Disney Characters Research Articles

What can heroes and villains teach young audiences? A research brief investigating the values emphasized in family-rated Walt Disney films

ABSTRACT Due to the popularity of Walt Disney Studio films and characters, and the fact that young audiences often emulate their favorite Disney characters’ actions, an understanding of the values depicted by Disney’s popular heroes and villains is warranted. Guided by the model of intuitive motivation and exemplars, and extending previous work investigating broader altruism and egoism in Disney films, we content-analyzed the population of N = 442 family-rated (i.e. G- and PG-rated) Walt Disney Studio film synopses to extract the specific values depicted by films’ heroes and villains and examined the extent to which values depicted as socially desirable were predictive of audience reception (i.e. IMDb.com ratings and votes). Results from this research brief revealed that (1) heroes were more likely to violate personal safety considerations in pursuit of upholding care, loyalty, competence, autonomy, and relatedness, (2) villains were more likely to violate care and fairness in pursuit of power goals, and (3) films emphasizing the desirability of care, loyalty, and relatedness values were more popular with audiences via IMDb votes. Implications of these results are discussed.

Meta-narrative review of gender portrayal in Disney movies for young children and its pedagogical implications

Many of Disney movies have been criticized for perpetuating traditional gender stereotypes which constrain opportunities for children at large. Its recent characters have also incurred heated discussions on gender portrayal. Moreover, stereotypes of gender roles, developed early on, can exert an immediate impact on individuals’ behaviors and utterances and a long-term impact on individuals’ perceived options academically, professionally, personally, and socially. Recognizing the significance of this matter, this paper employed a meta-narrative review to collect and conceptually and empirically synthesize previous literature on the impact of Disney movies on young children’s gender awareness. Through an academic database search, 49 articles were collected using combinations of the keywords Disney character, Disney movie, young children, early childhood education, classroom practices, and gender. Furthermore, this review, in the pedagogical implication section, highlights the authors’ call for teachers to develop critical mindfulness of gender and shares hands-on activities for children to play with Disney characters in a reconstructive and agentic way.

Disney characters as moral role models: a discourse analysis of Coco and Encanto

Popular culture characters and narratives can influence people’s understanding of moral actions, and thus guide their behaviors accordingly. Films have proven to be strong anchors in people’s understanding of morality. We examine the perception of resilience as a moral characteristic in examining not just how people become resilient (thereby focusing on impact and action) but also to study “resilience” as a discourse and discussion in society as a moral message. We argue that popular culture narratives, particularly Disney films, help reinforce moral meanings of resilience. By conducting a discourse analysis of two films-Encanto and Coco and particularly focusing on resilience, we aim to contribute to a deepened understanding of Disney’s role in producing morality through diverse narratives and characters who serve as role models.

The Sociology of Afrofuturism in the New Disney Princesses: From Pinocchio and Anastasia, to Tiana

Afro-American Music, Dance, and culture, inspired entire movement Afrofuturism, afrofabulist Nyong, Tavio, Vincent Joslin, and John Szwed “Space is the place”, support the ideas of YTasha L. Womack, that can be found in the representation of blackness, as a new model of Princess and the Frog. Pinocchio, Anastasia and Tiana, were left out on the streets, but only one of the three becomes restaurant owner. Investigation on Gender dimension of comparison in between the Anastasia, and Pinocchio characters in cartoons, was conducted in group of BA students, of Sociology, at Faculty of Political Sciences, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, at Sociology of Gender I classes. The opinions about the issues of social inequalities, homelessness, and rising to the positive role model in Disney characters. Student showed high interest, and responded, and discussed, all of the offered questions. Interest in the analysis of cartoons, especially Disney characters, or post-feministic Disney masculinities (Michael Macaluso, 2018), and femininities, was higher than in the other themes. Focus on to the theme of the gender dimensions of Youth homelessness, influenced very wider aftermath discussion. What types of the femininities are globally celebrated inside the Disney. The opinions about the issues of social inequalities, homelessness, and rising to the positive role model in Disney characters.

