that believing these corrupted subtleties will be largely influence the behavior of children is farfetched. However, the examples you gave are interesting to look at and may be good to revisit for a short time when we're in the animation/movie section of our course.
ReplyDelete