#44: Taking Our Place

Brother Bear, 2003
watched July 22, 2012

I've decided to set aside my issues with Phil Collins' ridiculous soundtrack so I can focus on the story. Couldn't resist those cheesy lyrics, huh Phil? Sigh.

After several weeks in outer space, we've returned to the wild outdoors and anthropomorphic animals. Brother Bear, one of the few Disney films set in North America, is also unique due to its nearly all-male cast. This is undoubtedly a "bro" movie.

But even though I'm not a bro, the sibling interactions featured in this film still resonate with me. Here we see Disney showcase a more complex, deeper kind of love, the love between family, like in Lilo & Stitch. As a middle child, I especially connect to the torment of the middle brother, Denahi, who unwittingly becomes the story's villain.

Beyond the three brothers, however, another relationship comes into focus as the story progresses. Kenai, the overconfident youngest brother, is turned into a bear after he unnecessarily kills one. He meets a bear cub named Koda, and as they travel together, Kenai's disdain for Koda's joie de vivre reveals his deep prejudice against their kind. In Kenai's mind, bears are merely savage monsters, and he is keenly intent on getting transformed back into a human as soon as possible.

But, as most Disney characters eventually do, Kenai realizes that he was completely wrong about everything. As he literally steps into the life of a bear, he learns that his ignorance and unwarranted hatred has cost something, and the one who pays most dearly is Koda, whom he has grown to deeply care for.

Kenai's inner and outer transformations are quite significant. While he begins the film as a selfish, impulsive guy, we find at the conclusion someone who makes a life-altering sacrifice for the sake of another. But what causes Kenai to change? It is the experience of walking in another's shoes (or paws?). It is through his relationship with a community different from his own. It is in the discovery that misconceptions come at a high cost.

Change takes place when we take the place of someone else. We experience situations as well as relationships that stretch us and give us new perspectives. Only as we encounter differences do we realize that our own worldview is filled with stereotypes and prejudice. When our world expands like this, we have the opportunity to become people, or bears, who love more fully and freely.

Of course, true transformation is only possible through the one who became a man, so he could walk in our shoes (or sandals?) and give us a completely new perspective. His life-altering sacrifice shows us the perfect example of what it looks like to take the place of another. And through him we are forever altered, taking our place as people guided by love.

#36: A Great Honor

(c) Disney

Mulan, 1998
watched May 28, 2012

I've always thought it was cool that Mulan not only kicks ass (yup, I just said "kicks ass" about a Disney character. I can do that, because this is my blog), but that she's also the first Disney "princess" to resemble the faces I grew up with--my mom's, my aunties', my sister's, my own. And as I've grown in my own ethnic journey as Chinese American woman, I appreciate how significant this is.

Instead of the painful racial stereotypes found in past Disney films, Mulan brings a refreshing humanity to the Chinese people and culture. This adaptation of the ancient legend tells a compelling story about a Chinese woman, a voice not often heard throughout literature and history. Two memorable scenes seem to linger within me as I reflect on the film's connection to the experience of Chinese (and more broadly, Asian) women.

First, when the Emperor appears he's about to rebuke Mulan for her disobedience and recklessness, he instead commends her for saving China, giving her the highest honor: his personal gratitude. She reacts in shock, turning around to see the entire kingdom of China bowing to her.

Then, as Mulan presents Shan-Yu's sword and the Emperor's crest to her father, she hopes she might at last bring honor to the family. Falling to his knees in an uncharacteristically candid manner, Fa Zhou tosses the symbols of honor aside and embraces Mulan. He says,

"The greatest gift and honor is having you for a daughter."

Inexplicably, my eyes start to water uncontrollably at these moments. Must be the dust.

