This Week's Project: Highlights and Lowlights of Disney Analysis Presentations

This week and last week in class, Mrs. Castelli used us as guinea pigs for a new assignment that she just recently came up with because of a conversation we had in class about Disney.  We were to make a presentation (in Powerpoint, Prezi, etc.) analyzing the sociological messages conveyed in Disney's classic movies.  Many groups chose to criticize the messages about gender that the films sent us.  For example:  the skinny waists of Sleeping Beauty's Aurora, the dim wit of Ariel, the unrealistically huge biceps of Hercules.  However, as more and more groups gave their 10-15 minute presentatinos INCLUDING CLIPS, we pretty much got the message and were ready to move on.  One group focused not only on gender stereotypes but on Tarzan and its false representation of human socialization.  As refreshing as that was, I still was extremely bored out of my mind at the majority of the presentations (two groups decided to do Hercules and showed the exact same things).

However, aside from the Tarzan group, the real stars of the project were, in my opinion, Kaitlin and Nicole.  They took a super creative spin on the project by comparing two movies:  Sleeping Beauty and Anastasia.  They did look at the gender stereotypes exhibited in the movie, but the major point of their presentation was to draw attention to the changes made throughout the years.  They saw how, in the late 1950s, Sleeping Beauty was made as the story of a helpless girl relying solely on beauty and singing (a soprano, nonetheless), who finds a man and only sings songs about her prince.  Anastasia (1997), on the other hand, features a heroine rather than a hero (In Sleeping Beauty, Aurora just slept through the whole battle scene); she herself defeated Rasputin, and although she did find a romantic interest in Dimitri,  the songs she sings in an alto voice are about finding herself and establishing her own identity.  In my opinion, this is much better than simply being boy-crazy.

That then got me thinking:  What other movies show the difference betwen the more early times of the twentieth century and the modern values held today?  Mulan certainly put a spin on the classic tales of damsels in distress and huge muscular heroes.  Mulan herself became the hero of China by proving to be just as strong, disciplined, and capable as a man.  Not only that, but she did the whole thing for her family (remember how Ariel ran away from her father, the "ugly stepsisters" in Cinderella, stepmothers in Cinderella and Snow White), which certainly was a much-needed aspect of Disney movies.

Furthermore, I suggest this to my teacher:  Have the project be a timeline or comparison between children's films (not necessarily Disney), and see whether your future students believe society has improved or gotten worse.  After all, there's no real answer to that question, is there?