Blog Post 1

How I found my topic

From a young age, fairy tales have been something that have been a large part of my life, and I loved being able to read different versions of my favorite fairy tale story: Cinderella. I wanted to further this interest, and decided to focus my project around fairy tale films. However, I needed a question to relate to these that I knew would interest me. As I did more research on films and film studies, I came across a lot of research on how there was a large amount of negative representation of people of color in films, and how this could negatively affect young children.

 One particular study I came across, the very popular Doll Study conducted many years ago, talked about how the lack of representation of Black people in movies caused young black children to identify more with white dolls instead of black ones, due to them never having seen anything different. This intrigued me, having once been a child who's only POC princess growing up was Jasmine from Aladdin (who, contrary to popular belief, is Arab and not Indian). Because of this, I decided to focus on how people of color are represented in films, and as this is something that's been a very important topic as of late with the casting of Black actress Halle Bailey in the Little Mermaid Live action, I thought it would be a good question to focus on. 

Although I originally wanted to focus on the more general topic of all fairy tale films, after some reconsideration I decided to focus exclusively on Cinderella films. This is due to the fact that there are a multitude of Cinderella retellings alone, and focusing on other fairy tales along with Cinderella may have resulted in uneven data as not all fairy tales have as many movies that were made about them. This resulted in me narrowing in on my final question: Is the representation of people of color in Cinderella films adequate for a changing social climate?