Essay On Stereotypes In Disney Movies

There has been a lot of debate on the various stereotypes within Disney films and the effects they have on their audience. Disney’s audience is predominantly children, which makes it even more important that they are sensitive with the views and ideas they portray. Media as a whole plays a large role in influencing the way children perceive society and shapes their own views and beliefs as they grow up. It is for the children that issues of representation, such as race and gender, need to be considered and applied appropriately within Disney’s feature films to prevent teaching them racist or sexist ideologies. This essay will focus on the stereotypes and issues of racial representations in Disney’s feature films. I will assess how these stereotypes have changed over the years and

There is an obvious racist stereotype in The Pastoral Symphony. In this scene of the film there is a group of female centaurs of different colours all bathing and getting ready to end up heterosexually paired with a male centaur of matching colour. When first released in 1940 there was also a pickaninny slave to the female centaurs, and dark skinned, zebra girl servants. Again, we must think about these stereotypes in relation to when they were portrayed. In the 1940s racial discrimination was very common and it was the law to have racial segregation. So creating these clips at a time when the United States was still a more racist community would not have been seen as significantly wrong. If those clips were to be released in this day and age it would be a very racist stereotype to portray. However, in the 1960s Disney re released the film cutting out these scenes. Cohen states This shows that over the first 40 years since Walt Disney Studios started, they have shown that they have improved their sensitivity towards racism and are adjusting their views and beliefs on racism in conjunction with the rest of the