At last, Mulan is publicly recognized for her accomplishments. She is called a hero; she is called worthy. As it's culturally frowned upon for Asian women to call attention to our achievements, we constantly look to others for approval. We long for the assurance that we are worth something, that what we do matters. Perhaps I feel this more acutely as someone naturally drawn to behind-the-scenes work. In any case, the praise Mulan receives represents the affirmation that I yearn for as an Asian American woman. Watching the multitudes honor Mulan helps me see that I, too, contribute something valuable to my community, even if it looks very different from what's traditionally accepted.

On the other hand, Asian women also become trapped in a constant cycle of people-pleasing, trying hard to earn a place at the table, to prove themselves good enough. Success always seems out of reach. The last scene with Mulan and her father echoes good news: achieving greatness has nothing to do with the unconditional love my Father has for his daughter.

When I am prone to see myself as unworthy, useless, or unlovable, Mulan reminds me of the truth: I'm a deeply beloved daughter of God, empowered with unique gifts that can change the world. This message isn't just for Asian women, but for all who call him Father. Indeed, it's an honor to us all.

#33: Pocahontas? Puh-lease.

Pocahontas, 1995
watched April 29, 2012

As a self-proclaimed Disnerd, I have a pretty high threshold for unbelievability. Talking animals and magical creatures run rampant through these films. It's no question that I am very willing to suspend belief for the sake of a good story.

So despite the fact that Pocahontas features neither talking animals nor magical creatures, the movie really bothers me. Sure, there's the whole historically-inaccurate-there's-no-way-she-was-that-well-endowed thing. There was no romance between John Smith and her. And I'm pretty certain Governor Ratcliffe never wore that awful purple suit.

But I'm not even talking about that.

As an InterVarsity staff, I've become familiar with the "approaching differences diagram," which emphasizes that one must take an open, learning approach when encountering a culture different from one's own. And in Pocahontas, the clash between Pochahontas' native people and the ignorant Englishmen provides the core of the story. We're dealing with major cross cultural stuff.  

In light of all this, I absolutely cannot stand the way that Pocahontas learns to speak English by "listening to her heart." It makes me want to pull my hair out! (Though, that would probably be counterproductive as one of my new life goals is to have hair just like Pocahontas. I mean, it's gorgeous, really.)

I digress. This "listen to your heart" plot device (remember I warned us about this before?) says nothing about the hard, often awkward process it is to engage across cultures. We're not dealing with a fire-from-heaven-Holy-Spirit-anointing kind of situation where people miraculously speak other languages. No, this was a quick and dirty way to move the story along and I just can't get over it! Furthermore, there is little effort on the Englishman's part to learn Pocahontas' native tongue. What's that about?

This is worse than Tinkerbell's pantslessness.

Despite my harsh criticism, I will admit the film still sends a truthful message: ethnocentrism leads to deep prejudice and hatred, which can result in violence and destruction. The solution? Learn to appreciate and understand that which is different from you. The movie's one saving aspect, the beautifully animated and sung "Colors of the Wind," sums it up: "You think the only people who are people / are the people who look and think like you. / But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, / you'll learn things you never knew you never knew."



Pocahontas had a lot of potential, but it's overly serious and weepy (thank God for Meeko, Flit and Percy!), and it cuts some corners that I find unforgivable. Add to that some embarrassingly lame pickup lines from John Smith (voiced by Mel Gibson), and it's all over. I have high standards for these Renaissance films, and even with its gorgeous background landscapes, Pocahontas is by far my least favorite.

My recommendation? Listen to "Colors of the Wind" on repeat and you're probably good to go.

#24: A star-crossed bromance

(c) Disney

The Fox & the Hound, 1981
watched February 12, 2012

It's not the most glamorous, funny or beautiful film, but there are some pretty unique things about The Fox & the Hound. This is the first of these films built around a friendship between two male characters. While previously seen in Bambi and The Jungle Book, F&H draws much more deeply on this theme of male friendship by bringing together two characters who are not naturally supposed to be friends. It's somewhat refreshing not to see another sugary love-at-first-sight romance, or even a good-thwarting-evil epic. Instead, Disney successfully banks on the emotions that arise in every person as they recall their own childhood friendships, and the ways life and society makes it impossible to maintain them. This simple yet rich tale of friendship connects with a broad audience.

