The Cinema of Early Disney: Bigotry or Revolution?

There is no doubt that Walter "Walt" Elias Disney (December 5, 1901 - December 15, 1966) was one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century and, arguably, of all time. His entertainment enterprise has been responsible for everything from gigantic theme parks, which are some of the most sought after vacation destinations in the world, to live-action and animated films, which have become some of the most recognizable in film history (and everything in between). But, as Steven Watts, a professor of history at the University of Missouri at Columbia, explained in an article for The Journal of American History, three barriers for making sense of this American icon loom large. "First, Disney's enormous popularity has contributed to his dismissal in critical circles... Second, a swiftly moving flood of Disney productions has engulfed attempts at analysis. The output of the Disney Studio has been so extensive, in so many venues, over so many decades that it resists interpretive synthesis. Third, violently contrasting reactions to the Disney legacy have polarized opinion in the academy and outside it" (Watts 84). It is those polarized opinions that the following essay will both examine and hold up to scrutiny.

Walt Disney's filmography is a truly massive list, totaling nearly a thousand credits, as producer, director, writer, animator and even actor-he was, after all, the voice of Mickey Mouse (IMDb). During the time period examined specifically in this piece-from the studio's beginning through 1950-Disney Studios made five feature length animations- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), as well as a number of other controversial works, including the combination live-action/cartoons Song of the South (1946) or The Three Caballeros (1944), and animated shorts such as Pecos Bill (1948).

Early in his career, Disney was taken quite seriously as an artist and received widespread intellectual praise. "David Low, for example, described Disney in the 1942 New Republic as the most significant figure in graphic art since Leonardo da Vinci and trumpeted his arrival 'at the foothills of the New Art of the Future'" (Watts 86). By the late 1940s, however, criticisms of Disney's works had begun to mount. There was a growing impression that Walt had abandoned his artistic roots and was now "pandering to popular tastes" (Watts 86). In 1946, American film critic Manny Farber wrote that Disney's films "had degenerated into 'lollypop art,' a 'bon-bon mode that will satisfy the people who do printing on weeding cakes, those who invented Mother's Day, the people who write their names with a flurry and end them with flounces and curlicues'" (Watts 86).

Although he claimed until his death that he never cared much for politics, Disney's, "opposition to labor organizing and support for anticommunism in Hollywood seemed to crystallize a visceral conservatism that moved him into the camp of such politicians as Barry Goldwater" (Watts 96). In addition, late in his life & career, he made considerable campaign contributions to California right-wing political candidates such as Ronald Reagan and George Murphy; gave friendly testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947; and was rumored to have had private outbursts[1] discriminating against African Americans, Jews and political leftists (Watts 96).

It is this side of Walt Disney which prompts the argument from many that there are racist and sexiest ideologies present in lots of early Disney productions. Many scholars, including Brenda Ayres in her article The Poisonous Apple in Snow White: Disney's Kingdom of Gender, have argued that Disney's first animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), by adapting a Victorian era fairytale, "perpetuates a nineteenth-century notion of domestic ideology: Women are to be submissive, self-denying, modest, childlike, innocent, industrious, maternal, and angelic-all traits that perfectly describe Snow White" (Ayres 39). By contrast, in the film, Snow White's second mother fails as a proper roll model because she comes off as independent, self-assertive, and free of male-domination. "Thus Snow White must be removed to a home where she can learn how to take care of a house and meet the needs of not only one man, but seven" (Ayres 39).

Snow White attempts to coerce its viewers into roles of gender conformity and often does so through the prosecution of rebellious women. In actuality, the film "promotes any source of female empowerment as evil. Little girls must grow up to be like Snow White, who uses her beauty to attract a man so that she can serve him and serve her children. Beauty is not to be a source of self-liberating power. However, without beauty, the woman has very little currency to barter her own worth" (Ayres 43).

