Disney Studio Research Articles

Disney in Black and White: An Analysis of Race Representation Within Disney Animated Films From 1937 to 2021

This study examined Disney studios’ portrayals of race as it relates to the physical, mental, and social characteristics of major characters ( N = 319) within Disney animated films released from 1937 to 2021 ( N = 59). Findings revealed most of the characters featured were portrayed as White (68.3%) whereas BIPOC characters made up 31.7% of the total. Results suggest that BIPOC characters were significantly more likely to be featured in supporting character roles, with White characters featured in both the protagonist and antagonist roles. We further observed a limited integration of characters of varying races in a singular film.

Diversity in Disney’s Theme Parks: Is it working?

In celebrating the centennial of the Disney Studios, it is also important to note cultural challenges to Disney’s representation and how the studio/corporation responds. This includes looking beyond their cartoons and films, but also into their theme park offerings, which are arguably extensions of Disney’s animation innovations. To do this, we drill into three popular Disneyland theme park attractions that are simultaneously cinematic and controversial, placing Disney in a delicate balance between the need for renewal and their fan’s reactions to change in any form. Indeed, sometimes it seems that Disney is not responsive enough or that they are too reactive. Our contention is that, in recognition of Disney as a cultural influencer, their attempts to improve representation in the theme parks will help lead to a better small world.

Disney’s Wagner Aesthetic: Music Drama in Pursuit of the Total Artwork

Aside from Walt Disney’s reputation for renegade avant-gardism, ‘sentimental modernism’ and subliterary Americana, the German composer Richard Wagner’s pursuit of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) provides a coherent framework for interpreting the ‘music drama’ of the Disney studio’s Depression-era shorts of the 1930s and its feature films of the Golden Age (1937–1942). In citing Wagner and Adorno’s critique of him, the author argues that Disney follows Wagner in three key respects: (1) in his disavowal of the ‘work’ of art and corresponding objectification of Nature; (2) his espousal of technology and its ‘innovation’ as a means of attaining artistic perfection; and (3) his striving for a synaesthesia, or aesthetic unity of the senses, which would ultimately prove unsustainable given the commercial constraints of capitalist modernity.

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE LANGUAGE GAME IN PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION AMONG ENGLISH SPEAKING ANIMATORS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE DISNEY ANIMATION STUDIO PRODUCTION

The language game has been a long-term study object among linguists and philosophers. The given paper studies the functions and ways of implementing language games in the professional communication of Disney studio animators through the analysis of morphemic and semantic structure of the selected language units, the context of their use and their functions. The given study is supposed to be of contemporary scientific relevance due to low interest in the peculiarities of professional communication in animation and is aimed at filling to some extent the gap in the studying of animation specialised vocabulary by researching its language games through their word-building tools. The study object is represented with the language games and their functions. The subject of the study deals with various ways of word-building in the context of professional communication in animation: contamination, collocating semantically mismatching words (oxymoron), conversion, working rules stylized as the Bible commandments. The undertaken research revealed that the examined language units, formed as a part of the language games process, fulfilled pragmatic functions and were used for achieving definite production, creative and communicative purposes. The examined material and proposed analysis can be useful for a broad audience of theorists and practitioners in the field of lexicology and ways of word-building, discourse studies and communication studies.

The use of cartoon characters in brand advertising communications

The authors of the article explore how the cartoon characters are perceived in advertising products of famous brands among young people. To study this issue, focus groups were held, in which representatives of the youth audience took part. To demonstrate the stimulus material, 22 characters from animated films were selected (cartoons of the Soviet period, Disney studios cartoons and other foreign cartoons). For a large number of products, especially for children, the use of cartoon characters is logical and relevant in most cases. The level of popularity of Soviet cartoons is quite high, which gives brands the opportunity to use their characters in advertising communications. The most popular are the heroes of foreign cartoons (Disney studios and others). According to the results of the study, it was concluded that the use of cartoon characters in advertising communications of the brand contributes to its successful promotion, makes advertising bright and memorable, such advertising attracts the attention of the target audience and arouses its interest. At the same time, the authors point out that it is impossible to take the character out of the context of the cartoon, his image should be exactly the way people used to see him. In this case, advertising communication will be really successful. The results of the study can be used by brands when promoting goods and services using cartoon characters.

Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic by Sean Eedy

Reviewed by: Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic by Sean Eedy Anna Horakova Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic. By Sean Eedy. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2021. Pp. 218. Hardcover $135.00. ISBN 978-1800730007. Sean Eedy's monograph fills a gap in GDR, comics, media, and education studies by charting the ways in which the East German government sought to summon the popular appeal and educational powers of comics to instigate enthusiasm for socialism and the development of the socialist personality among the GDR's youths. Eedy's study focuses on the paradoxical efforts by the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) as the most representative state-mediating institution of the GDR's youths, to channel the semantically polyvalent and, as he suggests, potentially uncontrollable hybrid medium of the comics. Seeking to portray the interplay between dissent and state power in the culture of the GDR in nuanced and historically contingent ways, Four-Color [End Page 174] Communism constitutes an invaluable contribution to recent scholarship dedicated to dissident or marginalized cultures in the GDR, alongside Seth Howes's Moving Images on the Margins (2019), Sara Blaylock's Parallel Public (2022), and Sarah E. James's Paper Revolutions (2022). However, instead of documenting the critique of state power from within the ranks of East German avant-garde artists and filmmakers, Eedy's study locates this critique within its mass-produced but still relatively marginalized comic book print culture. In so doing, Eedy's monograph follows in the footsteps of Scott McCloud's classic study Understanding Comics (1993), as it maintains a dual focus on close reading and historical context, teasing out the formal qualities of GDR comics as well as their uneasy relation to state power and oblique practice of social and institutional critique. Eedy's study traces the origins of East German comic book production to larger postwar anxieties about the medium's rootedness in perceived "US cultural imperialism and the destruction of national and cultural identities" (21) that were likewise shared by, for instance, West Germany, France, and the UK. The first two chapters, "Comics and the Crisis of Kultur in the SED State" and "State Power and the East German Zeitgeist," offer a meticulously researched and historically grounded account of how the GDR's policies desired to create alternatives to American (and later West German) productions in order to encourage East German child-readers to perpetuate the East German socialist state. The chapters follow the evolution of the country's two major comics, Mosaik von Hannes Hegen and Atze (and to a lesser extent, Frösi), from their inception in the mid-1950s as a bulwark against the perceived capitalist-imperialist influence of Western comics that were feared to be deleterious to the fledgling socialist state, all the way to the surprisingly positive impact of the Berlin Wall's construction on the quality of East German comics that were now allowed to become "more than derivative clones of West German and American publications" (8). That even at their qualitative peak, however, East German comic books did not evolve in the supposed vacuum of the "walled-in state" is correctly maintained by Eedy, who demonstrates the formal influence on these comic books exerted by both their German precursors (such as nineteenth-century and Weimar-era comics and children's literature) and Disney studios productions. In terms of the latter, Eedy's study takes seriously the official demand to "create a socialist alternative to Mickey Mouse," demonstrating Disney's influence especially on Mosaik's creator and drafts-man Hannes Hegen, and discussing how Mosaik's subsequent popularity with East German children is attributable to the transnational influences it had been intended to countermand (a topic that is discussed in depth in chapter five, "Western Influence, Popular Taste, and the Limitations of the FDJ's Publishing Regime"). Crucial to Eedy's study is a theoretical model of the GDR society as Nischengesellschaft (first defined by Günter Gaus), where the population is thought of as having retreated into the private, domestic sphere to escape from the thorough politicization [End Page 175] of East German society by the...

METATEXTUALITY AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES IN STEPHEN SONDHEIM’S INTO THE WOODS ON STAGE AND SCREEN

This paper focuses on the transmedial relationship between Stephen Sondheim’s 1987 Broadway musical Into the Woods and its 2014 film adaptation directed by Rob Marshall and produced by Disney Studios. It places emphasis on the various medium-specific narrative devices the two texts employ in order to bring forth the story’s central motif of storytelling. The metatextual motif of storytelling is deconstructed against Stephen Sondheim’s postmodernist ideology as he challenges the closed system within which fairy-tales traditionally figure, drawing attention to the artificiality of the inherited notions of good and evil, and by extension, the fallibility of prescribed narratives. Finally, this paper offers a detailed analysis of narrative layers and narratorial figures in Into the Woods on stage and screen, ultimately concluding that, due to its lack of an omniscient narrative voice to be questioned, the story’s transposition onto the screen fails to reiterate the significance of metatextuality of the central motif that has proven fundamental to Sondheim’s play.

Exaggerated Cartoon Style Motion in Hotel Transylvania

The fundamental principles of animation were developed at the Disney studio in the 1930s and when applied to animation result in a recognisable “Disney” style of motion. By adhering to these fundamental principles of animation, Animators have been able to successfully extend the Disney style of motion to the 3D CG medium. This paper goes beyond Disney style motion and examines the adaptation of techniques typically seen in more extreme cartoon-style motion and “pushed posing”, exemplified by early Warner Brothers animated short films. This is achieved via an analysis of Hotel Transylvania by Sony Pictures Animation, which features a stylised form of animation adapted from the extended principles of extreme cartoon-style motion to the 3D medium.