I also think F&H may be the first time Disney addresses the issue of race in a way that is thoughtful and compelling, rather than offensive or confusing. Oddly enough, neither Tod or Copper are "racialized" characters. They are, however, characters set in a context where their roles have been firmly determined by society. Copper's aim in life is to become an effective hunting dog and to loyally assist his owner, Amos Slade. To do anything else would deem him useless and a failure. Tod, an orphaned red fox, lives less clearly within his role as 'the hunted', since he is raised domestically as a pet for the first year of his life. This explains why he is more confused about the change in Copper's attitude towards him as an adult and reluctant to accept what society has served them.

The friendship is ultimately tested in the climax of the film, when the hunter and hunted find themselves at each other's mercy. Tod risks his life to protect Copper from the monstrous bear, nearly dying in the process. In response, Copper stands between his fox friend and his master, who is about to shoot him dead. Without a single word spoken in this moving scene, they demonstrate a courageous love for each other, while also acknowledging that they will never be friends again. It's a surprisingly bittersweet moment for a Disney film.

External definitions of their identities and relationship to one another ultimately win out over what was a strong budding friendship (or as we might like to call it now, bromance). We see a commentary on the divisions society makes between people and groups of people, where there need not be. This applies not only to ethnic segregation but class, gender, and any categories we like to put ourselves in.

While F&H certainly lacks the same polish and timelessness of other classic Disney films, it does make one pause and reflect on human nature. We long to find the two main characters together in the end, laughing and playing. We know, however, that how it really ends is much closer to reality - a reality that is in great need for renewal and change.

#20: The Worst One So Far

(c) Disney

 The Aristocats, 1970
watched January 15, 2012

In case you're like me and never bothered to see The Aristocats, you are not missing much. Needless to say, this was one of the worst Disney animated films I've ever watched. We haven't gotten to Home on the Range though. So I am thinking perhaps we haven't hit rock bottom yet. Yikes.

I'm not quite sure what to say about a film that I really didn't like. I've maintained a fairly optimistic voice on this blog, but it's hard not to be critical of this one. Watching this film reminded me of all the reasons I love the other ones, and how this one fell short on so many levels.

An engaging story
One of the strengths of animated films is that the story is established before any drawing happens. This is why the best animated films are so seamless. All the editing happens in advance, and only the crucial, important moments are captured. Aristocats "rambles" on in ways that made me wonder why certain sequences were kept in. The scenes when Edgar the butler is being chased by the two dogs feel especially random and unimportant. I found myself wanting to get back to the main characters, Duchess and Thomas, instead of wasting time on the gags of Edgar crashing into a windmill and repeatedly losing his umbrella. Who cares about that? 

Characters that you can relate to (or, for you grammar snobs, "to which you can relate")
The main character is a Parisian cat (with a mysteriously Hungarian accent) who lives in a mansion with her extremely wealthy mistress. Duchess is pampered, proper and poised, with no experience in the 'real world'. While this bears striking resemblance to Lady and the Tramp, Duchess does not possess the same qualities of Lady's vulnerability and charm, and I felt little sympathy for her. Her character does not seem to have any emotions; she is neither happy nor sad nor frightened enough for me to feel connected to her story. Additionally, Thomas O'Malley, the street-wise alley cat Duchess meets, seems two-dimensional and predictable. Been there, done that.