Disney Setting and Changing Gender Stereotypes

Disney has been enthralling audiences of all ages with its timeless stories of adventure, love, and bravery for almost a century. However, a vast tapestry of societal impact is hidden below the outermost layer of its animated masterpieces. Disney has a narrative power that goes much beyond simple pleasure; it has the extraordinary capacity to influence, mirror, and even subvert cultural standards. Disney's contribution to the establishment and subsequent modification of gender norms is among the influence's most noteworthy features. This study aims to investigate the complex relationship that has developed between gender stereotypes and Disney's storytelling, both in the studio's products and in the larger cultural context. This paper seeks to further this continuing discussion by examining the ways that Disney's narrative has both upheld and challenged conventional gender stereotypes. This study will examine how gender roles are portrayed, Disney characters' agency, and messages about gender equality are communicated through a thorough examination of a few Disney classics and recent releases. Examining Disney's attempts to portray a broader range of identities and expressions of gender is also crucial, as the company increasingly recognizes the value of inclusivity and diversity in its narrative. This study will examine how Disney handles the challenging terrain of gender portrayal in the twenty-first century and how much these representations affect the opinions of its worldwide viewership.

The Embodiment and Effects of Feminism in Disney Films in the 20th and 21st

With the rise of feminism, the female characters in Disney's animated films break away from the original female stereotypes. The feminist content in Disney has evolved with the wave of the feminist movement. More and more brave, astute and independent female characters appear in movies. Compared with the simple princess movies, which tell the story of the elegant but weak princess who is rescued by the prince, these new female characters reflect the change of people's thoughts. These feminist contents promote the concept of gender equality, show the diversity of women's beauty, and deepen people's self-affirmation. However, some evidence shows that Disney characters have deformed aesthetics and tend to cause unhealthy body control. But people can improve this problem by being tolerant of beauty’s distance and paying attention to the beauty within. Parents can also guide their children to learn about women's rights in movies so that the improved Disney movies can play a more positive role.

From ‘tiaras and twirls’ to ‘action and adventure’. Eliciting children’s gendered perceptions of Disney characters through participatory visual methodology

ABSTRACT This study, based on interpretative phenomenological methodology, examines the influence Disney media and merchandise may have on children’s understandings of gender. Although there are various studies in this area, most focus on the Disney Princesses’ effects on girls’ gender development and few directly elicit the views of both girls and boys (Golden and Jacoby 2018). The current study attempts to address this gap by investigating how girls and boys, aged five to eight years, interpret messages circulated by Disney to make sense of the gendered norms and roles of its characters. Participatory visual methods used were a draw and talk exercise and an image-values line activity. Critical discourse analysis identified two key gender discourses: physical appearance and gendered behaviours, with children’s exclusionary binary opinions core to both. However, both boys and girls valued the more active traits portrayed by the contemporary princesses. Through adopting a feminist poststructuralist lens, this study contributes to the existing body of knowledge that informs of ways to deconstruct stereotypes with children to promote positive gender development in childhood.

The Kingdom’s Shōnen Heart

Taken by themselves, neither Disney nor Square Enix appears particularly successful at transcultural expression, although both are certainly marketing juggernauts in transmedia franchise operations (Smoodin, 1994; Consalvo, 2013). Disney may be understood in terms of American postwar cultural imperialism, while Square Enix is deeply rooted in conventions of Japanese storytelling. But together, somehow the two achieve a synergy in Kingdom Hearts (2002), coalescing in the figure of Sora, its youthful protagonist. This article performs a close reading of Sora’s visual character design, a transcultural melding of Walt Disney’s own Mickey Mouse and the shōnen figure of earlier Nomura Tetsuya creations. While gameplay dynamics point to a new action-adventure style for Square Enix, the shōnen characteristics of Sora’s appearance combine with his sense of loss and yearning to position the game in the JRPG genre. 
 