The Underwater Imagination

Abstract The 1940s and 1950s were a revolutionary era in both access to and imagination of the underwater environment in the most modernized nations of the globe. This article examines new possibilities in the exhibition of the underwater environment in film thanks to new dive and filming technologies. It focuses on how the depths are portrayed as a setting in Richard Fleischer’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954), by the Disney studio, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle’s The Silent World (1956). In both films, conventions for portraying terrestrial settings are adapted to the resistant conditions of the aquatic environment. Such adaptation unleashes creativity in filmmaking and results in portrayals in which audiences are at once at home in this alien area of our planet and able to assimilate and enjoy its unprecedented vistas and savage life.

Absent Patriarchs and Persuasive Enforcers of the Future Nation: A Contextualized Reading of American Wartime Fathers in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi

This article discusses the portrayal of fatherhood and paternity in Walt Disney’s benchmark features Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942) through a contextualized historical and cultural analysis. The author aims to provide a coherent study of how the father figure is constructed in each of these films and why the tone of this presentation varies considerably within the short time span between the theatrical releases. The article proceeds to demonstrate how, with their prominent father characters, these features exhibit metaphorically the transitional and challenged sentiments regarding fatherhood and masculinity in early 1940s America. The immense societal crises, the Great Depression and the Second World War, destabilized prevalent gender roles and, as a response, sparked ideologically charged discourses that were pretentiously spread in contemporary mainstream film, and which sought to restore the former patriarchal order. This article intends to discover to what extent the Disney studio participated in these popular discourses or used them for its own interests. Finally, the article investigates how these films contribute to the construction and understanding of ‘reality’ of this past and the role of fathers within it.

A tradição dos contos de fada e a sobrevivência de matrizes culturais femininas nas narrativas cinematográficas infantis

O principal objetivo deste artigo é o de refletir acerca dos valores culturais que são continuamente reproduzidos pelas narrativas cinematográficas ao longo de gerações. Estes valores que podem ser (re) construídos através das imagens e narrativas, utilizam-se de condutas já legitimadas socialmente como elos mediadores da memória coletiva, reconectando o passado ao contemporâneo. Ao analisarmos historicamente as produções cinematográficas dos estúdios Disney e suas personagens de princesas, percebemos que, embora uma desconstrução de estereótipos femininos possa ser evidenciada, persistem alguns valores tradicionais, que podem ou não ser ressignificados à medida em que a mulher consegue se emancipar culturalmente.

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno‐Marvels: Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno-Marvels : Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

“A banquet for all the world”: democracy and consumerism in Disney’s Food Will Win the War

ABSTRACTThis essay considers Food Will Win the War, an animated short made early in World War II by Disney Studios for the United States Department of Agriculture. Through a fantastical catalogue of hyperbolic images, the film shows how the mass production of American agriculture becomes the first wave of a new American-style consumerism of plenty that will transform the social order. The analysis blends contemporary theories of affective politics to show Food Will Win the War as a threshold text, revealing the post-war economy at its formation. Using food as a symbolic field, this film ultimately links the endless expansion of consumer desire to national identity and global colonization.

Para assistir aos vilões Disney: abjeção e heteronormatividade em “A Pequena Sereia”

Compreendendo a cultura midiática como um dos principais espaços contemporâneos de (re)produção de sentidos acerca dos mais variados âmbitos da vida social, a partir dos quais são estruturados procedimentos de controle e exclusão de corpos, ideias e comportamentos, o presente trabalho objetiva desvelar e analisar criticamente a sutil estratégia discursiva empregada em filmes de animação dos Estúdios Disney, estratégia essa que cumpre em reiterar a “normalidade” das formas de identificação por gênero hegemônicas a partir da abjeção de identidades desviantes. Para tanto, empreendemos uma análise sociocultural da vilã Úrsula, de A Pequena Sereia (1989), valendo-nos de aspectos metodológicos próprios à semiótica e à Análise Crítica do Discurso. Mediante uma leitura informada pelos Estudos Culturais e pela Teoria Queer, observamos que o padrão de representação mobilizado na animação veicula uma implícita avaliação negativa das formas de ser e agir que frustram o binarismo heteronormativo, associando-as inequivocamente com crueldade e ganância.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Master Score by Walt Disney