A threatening and complex villain
Pretty much the entire plot is ruined when we are introduced to the villain. The butler, named Edgar Balthazar, overhears his mistress Adelaide Bonfamille creating her will, indicating that her entire fortune is to go to Duchess and her kittens. The jealous, greedy butler decides to take action so that he can inherit her wealth. Now, if I were in this situation, I would probably just kill the cats and get it over with. End of story, right? He could have easily poisoned them with something more deadly than sleeping pills. So, when Edgar instead "catnaps" them and drops them off into a river (inside a basket, so they wouldn't drown), I was pretty much ready to throw in the towel on the whole film. Why go any further when the whole threat rests on the stupidest villain move in the history of villains?

Memorable melodies
My favorite Disney animated films contain some of the best songs. Their melodies are not only the kind that can get stuck in your head for days, but they also embody the heart of the film's story, express the characters' innermost thoughts, and captivate the audience. In Aristocats, all we get is a jazzy rendition of "Everybody Wants to be a Cat," performed by a gang of racially stereotyped alley cats. Don't get me started on the "Chinese" Siamese cat who plays the piano with a couple pairs of chopsticks, while singing "ching chong" speak. Ugh.

Beautiful animation
After watching films like Bambi and Sleeping Beauty, the artistry in Aristocats is extremely disappointing. There is something compelling about how most Disney films use color, brush strokes, and shapes in a style that can only work with animation. It creates a sense of wonder and fantasy, further pulling the audience into the story. Aristocats is, in a word, sloppy. The lines were rough, the colors rather garish, and the backgrounds were stiff and boring. The characters are portrayed as if the animators were rushing through the drawings. At the end of the day, the medium did nothing to serve the purpose of telling an already uninteresting story any better.

So, ladies and gentlemen, now you know that yes, even a Disnerd such as myself can actually say something negative about a Disney movie. This makes me even more eager to get to the Renaissance movies! Can't wait for March to come!

Letting the cat(s) out of the bag

(c) Disney, thanks disney.wikia.com

I'm full of puns when it comes to the topic of race, apparently.

So... anyway.

Since Aunt Sarah's Siamese cats, Si and Am, are the first (and only, for several decades) Asian characters in the Disney animated canon, I thought it important to write a post about how they are portrayed.

It seems like Disney held nothing back in bringing every negative Asian racial stereotype to life in this pair. Their extremely slanted eyes and buck teeth seem to underline their overall suspicious demeanor. They speak a very heavy "pidgin" dialect which accentuates their foreignness. That there are two of them could even imply that all Siamese [cats] are the same.

Si and Am's song "We are Siamese" is unfortunately quite catchy, probably the most memorable in the film. I know that as a kid that's the one that stuck with me. But its tune and harmonies mimic a certain oriental musical style, and here it is used to give a chilling, uncomfortable feeling.

Most of all, Si and Am are undoubtedly villains. Even while Aunt Sarah seems to have a change of heart at the end of the film, there is nothing redeeming about Si and Am. We have seen racial stereotypes in previous movies (such as Dumbo and Peter Pan, which I never got to talk about), but this is the first time the stereotyped characters have been pegged as outright villains.

So what do we do when a good film like Lady & the Tramp features such offensive racial stereotypes as Si and Am's characters?

I should mention that most of the other animals in Lady & the Tramp also have distinct ethnic accents, which are associated with their personalities. Jock is a feisty Scottish terrier. Trusty is a slow-speaking, old-fashioned Southern hound. There's also an English bulldog, a Mexican chihuahua and a Russian borzoi (I had to look that one up, definitely never heard of that one before.) The filmmakers made a deliberate choice to give each animal character certain traits that would make them stand out and give them more of a personality to act and animate to. This seems to make sense when you're dealing with a lot of animal characters that could be hard to differentiate from one another.

But I think the offense here lies in how Disney allows viewers to make assumptions about the people groups that are associated with their characters. Having interacted with not a few ignorant people, the broken "Engrish" that the Siamese cats use brings back bad memories of people making fun of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans alike. It perpetuates the idea that because someone sounds Asian or even just looks Asian, they are somehow less civilized, educated, and decidedly "other." Similarly, the mischievous nature of Si and Am harken back the idea of "yellow peril" which was definitely fresh in the minds of Americans at that time, less than a decade after World War II ended. I find it unfortunate that Disney did not use their influence to reverse the impact that World War II had on attitudes towards Asians, but rather enforce negative stereotypes.

