October Blog Post

For this blog post I decided to talk about the controversies and cultural concerns surrounding Disney. For starters, anyone who knows me knows I LOVE Disney and anything that has to do with it. Disneyland is probably my favorite place ever. With that being said, I definitely respect other people's concerns with certain aspects of Disney and it was very interesting to hear all the different opinions. I always considered Disney to have a wide range of culture and representation, and I feel as though the corporation is striving towards that now. However, it hasn't always been that way.

In the documentary we watched titled "Mickey Mouse Monopoly", many different individuals pointed out different aspects of Disney movies that didn't represent, or misrepresented cultures. Something that really stuck out to me was the way Disney seems to portray the African American community, as though every character played/voiced by an actor would be a stereotypical animal. This disappointed me because I never thought of it that way. Another thing that stuck out to me was the fact that people felt as though their cultures were not actually represented throughout Disney movies. For example, the movie, "Pocahontas", is based off a true story. In the movie, Pocahontas falls in love with John Smith. However, in real life, that is does not correlate to the real history of Pocahontas' life.

On the other side of things, when I was watching this documentary I couldn't help but think about the fact that Disney movies are generally geared towards kids, even though most adults I know love the movies just as much. All of these aspects that people are analyzing in depth go right over a kids head. It is only when you watch later that you can actually make something out of the movies other than the  obvious story.

I didn't realize how much a bunch of Disney movies could relate to communication and the way people interpret things so much. I chose to talk about this in my blog post because it really opened my eyes to all the different ways people are affected by things, and not everyone is going to react the same to certain things. It makes me more aware and it makes me analyze things a little bit more as I watch movies, T.V., etc.