Reviewed by: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Master Score by Walt Disney Daniel Batchelder Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Master Score. Music by Frank E. Churchill, lyrics by Larry Morey, and additional underscore by Leigh Harline and Paul J. Smith. Limited edition digital replica. (Disney Music Legacy Libraries.) Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2015. [Prologue, p. 4–5; score, p. 6–205; epilogue, p. 206–7; acknowledgements, p. 207. ISBN 978-14950-0872-6. $300.] Conventional musicological wisdom regards a score—say, that of a Beethoven symphony—as a blueprint of performable musical events. Scholars may subject these texts to stylistic analysis with an eye toward uncovering aspects of the composer’s musical thought process: why this chord, this rhythm, this instrument? Though certainly not without value, it is precisely this monolithic and quintessentially romantic approach that Ben Winters decries in a 2007 article on film-music scholarship (“Catching Dreams: Editing Film Scores for Publication,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 132, no. 1 [2007]: 115–40). While the availability of published film scores has dramatically increased in recent years, Winters asserts that the auteurcentric methodology such documents enable distorts the emphasis on the composer’s creative autonomy by failing to account for the fact that scoring a film is a highly collaborative and fluid process. A film composer’s musical decisions are tempered by innumerable exigencies, from storyboard and sound-mixing concerns to editorial decisions that can leave feet of scored footage on the cutting room floor. This unavoidable indeterminacy, writes Winters (p. 120), “leaves us with a dilemma: how can we present a film score editorially in a way that both is useful for musicologists and yet acknowledges the often pluralistic, Text-like [in the Barthesian sense] complexities of the score?” An appealing solution to this dilemma has arrived in a surprising form. In late summer of 2015, the Walt Disney Company produced a beautifully bound, glossy facsimile of the manuscript “master score” to its 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While it cannot claim to be the first published film score—or even the first publicly available animated film score, given Ries & Erler’s edition of Wolfgang Zeller’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed from 1926 (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed: Musik zum Lotte Reiniger-Stummfilm, für kleines Orchester bearbeitet von Jens Schubbe, 5 vols. [Berlin: Ries & Erler, 2008])—this document is the first of its kind in many ways. Published by Hal Leonard and limited to a print run of 400 numbered copies, the edition was compiled and produced by a Disney-owned internal organization known as the Disney Music [End Page 157] Legacy Libraries (hereinafter, MLL). According to an explanatory two-page epilogue printed in the edition’s final pages, the MLL is an archival project dedicated to providing “a comprehensive and elegant resource solution for documenting and retrieving all phases of the [Disney studio’s] music scoring, contracting, and recording process” (p. 206). Since 2014, the MLL’s formidable parent company has exploited the project’s commercial potential with the Disney Music Emporium’s Legacy Collection, offering lavishly produced soundtrack recordings on compact disc and vinyl, complete with deleted songs and extensive liner notes (Walt Disney Records, “Disney Music Emporium: The Legacy Collection,” http://www.disneymusicemporium.com/the-legacy-collection [accessed 18 May 2016]). This score, however, signals the collection’s first foray into printed music. The publication’s use of the phrase “master score” compels some explanation. Though creating the score for a live-action film requires, as noted above, close and consistent collaboration between composers, editors, screenwriters, sound engineers, and the like, this process is magnified tenfold in the case of an animated film: every sound, utterance, and gesture must be carefully planned and organized in advance in order to ensure proper audiovisual synchronization. Though modern technology has streamlined and simplified this process, in the mid-1930s the creation of an eighty-three-minute animated film represented a gargantuan undertaking. By this time, however, the Disney studio had been at the forefront of the animation industry for nearly a decade, due in part to its constant experimenting with and implementation of new equipment...

Fantasy Imaginaries and Landscapes of Desire: Gustaf Tenggren’s Forgotten Decades

Gustaf Tenggren (1896–1970) was a 20th-century Swedish-born American illustrator of children’s books, magazines, advertisements, and artwork for the Disney Studio. Tenggren’s work was so ubiquitous that it remains in circulation and widely recognized today. But this large body of work has been understudied, as has its impact on the popular imagination. This article revisits Tenggren’s long career, and reinserts periods often skipped over, such as his work in magazine advertising during the 1920s and 1930s, and argues that although Tenggren is most often referred to as a children’s book and fairy-tale illustrator, his style was developed in the commercial field of magazine advertising, which incorporated aspects of modern art. That is, those aspects of modernism – abstraction, attention to form, the bright use of color for emotional impact – that were so much a part of fin de siècle Europe, a time when Tenggren was in art school, were appropriated first by advertising in America, and then by children’s book illustration. Thus, in the process, modernism was translated and democratized for middle-class consumers.