Finally, Snow White-like her arguable source material, the biblical character Eve (Ayres 46) -is alone and without a husband. Thus she has failed as both a woman and as a mother to the dwarfs. She is poisoned because "she is without a husband to protect her from the evils of the gender-rebellious world" (Ayres 46).

Shan Yu. Keisha Hoerrner analyzed Disney's feature-length animated films using four categories-physical aggression, deceit, verbal aggression, and theft-developed by Bradley S Greenburg in 1980. She studied a total of 864 behaviors from the Disney screen and estimated that 66% of them were antisocial. Of those, 84% were performed by white males; activities that were, for the most part, not only un-scolded but actually rewarded. Women were thus "taught that they were not significant actors: They didn't have presence and they should keep quiet and invisible. These are stereotypes that are being passed on to our children as proper behavior types" (Ayres 19), Ayres asserts.

In his book Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment, Douglas Brode argues that in Snow White, by implication, "progressive romantic inclinations and traditional moral attitudes were not necessarily at odds" (Brode 118). He believes Snow White represents a completely natural woman feels that the contrast of White with the "wickedly beautiful queen is not the conventional dichotomy of The Woman, but that 'adult' film's polar opposite. Here the 'good' Snow White surrenders to her sense, while the 'bad' queen remains cold, rigid, narcissistic-her beauty enjoyed alone, before the Magic Mirror" (Brode 118). Brode, by contrast, heralds Snow White as being "thirty years ahead of its time" (173). A film which can be read, "as a protofeminist cautionary fable, implicitly criticizing what in time would be attacked as 'the beauty trap.' 'Rags cannot hide her gentle grace,' the mirror's Slave informs her majesty. True beauty, Disney insists, is not implied from the outside but grows from within, and has less to do with a woman's physical appearance than her personality" (173).

It is here in arguments such as Brode's that the flipside of Disney's ideological coin is revealed. Later in the same article mentioned above, Steven Watts suggests a critique of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that actually seems to align itself somewhat with leftist thought:

SnowWhite made national celebrities of the seven dwarfs, miners who bent to their task singing "Heigh Ho, It's Off to Work We Go." It subtly celebrated the virtue, independence, and dignity of (literally) "the little guy" who, despite character flaws and a rough-and-tumble life, works hard, maintains an upright character, and pulls through the worst travails offered by nature or the social order. Aristocracy takes a beating throughout. The Wicked Queen destroys herself, and the protagonist, a princess, gains viewer sympathy by per position as a servant girl and her no-nonsense habits of hard work (Watts 99).

Furthermore, it seems that the prejudices believed to be rampant in the film are actually looked down upon. The dwarf "Grumpy", who makes fun of his housemates for washing up before dinner (at the request of Snow White) because he sees it as a feminine gesture, "is Disney's presentation of a narrow-minded cracker who believes that deep-seated (and heretofore unquestioned) bigotry represents some sort of simple folk wisdom" (Brode 234). Disney hardly condones Grumpy's actions, however, since "he is the only dwarf who must dramatically arc, if he's to, in time, find salvation" (234).

Snow White is not the only early Disney film to cast women in a positive light, either, argues Brode. In the 1948 animated short Pecos Bill, the leading lady, Sue, "administers a sweet sexual education in one of the first Hollywood films to depict a woman of experience in a highly positive light" (Brode128).

Nor does it appear that the only progressive thinking in Disney films is in portraying leading women positively. While the black crows in Dumbo (1941) are often criticized as upholding to black stereotypes and caricatures, it can be pointed out that Dumbo's hard-fought success could not have come "without the strong support from a little brown mouse and five black crows-characters of color who save the day after all the Anglos disparage Dumbo" (Brode 51). More than just a caricature, each crow "is individualized as a distinct character, resembling the uniquely realized jive-talking denizens of a Brooklyn street corner in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989; Brode 51).

"Since the film could be viewed as an attack on unthinking prejudice" (Brode 52), Steven Watts is quoted by Brode as saying, what better way to teach Dumbo how, not only to survive, but to succeed than through the teachings of Disney's "anthropomorphic equivalent" (52) of African Americans, the most persecuted minority in America at the time?

