A critical and contextual analysis of the changes in African-American character representation in Disney animated films from Dumbo (1941) to the Princess and the Frog (2009)
Date
2014-06-12
Authors
Joffe, Sheri Lee
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Abstract
This paper explores how ethnic character representations in Disney films have
changed in response to changing cultural attitudes and historical context over time in
response to variations in the broader American sensitivity to race and ethnicity.
When we today look at instances of African American representation from the 1940s,
such as in the Film Dumbo (1941), we are shocked at how overtly stereotypical these
representation are. According to today’s standards, it would be unacceptable to show
such caricatured racial representations. But at the time in America such standards, and
the attitudes that inform them, did not exist.
In view of the progress made in the intervening 70 years in thinking about race and
the extent to which attitudes to racial representations have changed, we should now
see the representation of African Americans being dealt with very differently in recent films such as The Princess and The Frog (2009), which featured Disney’s first
African- American princess (Breaux 413).
In order to answer this question I in this paper critically assess African-American
representation in Disney films from the 1940s to today. In order to see how race has
been dealt with in one of the studio’s first feature-length films and in one of its most
recent releases I analyzed specific instances of racial representation in two case
studies: Dumbo (1941) and The Princess and the Frog (2009). This analysis is
informed by an awareness that the offensiveness of such representations is culturally
determined and has changed over time. By textually reconstructing the contexts in
which the films were produced and then analyzing instances of racial representation
according to how they have been constructed, making reference to concepts of
Stereotyping, Othering and Hierarchy.