Racism and stereotypes
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Date
2016
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university of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
For a long time the literary classic tale used to be the source of joy for children; however, nowadays this is not the case since people become more familiar with Disney's interpretation of these tales. Disney's full-length animated films have been a popular form of children's animated literature for more than 60 years. But when we look back at racial representations from the time of the 1940s in films such as Disney's Dumbo (1941), we are likely to be shocked by how negative and overtly stereotypical the racial representations are. The literature review shows that this subject has been studied in a general manner. However, this study reveal the fact that even though the films of Walt Disney are widely considered as innocent, pedagogical tools that aim to educate the most sensitive part of the society i.e. children, a critical viewing will show that they generally reflect racist stereotypical connotations about non-western people. Thus, this research raises a set of interesting questions such as how the western best views the orient rest. Therefore, this paper will be focusing on revealing the negative, inaccurate representations that sought to propagate racism in a sample of three full-length animated Disney movies namely: Dumbo (1941), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994).This study finds that the Magical Kingdom had stereotypically portrayed people of color namely arabs, african and african americans or blacks in general. These stereotypical depictions were consciously adopted to provide young audiences with distorted facts about their other and thus perpetuating and reinforcing racism.
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Racism : Disney's movies