Representations Of "Otherness" In Disney Animated Films

Over the last few decades, especially since the late 1980s, the subject of "Otherness" represented in Disney animated films has been mostly examined in three aspects: the symbolic order (Disney film as a signifying system), the people who are involved in the semiotic activity (film consumers, film makers) and the society that backgrounds this cultural phenomenon (the American society and other communities that consume Disney products). Disney film as a semiotic system definitely can be a path for tracking down "Otherness", but the system should not be treated as an impersonal scientific structure. Rather, it is an artificial product and, more accurately, a social activity. Traditionally, a Disney film is invariably received as a purified and exorcized form of art which perpetuates and validates universal values and truths that transcend time and space, and the audience is eventually mandated to see it from a distance so that the authority established by the discourse remains safe and sound. Nevertheless with the burgeoning of the campaign of cultural studies, people (both scholars and marginalized groups in a society) realize that an elitist culture might cocoon their independent mind and create nonage with the accepted knowledge. Armed with various critical theories and paradigms, they are now in a position to observe dialectically how knowledge has been constructed in the intellectual world.With recourse to different schools of thoughts and discourses such as semiotics, neo-Marxism, feminist theories, Foucauldian analysis of sexuality and power, Roland Barthes' mythology and Nietzsche's deconstructive thinking against historicism, this study is an interdisciplinary critique of some of the typical but often negligible representations of "Otherness" employed by the Disney Studio, for the purpose of exposing and verifying the fact that Disney programs, "clean and healthy and innocent" as they are frequently acclaimed, exercise manipulation and control more easily and conveniently than other forms of discourse. In thrall to the long-standing mentality historically formulated on Disney programs, the Disney Studio as a belittled genre has hardly received due attention from the intelligentsia, thus exempted fromin-depth criticism directed to other categories of films. "Otherness", as this research tries to prove, is intricately related to racism, sexism, mythology, and historicism in Disney films such as Snow White and Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Jungle Book (1967), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998), Tarzan (1999). These films are mostly bedtime stories for kids, but it is these Disneyfied narratives that have been playing a constant role of consolidating the unconsciousness of discursive power.Dedicated to the subject, this thesis illustrates that these platitudes are ideal tools to exert influence and power over people through binary oppositions. Whether these Disney films center on gender, race, or other fields of knowledge such as economy, politics, and religion, they are apt to be accessed with the preoccupied concepts of good and bad, black and white, male and female, kind and cruel, rich and poor, ... despite the fact that there are many other possibilities to receive them. However, the projection of these notions and concepts rationalizes Western values and mindsets such as white supremacy, Eurocentrism, masculinity, imperialism which unconsciously justify and windowdress inequity, inequality, repression, exploitation, prejudice, transgression, appropriation, hegemony that are pervasive of all the present social relations. Although these stories are of different cultural origins and of all geopolitical spaces such as Europe, the Middle East, China, Latin America, once adapted and cast by Disney Studio, they serve unanimously the interest of the "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" as bell hooks once put it.Structurally this thesis is...