Racism and nationalism in Disney movies

Today I saw bits and pieces of Disney's Aladdin. The music was as much fun as I remembered from when I saw it in the early 90s, and Robin Williams was as Robin Williams-y. But what I hadn't noticed back in my teens was how not-so-subtly RACIST the thing was.

In the world of Disney's Aladdin, Good Guy = looks and sounds American. Bad Guy = looks and sounds Arabic (or in Jafar's case, looks Arabic and sounds sorta British.) Iago sounds like he's from Brooklyn, but he's not human and he's comic relief, so that one doesn't count.

Seriously. Look at Aladdin and Jasmine. They drew a couple of all-American white kids, colored them very slightly brown, and voiced them with a couple of all-American white kids. As for the Sultan, you could put him in a Santa Claus suit and he would fit right into any Christmas special - he's a jolly fat white guy with a tan so slight as to be barely noticeable.

Then look at the merchant guy at the beginning trying to foist worthless junk on us tourists. Look at all the guards who enjoy pushing people around, who are such caricatures that they might as well be in a 1930's Popeye cartoon, brandishing scimitars and threatening to cut off thieves' hands and - oh, look, they're brandishing scimitars and threatening to cut off thieves' hands. Look at all the background characters in the story who are supposed to be foils to Aladdin, and especially look at Jafar. They're several shades browner, they have beards and turbans, they have accents. The further along the continuum they lean towards evil, the more "foreign" they're drawn and voiced.

And I don't think it was an accident, or even just the unthinking kind of discrimination that all human beings have built in - the unspoken assumption that "folks like us" are better than "folks who aren't like us." This movie was, after all, released a year after the first Gulf War. I think they were playing deliberately to the public's not-fans-of-Middle-Eastern-people-right-now mood. That greedy, slimy little merchant with the ridiculous accent in the first scene - he was pulled straight out of our country's resentment about the fact that we'd had to start paying more than a dollar a gallon for gas. (Ahhhhhhh - remember when $1.25 a gallon was expensive?)


I haven't watched other Disney movies for many years, but I'd bet that "Foreign/non-white = bad guy" is a thing in a lot of their other movies too. Thinking back to the ones I remember:

Pocahontas - this one was actually ABOUT racism and how that's wrong and stuff - but again, Pocahontas herself looks like a white model with a tan, has no accent, and her costume is basically a leather version of the same basic dress any American girl has half-a-dozen of in her closet. The more aggressive and warlike her tribesmen get, the more "Indian" their costume and voices get, till you can't see the people for all the feathers and warpaint.

Jungle Book: More subtle here. Mowgli, Bagheera and Baloo are American. Shere Khan and the vultures are British. So, the bad guys aren't very foreign, but foreign enough to let you know which characters will eat you given half a chance.

Robin Hood: Everyone's supposed to be British and they're all animals; but Marion, Little John, and Friar Tuck all sound American, and Robin's English accent isn't very pronounced, while Prince John is being British just as hard as he can. Foreigner equals eviler, even if they're all from the same  country.

Ariel, Triton, the prince Ariel's trying to hook up with - good guys, sound American, very white (Ariel's a redhead, as melanin-free as you can get without having albinism). Chef who tries to cook Sebastian - bad guy, sounds French, foreign-looking mustache. Sebastian - sounds Jamaican, but he's comic relief and therefore allowed to have an accent without being a bad guy. Ursula - sounds American, but look at her coloring. NO other character in this movie has even slightly dark skin. Her non-human parts are black, and her human parts are dark, almost purple.
But what the hell, no one's looking at anything but Ariel's little shells anyway. So Ursula's coloring probably isn't doing much to reinforce any stereotypes here.

Simba, Nala, Mufasa, Timon, Pumba - good guys, sound American. Scar - bad guy, sounds British. Rafiki - sounds vaguely African, but he's a monkey and therefore falls under the "comic relief" exception.

Mulan - Everyone's supposed to be Asian here, right? But my (admittedly very vague) recollection is that only the bad guys sounded like it. Mulan's dragon was allowed to be a black man without being a bad guy under the "comic relief" exception.

Beauty and the Beast - we're in Western Europe here so everyone who isn't a main character is French or British. Belle, her father, and the Beast are all American. In this one, Gaston sounds American too. But even here, the main villain and his sidekick Le Fou have the French-iest sounding names. More foreign still equals more evil.

Quasimodo, Esmerelda, Phoebus - all American. Phoebus is blond with blue eyes, and Esmerelda's a gypsy but still has very Caucasian features with a slight tan. The evil priest dude, on the other hand, looks and dresses like Jafar, and sounds British. The story's set in France, but what the hell, bad guys are British - because we're still pissed off about the Brits taxing our tea centuries ago, I guess.


Then there's the older Disney films, where it's not even remotely subtle:

Lady and the Tramp - Siamese cats are bad. American dogs are good. The Tramp mimicking the accents of the immigrants who feed him, that's meant to be funny. Ungrateful son of a bitch.

Peter Pan - dear GOD, the racism in the portrayal of the "Injuns". Also, Hook is darker-skinned than Pan, as are many of the pirates. Tinker Bell, on the other hand, looks like Marilyn Monroe; and Pan, Wendy, John and Michael are as white as white can be.

Snow White - It's right there in the damn title. White equals good, whiter equals better, Snow White is fairest of them all. The darker-featured Queen is, of course, evil.

Of course, those are from before the civil rights movement so they really can't be held to the same standard as the movies made after the 60s. But the ones done in the 90s? The animators and producers should have known better.

But they also knew what sells, and what sells is telling the audience (mostly white Americans) that the good guys are "folks like us" and the bad guys are "not folks like us".


I haven't seen the Frog Prince, so I don't know whether Disney's made yet another princess that looks like someone painted a Barbie doll brown and sounds like a bland, accent-free Caucasian, or if they actually made her look and sound African-American - actually made a protagonist that isn't drawn and voiced as a blonde white person with optional spray-on tan. Might be worth watching someday, to find out if Disney's finally ditched this "White makes right" device. It's long overdue to be ditched.