 Transculturality of the non-player characters (NPCs) in Kingdom Hearts is then considered. These character designs remain static, anchored to their original reference texts. Where the Disney characters fit their settings in an uncomplicated way, providing escapism and nostalgia for the player, Square characters seem to be chosen for their complexity. The use of then-recent Final Fantasy X characters Tidus and Wakka in Destiny Islands is contrasted against the use of darker, brooding characters from older Final Fantasy titles encountered later in the game. Just as loss and yearning define Sora’s shōnen character, the sense of loss manifested by Cloud, Aerith and Leon connect the player to the real-world context of the global late 1990s, speaking to Japanese anxiety following the Hanshin earthquake and Aum Shinrikyo attacks of 1995, and to the despair of ‘Generation X’ following Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 (Funabashi and Kushner, 2015; Brabazon, 2005). Meanwhile, the deep economic recession of Japan’s ‘lost decade’ (1991-2001) connected perfectly to the post-9/11 unease in America at the time of the game’s release. Overall, I argue that the game’s success stems from its transcultural emphasis on loss and yearning, which fit not only the JRPG genre but also the sense of anxiety pervading both Japan and America at the time.

Induction.

Induction.

Women Equity Strive in Society Depicted through Animation Film Characters

The purpose of this research is to identify the female representation depicted in the Disney Renaissance and to investigate why Disney characters struggle to claim their equity as women in their society. The research methods used in this study are classified as qualitative and descriptive. The documentation method and taking notes techniques are used to collect data. The research also employs two method concepts to analyze the collected data, including a gender equity approach analysis and Simone de Beauvoir's second-wave feminism theory. The data consists of linguistic units from various Disney Renaissance stories. The writer discovered three parts in the description of female representations based on data analysis of the female representations depicted in Disney Renaissance: rebel, wise, and adventurous women; confident, intelligent, and repellent of domestication women; and masculine, loyal, and ambitious women. Furthermore, data analysis of Disney characters' struggles in claiming their equality as women in their society reveals that they outperform patriarchal expectations, reject domestication, and practice emancipation by appropriating masculine attributes and roles.

Questões de género desconstruídas a partir de fragmentos de animação

This article reflects on the territory of Media Theory, as a platform for reflection on gender issues. Thus, we face the possibility of opening the discursive space entitled “Cinema and its contribution to the perception of the current world”, to the universe of animation. Our observations were directed towards the construction and deconstruction of stereotypes related to the female figure, in social and cultural contexts, in the east and in the west.. In this scenario, female Disney characters were analyzed, observing the transition from the princess imaginary, beautiful but with little autonomy to the heroine character, endowed with beauty, strength and autonomy and the heroines present in Anime.

Analyzing Hidden Elements in Disney Movies and Effects on Children

Disney characters and themes are inspiring for children. There is much more than an apparent setting of the Disney movies. Children learn to respect and help others; they also absorb some hidden messages. This research also aims to examine the hidden elements in the content produced by Disney as a major entertainment corporation. The researcher analyzed relevant movies and found prominent elements, i.e., escape, sexual content, jealousy, and stereotyping. Notably, parents of Disney movies' viewers do not guide their children or discuss the movies with the children to increase the potential influence of the movies on little minds. The effects of Disney movies include fear, low confidence, egoism, unrealistic expectations, ignorance, daydreaming, and contentment. Further, we have discussed the results and proposed recommendations for future researchers.

Female Disney Characters’ Linguistic Features in the 1990’s

The present study aims to investigate female Disney characters’ linguistic features in the 1990’s. It studies sexist ideologies manifested through these characters’ language. The sample consists of three Disney animated movies from the 1990’s: Mulan, Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas. The frameworks adopted to study female Disney characters’ language are Lakoff’s (2004b) forms of women’s language and Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional approach to CDA. The findings revealed that the linguistic features that mostly characterized female Disney characters’ language were hypercorrect grammar, super polite forms and hedges. They reflect the sexist stereotypicality of women’s language being slang-free and polite. They also used large stock of words related to their specific interests, empty adjectives and intensive ‘so’, which imply having stereotypical lexicon. The least linguistic feature used was tag questions. However, when used, they implied anticipation of being corrected by others. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Disney, Gender, Women’s language.

