The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom.(Book Review)

The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom. Ed. Brenda Ayers. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.

While the Disney corporation has been castigated for its ideological complicity with the most noxious aspects of capitalism, its cinematic oeuvre has rarely been critiqued with serious attention. This analysis of Disney is timely; it appears at a moment when orientalism and violence, especially with regard to depictions of the Middle East (as in the film Aladdin) are on the public mind. Ayers's book addresses this timeliness head on.

Those who teach courses on Disney and culture, or on fairy tales and cultural imagery, should find handy the thirteen essays. There are studied explorations of Pocahontas (and Pocahontas II) and Mulan, and even an essay on Marxist tendencies excluded from the film Mary Poppins. The strongest essays investigate the sexism ubiquitous in Disney's films. Mark Axelrod's contribution, for example, investigates why Disney films invariably do violence to the image of the mother. Likewise, Kellie Bean's essay explores how Disney insidiously dresses the politically regressive arguments of The Little Mermaid in feminist clothes. Reading against the Disney grain, Bean notes the way the figure of the Little Mermaid typifies a "male defined fantasy of female biological perfection," (55) and cleverly likens Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame to Demi Moore's film Striptease, released in the same year.

The collection is most persuasive when it actively engages the racism and ethnocentrism of Disney's films. Ayers herself notes the contrast between the Tom Cruise-styled features of Aladdin and the villainous features of the Khomeini/Hussein caricatures in that animated film. The one essay along these lines that should be required reading for anyone teaching Disney--or anyone teaching about US images of the Middle East--is Christopher Wise's "Notes from the Aladdin Industry: Or, Middle Eastern Folklore in the Era of Multinational Capitalism." Wise emphasizes the way Aladdin vilifies Islamic law, promoting Western notions of freedom--which stand only for the freedoms of the market--in its place. Wise notes that in Aladdin, "the elasticity, rigor, and sophistication of traditional Qur'anic interpretive practices are elided and reassessed to promote a largely jingoistic and childish understanding of {Islamic law} as a legal or judicial system" (108). His essay is refreshingly acerbic from start to finish, and it has the added attraction of an illuminating post-9/11 postscript.

Dianne Sachko Macleod's "The Politics of Vision: Disney, Aladdin, and the Gulf War" is similarly illuminating. She compares Aladdin and Operation Desert Storm, ...