Although this movie was made nearly 60 years ago, the stereotypes of Asians portrayed in Lady and the Tramp still linger. This has led to events as terrible and violent as the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982, and as embarrassing and ignorant as the YouTube "Asian rant" by a UCLA student just this year. And because of that, we must recognize the ways timeless films like this shape our ideas about race and ethnicity.

The Elephant in the Room

Well, here we are. Four movies in, and it's now time to talk about the elephant in the room. No, not that one. Well, yes that one, but the other one too.

Many people remember the black crows in Dumbo, distinctly depicted by many Black stereotypes: jive talk, incessant smoking, their clothing style. While the first black voice actors used in a Disney animated film provide voices for most of the crows, the leader of the flock, nicknamed "Jim Crow" during production, was voiced by a white actor. Talk about a double slap in the face.



Controversial as they may be, the crows also happen to have the best musical number in the film ("When I Seen an Elephant Fly" -- see clip). And while at first they are quite skeptical, after some convincing from Timothy, they rally around Dumbo and encourage him to fly. Generally their characters are seen positively in this film. But does that really make up for the obvious stereotypes used here?

Personally, I think the crows bother me less because of another example of racial stereotyping in Dumbo that happens earlier in the film. In "The Song of the Roustabouts," faceless black men are seen setting up the circus tent alongside Dumbo and the other elephants. The lyrics include:

We work all day, we work all night
We never learned to read or write
We’re happy-hearted roustabouts

We don’t know when we get our pay
And when we do, we throw our pay away

We get our pay when children say
With happy hearts, "It’s circus day today"

I wonder if this would have even caught my attention if I hadn't had the subtitles on while watching the movie. (In the featurette on the DVD, there was not one mention of this scene!)

What irks me the most is that the men's faces are not even drawn. They have large, smooth shadowy bodies - making them appear much more similar to the animals they work alongside. Their harsh working conditions and lack of dependable wages have a all-too- familiar echo, and yet they sing about how happy and content they are. What could Disney have been trying to communicate by including this scene in the film? Was it an embarrassing attempt of pretending that it really was okay to treat blacks just like animals? That they in fact enjoyed it? Perhaps they figured that we wouldn't notice or care so much, since the focus of the scene still remains on Dumbo with his mother. With other controversies in Disney films relating to racism resulting in edits, cutting scenes, or flat-out censorship (Song of the South ring a bell?), I wonder why this scene was kept in.

It's likely that we call more attention and critique to racism present in Disney films because of their timelessness. No doubt other films produced in the 1940s portrayed similar stereotypes, but what other movies from that era are still watched as widely as Dumbo today? In this film is preserved some of what we would perhaps like to forget in regard to history's attitude towards race. Still, throughout Disney films, even more current classics, racial stereotyping continues to exist. Could this be related to the types of people who continue to dominate in the animation industry? (We have yet to see a Disney or Pixar movie not directed by a white man. Note: I haven't actually verified that, but I'm pretty sure it's true. Someone feel free to correct me.)

People may proclaim that "Disney is racist" and because of that one should never watch any Disney movies, especially not ones including such overt examples like Dumbo. I disagree. These movies may include controversial and offensive content, but they are not wholly evil. Just looking at the first few movies I've written about, there are still redemptive messages being told. Also, too often we Christians are quick to condemn culture, not taking the time to use it as a teaching moment or an opportunity for dialogue, or to appreciate what value they do possess.

The discussion about racism in Disney films has only begun. Let's be civil, but let's be honest. What are your thoughts about these scenes and characters in Dumbo? Do you think the presence of racial stereotypes should result in choosing not to watch these movies at all? How have you handled this situation with your kids?