Disney And Cinderella Analysis

Media has the capacity to capture an audience’s attention and influence someone’s thoughts and ideas. Due to their growing and innocent minds, media can be very influential to children, in some cases it can stick with them as they grow into adults. Recently, this idea has been more concerning because as the world and society changes, the messages these movies are portraying have not.
Through their films, Disney uses gender to their advantage, to portray a false sense of what it means to be a man or woman. More so, in portraying princess characters in their films, Disney is affecting how young girls feel about themselves and how their life is going. In Sarah M. Coyne’s and et. al article, “Pretty as a Princess: Longitudinal Effects of Engagement

Through her study, she found that “…engagement with Disney Princesses can be limiting, as young girls especially are more likely to embrace traditional female stereo-types both concurrently and longitudinally.” (1923) This shows that by watching these films, girls are only shown female leads in traditional settings, which can limit what they are cable of doing later on in life. Similar to Coyne’s article, Lori Baker-Sperry’s article, “The Production of Meaning through Peer Interaction: Children and Walt Disney’s Cinderella” the author is interested in knowing how the Disney movie Cinderella, effects young women’s self-esteem. During her interaction with a group of young women, she found that “The girls were envious of Cinderella. For example, one girl asked, with a voice full of anxiousness, how Cinderella got to be so beautiful, and stated that she wanted to be as beautiful as Cinderella.” (725) With this, she found that girls often wanted their lives to look like those depicted in these films. Which can contribute to the levels of their low self-esteem. Both of these articles are presenting information about how Disney is contributing to children’s low self-esteem. Also, both of their

In "Peter Pan isn 't a Girls ' Part: An investigation of gender bias in a kindergarten classroom," Karyn Wellhousen and Zenong Yin see how teachers and parents impact how children think and feel about gender roles. Through their research, they found In contrast to their findings, in “How does it get into my imagination: Elementary school children 's intertextual knowledge and gendered storylines," Elizabeth Yeoman doesn’t believe teachers or parents play any role in furthering children’s education on