Reading Response: Henry A Giroux

Henry A Giroux, in his piece Animating Youth: The Disneyfication of Children's Culture written in 1994 provides a complex argument that is often not thought of when discussing Disney. Disney is very good at covering its tracks, portraying itself as truly magical and the best place in the world. However, Giroux suggests that there is much more going on with the company, and that being ignorant to it only increases the problem. Giroux recognizes the importance of studying Disney as it contributes to culture, but thinks that children are receiving negative messages from the entertainment monopoly: "Children's culture is a sphere where entertainment, advocacy, and pleasure meet to construct conceptions of what it means to be a child occupying a combination of gender, racial, and class positions in society that one defines oneself through in relation to a myriad of others" (Giroux 65). Basically, what he means is that children are subtly influenced by Disney which creates beliefs regarding gender, race, and class in their adulthood. While Giroux presents interesting points about these subtle influences, some of his arguments seem to be too much of a stretch. Giroux discusses major problems with the movies Aladdin, The Lion King, and Beauty and the Beast. In Aladdin, "the 'bad' Arabs are portrayed with thick, foreign accents, while the anglicized Jasmine and Aladdin speak in standard Americanized English" (73). While I agree that this suggests that Americans are good and foreign people are bad, I simply do not think that young kids pick up on this. Young children watch movies for entertainment and not for a deeper hidden meaning, and truthfully, I've seen Aladdin many times and have never picked up on the subtle racism until being enlightened by Giroux. The same goes for The Lion King, "where all the members of the royal family speak with posh British accents while Shenzi and Banzai, the despicable hyena storm troopers, speak through the voices of Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin in racially coded accents that take on the nuances of the discourse of decidedly urban black and Latino youth" (73). I have the same thoughts toward this argument. While it's true that the racist undertones are wrong, who's to say that children recognize these little details? I'm not convinced. In Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, the author describes a study in which children were monitored while watching Sesame Street to see how much they were learning from it. The researchers found that while the kids paid attention closely when the animals were on the screen, they were completely distracted when they were supposed to be learning. If these children are not learning from shows meant to teach, how will they learn from movies meant simply to entertain? Furthermore, Giroux stretches his argument on Beauty and the Beast, calling it a "rejection of hypermasculinity and a struggle between the macho sensibilities of Gaston and the reformed sexist, the Beast" (71). I agree with Giroux when he deems Belle a feminist, but I do not see a reason to label Belle's act of transforming the beast into a loving, sensitive character as a rejection of hypermasculinity. Maybe she should be respected for her charitable act instead. Diving too deep into Disney is ineffective because the target audience, children, are unable to think this deeply about the movies and stories Disney produces. There are some things better left on surface level, and Disney should be one of them. This is not to say that Disney is a moral company, however, and Giroux's arguments about how Disney indeed turns children into consumers should be taken seriously and thought about carefully.