Students gathered Thursday night for a presentation that examined racial elements in classic Disney movies and assessed how these messages affect viewers.
The presentation, titled Animated Lives Matter: How Disney Affects Our Perceptions of Race, featured three graduate students. Approximately 25 students attended the panel hosted in the Boston University Art Gallery in the College of Fine Arts.
CFA art lecturer Akhil Bhatt moderated the panel, which was comprised of Channon Miller, Rob Ribera and Tessa Croker, all graduate students in the American and New England Studies program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
“This raises an interesting question. How is Disney dealing with its legacy? What should they do with this material and how should they be editing it, if at all? When these films show questionable things, should children be exposed to it?” Croker said.
Audience members viewed clips from the movies “Dumbo,” “Fantasia,” “The Princess and the Frog,” “Peter Pan” and “Aladdin.” Panelists evaluated how stereotypes typically associated with minorities, such as low education and hypersexuality, differed from how other characters were portrayed.
Ribera said harmful messages aren’t immediately visible to children who watch the movies.
“One thing to consider is that these things don’t always jump out at us right away, and they especially don’t jump out at children,” he said. “That’s part of the issue almost, that Disney movies are infectious. Even if there are problematic parts of them, you still find yourself swept up in them because of the good songs and whatnot.”
Miller said she appreciated the title of the panel as “Animated Lives Matter” because of its reference to the #BlackLivesMatter movement that launched nationwide after acts of police brutality in several places sparked racial debates.
“Time with animation shows us that as media, images have a way of making things acceptable and that movies do matter,” she said. “These images have tangible effects, and I know that it may not seem like a movie could impact daily life or opportunities of certain minority groups, but images do have that impact of making attitudes acceptable. That’s why it’s so important to expose people to the realities of these images.”
David Silvernail, a second-year graduate student in GRS who helped organize the presentation, said the purpose of the panel was to take a critical look at Disney movies.
“It’s important in the future to have these discussions, and like I said, to be aware of the tools that Hollywood needs to get the conversation going and see [and] not to get too philosophical because culture is a construct,” he said. “It’s important to take this feedback and to understand what people think currently and to embrace our contemporary standards of what is and isn’t appropriate.”
Several attendees said the panel was engaging and thought provoking.
Alexander Ciesielski, a first-year graduate student in GRS, said subtle messages of racism in movies are some of the first racist stereotypes people encounter.
“Denying that these elements existed [by] removing a character or removing a scene, it really seems like a cover-up … in that sense, I don’t think it’s responsible for Disney to do,” he said. “At the same time, it’s not like you can release these films without editing and have young children … [have the idea in] the back of their head as they grow up.”
Nora Lankhof, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said it was nice to hear what other people had to say, but the conversation could have gone further.
“One thing I wanted to say the whole time but didn’t was that we were only talking about racism when there are so many other issues that need to be addressed like class and sexism,” she said. “By just picking that out and focusing on it, you lose a lot of necessary things to talk about.”