프로파간다 애니메이션 <총통의 얼굴>의 기호학적 분석

디즈니 스튜디오가 제2차 세계대전 중 미국 정부를 위해 여러 편의 프로파간다 애니메이션을 제작했다는 사실은 디즈니 스튜디오의 위상에 비해 대중에게 널리 알려져 있지 않다. 본 논문에서 중점적으로 다루고 있는 <총통의 얼굴>은 디즈니 스튜디오의 의미작용과 미학의 특징을 총체적으로 담아내고 있다. 그리고 이 작품은 캐릭터의 전형화와 작품 속 공간의 회화적 형상화를 통해 관객에게 작품의 함축적인 주제와 신화를 효과적으로 전달하고 있다. 그것은 프로파간다의 장르적 목적에 부합하는 것으로써 작품의 주제와 메시지를 안정적인 의미작용을 통해 전달하고자 했던 디즈니 스튜디오의 애니메이션 전략으로부터 비롯되었다고 할 수 있다. 그러므로 <총통의 얼굴>에 대한 기호학적 연구는 실험적 시도와 노력을 통해 정립해 온 디즈니 애니메이션 고유의 표현과 소통의 특징을 살펴보는 것이다. The fact that Disney studio produced several propaganda animations for the U. S. Government during World War II, is not widely known to the public. Der Fuehrer's Face that this essay centrally deals with totally includes the characteristics of signification and aesthetics in Disney animation. And, Der Fuehrer's face shows the tendency that represent the connotative theme of the work and myth to the audience, based on the typified character and the imagery of spaces in the work. Therefore, from this perspective, the semiotic studies on Der Fuehrer's Face is ultimately the approach to the characteristics of Disney animation's representation and communication that is established, through experimental trials and efforts.

Tinjauan Singkat Perkembangan Animasi Indonesia dalam Konteks Animasi Dunia

The purpose of this study was to assess the development of animated films in Indonesia based on historical studies to determine simultaneously mapping the history Indonesia in the context of world/global animation history. This study also examines the relationship between the histories of Indonesiananimated films with history first entry of the film in Indonesia which began the Dutch colonial era. According to Stephen Cavalier, the world history of animation was divided into five large round starts from the era before 1900 (The Origin of Animation) to the digital era (1986-2010). Based results of the study, Indonesian animation in the context of five major round of world animation, though have long been in contact with foreign-made films and animation (Disney Studio) has into Indonesia from the early 20th century (the early 1900s), the animation is produced Indonesia has only emerged in the '50s through the vision of a Soekarno, the first President. 1950 in the world of animation history entered the era of transition from gold age of traditional animation/cartoon (golden age of cartoons) are dominated by studio Disney to the era of television (television era). In a review of the history of animation, the era of the '50s travel half a century is the era of the modern world of animation history. Based on the facts the Indonesian animation has actually grown quite long, but the development of animation in Indonesia was very slow when seen in the context of the world animation history.

Colourful material histories: The Disney paint formulae, the paint laboratory and the ink and paint department

Abstract When the Disney studio shifted into digital animation by the early 1990s, it radically reduced its ink and paint department and discarded a number of production tools and documents that had once formed a part of the company’s earliest history. These included the paints and mustard grinders that Ub Iwerks had purchased for the Hyperion Studio’s ink and paint department in the late 1920s. Along with records of the paint formulae, and other production materials used in cel animation, these artefacts were subsequently acquired by several animation restorers and made available to the author. The discovery of these extant materials is a rare opportunity to better understand the colour production processes of a leading studio, which pioneered the introduction of three-strip (or Technicolor IV) colour into the motion picture industry in the early 1930s.

애니메이션 캐릭터의 젠더 담론에 관한 연구: 디즈니 애니메이션 &lt;겨울왕국&gt;의 여성 캐릭터를 중심으로

Gender Representation of animation character that is discussed in this essay is a semantic discourse that is related to communication with contemporary audience. For gender Representation of animation character, as it can be thought that linguistic elements for signification with audience are materialized, it has a significant value when it comes to communication with audience. Commercial success of Disney`s feature length animation Frozen is from excellent aesthetic principles and techniques and global marketing capabilities of Disney studio. However, independent and active gender representation of Elsa and Anna in Frozen are more important commercial successful elements. Especially, Gender representation of these two characters reflects myth of women who live in this modern society so their linguistic meaning can appear affluently. That also means that those two characters have advantages, in terms of communication, that can have effective signification with contemporary audience as linguistic sign. And those advantages are signification foundation that Frozen can be commercially successful by communicating with audience all around the world.