Disney's Influence

Animated movies serve as valuable tools for parents and councillors to improve communication with children about tough issues. Disney films combine fun entertaining characters with life lessons about love, friendships, good vs bad, death and loss and the importance of family.

Talking about these factors improve a child’s cognitive and behavioural development, according to a study by the University of Houston. 73% of Disney films focus on the importance of loving yourself and others with 27% focusing on morality and social values. Majority of Disney films include a loss or absence of the main characters’ parents leaving children with many questions to ask to their parents after viewing. According to the study, parents have become more visible in Disney films during the last decade. Monit Cheung Mary R. Lewis Endowed Professor in Children and Youth and the study’s lead author. “Disney films can also teach children about unfair situations in society and acceptance of racial, ethnic, religious, cultural and other differences.” The researchers point out how Disney movies today illustrate families as more diverse, potentially leading to a better understanding and respect for cultural differences. The concept of love in Disney movies has also evolved. “Early Disney films focused on love within romantic relationships, but recent movies like ‘Frozen’ focus on the power of love between families and siblings,” Huang explained. “It’s a significant change in how love can be very diverse and how people apply love to their social relationships, not only family or parents or siblings but also to their relationships with friends and people in their life. Disney films could be used as materials to open parent-child conversations to nourish children’s minds and broaden their horizons of life.”(Tubbs, 2021)

The dialogue in children’s films help children to grow and learn through watching the films. Disney was the first person the adapt and make animated films for kids. Each Disney films promotes a different value for children to learn, for example, in Beauty and the Beast they dealt with the value of physical beauty and in Finding Nemo they teach the value of willpower and perseverance. Disney also takes issues that are important at the time such as in Wall-E, the main focus of the film was raising awareness of environmental issues and recycling which was ground-breaking at the time (You are Mom, 2018). Another lesson which Disney movies teach children is morality and the importance of culture and uniqueness in each individual.

Since 1931, Disney has always produced content aimed at everyone. Disney has willingly waded into cultural issues, for example, last year Disney removed the voiceover which addresses boy and girls to Disneyland and replaced it with ‘dreamers of al ages’ to include a gender-neutral way to greet the guests (Barnes, 2022). The mission for the Disney brand has always been to never offend or confuse the family audience, with the current world’s constant varying opinions of current controversial topics this has caused Disney to lose the sense that they bring everyone together through the magic of cinema. Avoiding socially divisible topics reflects a certain world view. Disney has always incorporated patriotism for America and bible verses to their parks at certain times of the year, yet it took the company until 2009 to produce a Disney Princess film which had the main character as a black female. In recent years, there has been a noticeable change as the Disney company changed its CEO to Robert Iger. He served as the CEO from 2005 to the beginning of 2020, pushing further diversity in the biggest entertainment company (AllEars.Net, 2020). As he said at Disney’s 2017 shareholder meeting, referring to inclusion and equality, “We can take those values, which we deem important societally, and actually change people’s behaviour — get people to be more accepting of the multiple differences and cultures and races and all other facets of our lives and our people.” Therefore, using entertainment as advocacy. Iger was the one who pushed forward the global Marvel Studios blockbuster, ‘Black Panther’ which almost the entire cast was from African American decent and had a powerful Afrocentric storyline (SMITH, 2018). Under his guidance, Disney also refocused the ‘Star Wars’ franchise to be more female centric and a variety of animated films to showcase a range of races, cultures, and ethnicities. As Disney began to release their streaming platform, Disney+, in 2019, the company began an extensive review of its film library. As part of the initiative, named Stories Matter, Disney added disclaimers to their content that the company thought included ‘negative depictions or mistreatment of people or cultures’. Examples included several episodes of ‘The Muppet Show’ in the 1970s and the 1941 version of ‘Dumbo’. ‘These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now’ the disclaimers read before the viewing of the film on the streaming service. The Stories Matter team also deemed some characters as problematic, these characters included Tinkerbell, for being too body conscious, and Captain Hook, for promoting discrimination against individuals with disabilities (Gizmodo Australia, 2020). Last year, ‘Muppet Babies’ explored topics in relation to the LGBTQI+ community as they incorporated gender identity into an episode where Gonzo wore a dress sending a positive message of love and acceptance to gender neutral kids everywhere. Although the company is trying critics still feel that Disney is missing the mark when they address current topics such as in an episode of Marvel Studios ‘Loki’ where the main character briefly his sexuality. The current Disney CEO, Bob Chapek, was questioned about this in the 2022 shareholders meeting to which he replied, ‘I think everyone can see how difficult it is to try and thread the needle in between the extreme polarization of political viewpoints’ “What we want Disney to be is a place where people can come together,” he continued. “My opinion is that, when someone walks down Main Street and comes in the gates of our parks, they put their differences aside and look at what they have as a shared belief — a shared belief of Disney magic, hopes, dreams and imagination.” (The Walt Disney Company, 2022). All this shows representation in Disney films is important for children watching the films.