Book covers and Disney characters—there’s a periodic table for everything

Book covers and Disney characters—there’s a periodic table for everything

Ten-Cent Ideology: Donald Duck Comic Books and the U.S. Challenge to Modernization

The comic-book artist Carl Barks was one of the most-read writers during the years after the Second World War. Millions of children took in his tales of the Disney characters Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. Often set in the Global South, Barks's stories offered pointed reflections on foreign relations. Surprisingly, Barks presented a thoroughgoing critique of the main thrust of U.S. foreign policy making: the notion that the United States should intervene to improve “traditional” societies. In Barks's stories, the best that the inhabitants of rich societies can do is to leave poorer peoples alone. But Barks was not just popular; his work was also influential. High-profile baby boomers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas imbibed his comics as children. When they later produced their own creative works in the 1970s and 1980s, they drew from Barks's language as they too attacked the ideology of modernization.

Are Disney Characters ‘Frozen' in Stereotypes? An Intersectional Analysis of Frozen

This paper analyzes changes and continuities in the popular princess characters created by the Walt Disney Studios, specifically in the 2013 movie Frozen. The analysis focuses on five themes suggested by an intersectionality framework: the historical and geographical contexts of Disney characters; the controlling images that are revealed; the power relations among the characters; the macro and micro conditions of Disney movies; and the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and class in the portrayed characters. The main finding is that the traditional Disney princess has made way for a new and more modern princess character that seems to transcend the conventional stereotype of former characterizations. Yet, closer inspection of the Frozen movie also shows that a new stereotype has developed that depicts a princess as someone who merely thinks she is independent, but who often still needs to rely on a man

Mickey Marx

Mickey Marx Devin Thomas O’Shea (bio) How to Read Donald Duck, Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart OR Books www.orbooks.com/catalog/donald-duck/ 208 Pages; Print, $22.00 The dictator Augusto Pinochet had this book burned in the streets of Chile after the 1973 September 11th coup d’ état — a coup that was funded, planned, and encouraged in secret by the United States. Since then, a copy has been hard to find. The English translation took a long while to make it state-side, and if you’re familiar with Disney’s attitude towards intellectual property, it’s a miracle that How to Read Donald Duck was able to print Disney comics in its pages. After years of scarcity, OR Books has brought this critique of American cartoons as propaganda to English readers. Even if this is your first foray into Marxist criticism, Dorfman and Mattelart’s critique is fun, concise, and sharp as a knife. How to Read Donald Duck is essentially a Marxist critique of children’s literature. Disney comics flooded Latin America alongside US influence throughout the twentieth century. During that time, Scrooge McDuck’s gold vault swimming pool was made to look like a modest savings compared to the exploitative practices of US companies aided by the US government. For Dorfman and Mattelart, the ideological groundwork for this imperialist exploitation is contained and represented within Donald Duck and the cast of Disney characters that compose Walt Disney’s comic book canon. How to Read Donald Duck is not addressing Disney movies overall, but the archetypes as they appeared in comic form. With beautiful flourishes of language, it is difficult to convey what a rare perspective it is to get two authors collaborating to make a convincing case that everything evil about US imperialism is reflected in a three-panel comic about Jiminy Cricket chased by vultures named Marx and Hegel. It might seem silly, or absurd, to make such serious claims about Disney cartoons, but the authors defend their study with a mix of self-deprecation and serious psychology. Doesn’t it make sense that ideological propaganda would show itself plainly in childhood media? Disney cartoons often count as the first morality tales a child learns, so shouldn’t we investigate what they’re saying? Shouldn’t [End Page 20] we be concerned if there an “iron fist beneath the Mouse’s glove?” One high-water mark of the book came when Donald’s nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, are revealed to be products of art in the age of mechanical reproduction; they are time-saving stamps. Each nephew is identical except for the colors of their caps. These colors change their being. Maybe that’s why Disney’s family tree is so full of twins and triplets, but according to Dorfman and Mattelart, this represents an affect that Disney wants us to receive; Disney wants us running on the treadmill. In the comics, everything needs to be in motion while having nothing ever really change. Fortunes won or lost, there is no class or social movement in Disney’s world. Each nephew is put in motion, but nothing really changes; technicolor printing allows one to become three like a Boy Scout duckling hydra. How to Read Donald Duck uncovers a deeply conservative, patriarchal, agenda in the center of Micky Mouse’s heart; the female characters are always the girlfriends and bystanders of the male protagonists. All the characters are related indirectly; there are no mothers and fathers, only uncles and nephews. Therefore, the parental voice is absent and everywhere; it’s in the composition of the comics that we hear what the God of Disney wants to say. I appreciated the take-down of Scrooge particularly. On the surface, Scrooge is a criticism of capitalism within Disney’s world. Scrooge never spends a dime; he lives a shallow life in service of inanimate wealth. He is just like the Dicken’s character of his namesake. But with How to Read Donald Duck, we come to see that Scrooge is a decoy; a prop meant to disarm the reader...

