@Jen: Hi! Galatea of Lashings here — thanks so much for the link, glad you enjoyed the post :)

@Hodge: Seriously excellent post! There are a lot of films here that I hadn’t even considered — this definitely seems to be pointing to a mile-wide streak of queerphobia running right through Disney kids’ films.

that’s a really good post, thank you for sharing!

Interesting! Need to brush up on my kung-fu flicks, obv.

That’s interesting – the foreign thing in particular, as there’s an interesting history of Disney’s voice artists: in Dumbo the horribly racist crows (one of whom is actually CALLED Jim Crow) are voiced by white actors doing their best ‘black person’ impression. By the time you get to The Jungle Book, they wanted Louis Armstrong to be King Louis (which is why he’s called King Louis), but Armstrong wouldn’t do it (presumably because he had understandable issues about voicing a monkey singing about how he wants to be ‘like you’). So they got a less famous jazz singer to voice him. Then in the Lion King it’s Whoopi Goldberg voicing one of the hyenas – who are so obviously New York ghetto hoodlums (I think one of the others is Hispanic – it’s a sort of ‘generically foreign’ underworld). Something very disturbing there about how the ideologies become ingrained in what Disney are doing to an extent that they’re almost robbed of any power to shock and they actually manage to get people like Goldberg implicitly on side where they couldn’t get Armstrong (and I assume they wouldn’t even have ALLOWED any non-white actor to voice the crows at that point, even had they wanted to).

Dunno, it’s not something I really want to comment on too much because I don’t think it’s really my place to do so, but there’s definitely something rather disturbing going on there.

Oh, yeah, that main villain whose primary villainous act is to attempt to “steal the heart” of all the Disney princesses and possess the body of a young boy really doesn’t make things any better, does he? Because Japan I suppose…

It is therefore in keeping that her methodology basically amounts to ‘hair down = female; hair up = male’ – and no-one ever notices it’s all the same person, just with a different hairstyle

– this is actually a common trope in classic Chinese kung-fu flicks, rather than a Disney invention.

‘English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States’ by Rosina Lippi-Green has a whole chapter on how Disney’s feature films teach children to discriminate based on accents that deviate from the norm. It’s well worth a read if you are interested in sociolinguistics. (Unsurprisingly, most villains sound either a) foreign, or b) uneducated, whereas all heroes have a perfect standard accent, mostly of the US variety, and the use of AAVE in characters is horribly stereotypical.)

Still love her though. She has the BEST song.