Finally, the ending of the film incorporates a theme often overlooked in Disney films, regardless of which side of the ideological fence you fall on-the positive portrayal of those who differ from society's norm and, "the need for others-purportedly more 'normal' types, if that term has any valid meaning-to accept and include those who are different into the American mainstream" (Brode 252).

Disney's Fantasia (1940) presents eight pieces of classical music; each segment introduced and interpreted by musicologist Deems Taylor. "Disney intended Fantasia to be an open text, featuring both narrative and nonnarrative 'visualizations' of music, with the initial intention that these sequences could be reorganized and other sequences would be added" (Luckett 214). To help with audience understanding and comprehension of the film, Disney produced a thirty-two page program which, "discussed the ideas behind the production of Fantasia and provided background knowledge on each musical selection" (Luckett 215). It was distributed to audiences during the film's premieres in 1940 and '41.

During a period in history when depicting non-marital sex in film was never "presented in such a way as to appear attractive and beautiful" (Brode 119), and certainly not "right and permissible" (119), Disney's version of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony plays out in the film like a Greek myth; a myth which conjured images of pagan myth and early-nineteenth-century Romantic poets. In the scene, centaurs and other mythic creatures enjoy what can only be classified as an orgy and, aside from a brief spring rainstorm and the "expected postcoital exhaustion" (119), are no worse for the wear. During a time in American history when sexual exploration was still strictly forbidden, Disney gleefully depicts "his half-human, half-animal creations slipping off to make love in the forest" (Brode 120).

As out there as this representation appears to be, however, it does not go quite as far as Disney himself had hoped. He designed the centaurs to be beautiful, topless African American "women", freely courting Anglo "males"; thus, killing two birds with one stone - breaking down both sexual and racial taboos. It was Will Hays and the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) that, in the end, nixed the scene for being too risqué, even if it was "merely" a cartoon (Brode 120). From this example, as well as many others like it, it would seem clear anyway that Disney did in fact posses an ideology of progressive thinking well ahead of its time.

It is difficult to say which argument-that Disney was a racist and sexist bigot and that his films merely perpetuate Victorian-era stereotypes, or that he was a sexual revolutionary and advocate of "the little guy" leading a revolution-better withstands thorough examination, but it may not matter in the end. As Henry Giroux explains in the introduction to his book The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence,

How audiences interpret Disney's texts may not be as significant as how some ideas, meanings and messages under certain political conditions become more highly valued as representations of reality than others-and further, how these representations assume the force of ideology, by making an appeal to common sense while at the same time shaping political policies and programs that serve very specific interests... (Giroux 8)

Although the ideologies present in his early work through 1950 (and probably even in most Disney releases since then) are debatable and we may never know exactly what ol' Walt was trying to accomplish, there is no arguing that Walt Disney the entrepreneur was one of the most innovative geniuses ever to grace American soil. Regardless of the messages behind it, his artwork and influence will grace both U.S. and international stages forever.

WORKS CITED:

Ayres, Brenda. The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom. New York, New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003

Brode, Douglas. Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2005

Dumbo, Walt Disney Productions (1941), DVD 2001

Fantasia, Walt Disney Productions (1940), 2000

Giroux, Henry A. The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 1999

Luckett, Moya. "Fantasia: Cultural Constructions of Disney's 'Masterpiece'" inDisney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. Edited by: Smoodin, Eric. New York, New York: Routledge, 1994

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney Productions (1937), DVD 2001

"Walt Disney" The Internet Movie Database 13 December 2006

Watts, Steven. "Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century" The Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 1. (Jun., 1995), pp. 84-110.

[1] For instance, it was reported that, when Disney learned of an animator who working on Fantasia that had decided to take piano lessons completely on his own, reportedly to better understand the combination of music and art in the film, he said to the employee, "Well, what the hell's the matter with you; are you some kind of faggot?" (Ayres 22)