Disney’s Final Package Film: The Making and Marketing ofThe Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad(1949)

As the last of Disney’s package films in the troubled decade of the 1940s, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) has acquired the reputation of an awkward ‘marriage of convenience’ of two separate stories based on well-known literary properties, one American and one British: Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. This article, by reconstructing the gestation of the film over eight years, demonstrates the degree to which the stark contrast between the two halves was not only inevitable but deliberate. This is especially visible in the handling of the narrative – action set pieces for Toad and a full-fledged musical for Ichabod – as well as the art direction, which favors realism for Toad and stylization for Ichabod. An analysis of the marketing campaign shows that the film was presented as a facsimile of the standard double bill of the period, with an A picture and a B picture. In lauding its new cast of sympathetic Disney characters and stories that stimulate a full range of emotional responses, some film critics in Britain and the US compared Ichabod and Mr. Toad favorably to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo and the Silly Symphonies, calling the film a harbinger of a Disney renaissance – a revival that would be fully realized with the premiere of Cinderella in 1950.

La visión de la discapacidad en la primera etapa de Disney: Blancanieves y los 7 enanitos, Alicia en el País de las Maravillas y Peter Pan

El cine es un gran promotor de ideas e históricamente ha contribuido a la difusión de una imagen de la discapacidad basada en estereotipos. Este medio resulta especialmente atractivo entre el público infantil por su alto valor de entretenimiento. Son precisamente los niños quienes asimilan como válidas muchas de las imágenes y valores que se transmiten en las películas y que ayudan a formar sus actitudes. En este trabajo se exponen diversos aspectos de la visión de la discapacidad en los personajes de Disney a través de tres películas del período comprendido entre 1937-1953: Blancanieves y los siete enanitos, Alicia en el País de las Maravillas y Peter Pan. Estas tres películas han sido ampliamente difundidas y han marcado a tres generaciones diferentes. Por ello, se hace un análisis de los personajes con discapacidad que aparecen en estos largometrajes y la imagen de la discapacidad que a través de ellos se proyecta. Se discuten además los estereotipos que perpetúan y la influencia que pueden tener los mismos en el público infantil al cual van dirigidas estas cintas.

Disney And The Magical World Of Writing; How Combining Creativity With Learning Disabilities Can Promote Academic Success

Through a Disney perspective, this author discusses how students can use creative strategies to cope with learning disabilities in secondary, post-secondary and even graduate levels of academic achievement. In particular, the paper will be presenting how the author, who has an infinity for “everything Disney”, chose to use both Disney Characters and Disney Song titles from movies and television shows, as a creative strategy in the organization of her master’s research thesis. The research study entitled “Why is it so hard to go a good thing? The Paradox and Dilemma of Parental Advocacy within the Individual Education Planning Process” took a qualitative, phenomenological approach to investigate the experiences of parental advocacy and to seek out macro/micro factors that may have contributed to positive or negative outcomes within the IEP process. The author used Disney song titles as an adaptive tool not only to help in the organization of the findings of the research, but also to help illuminate the phenomenological existential themes that were revealed through the analysis. The paper hopes to demonstrate that through the use of creative strategies in otherwise conventional academic expectations, students experiencing disabilities may increase the potential of achieving academic success.