CARLOS BONILLA
In accordance with the demands of current times, the powerful company The Walt Disney Company, founded in 1923, continues to break stereotypes that it defended for a long time, which were part of its essence. He recently presented the “Voices of Diversity” campaign, in which he brings together stories from six real people with inspiring trajectories and who, through a series of videos, tell which Disney characters are reflected in their daily lives.
The protagonists of these six stories are Mexicans who represent some trait of diversity: the actress Yalitza Aparicio; the Paralympic multi-medalist Gustavo Sánchez; trans man Santiago Corona; trans singer and actress, Morganna Love; actress, singer and comedian Michelle Rodríguez; and the actress and teacher of Mexican Sign Language Socorro Casillas.
The Disney characters whose creation was inspired by them are Moana, Iron Man, Hercules, Ariel (The Little Mermaid), Elsa (Frozen: A Frozen Adventure) and Mirabel (Charm).
Disney is now considering diversity in its movies. It includes other cultures, races and genders, thereby leaving behind conservative stories where the majority of the main characters were white, heterosexual and complied with the conservative norm that characterized the iconic characters with which the company was born.
The film “A Strange World” has an openly gay teenage character. He also announced actress Halle Bailey as the new “Little Mermaid” because of her skin tone, the same case with the “Blue Fairy” played by Cynthia Erivo in the recent adaptation of Pinocchio and in the upcoming feature film “Peter Pan and Wendy”, Yara Shahidi, who gives life to “Tinkerbell”.
As in all radical changes, controversy has arisen, since some perceive Disney’s reconversion as forced, obeying changes in society, but not the product of an authentic reflection on these issues. Others believe that these changes affect the essence of the characters and transform them. Appearance, they say, is closely linked to their actions.
This transformation evokes the arguments that Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart put forward in the book To Read Donald Duck, inspired by Marxism and Freudism, which affirm that Disney characters are part of a global plan to indoctrinate children, a kind of conspiracy of evil entities, which needed to be unmasked.
The reality is that there is not a single example of children’s literature that does not try to transfer to the child some teaching, in which a certain vision of the world is not glimpsed. The thing about Disney characters pales next to the children’s texts used by Castro’s propagandists. Another example is the manuals used by the Catholic Church in Spanish classrooms. However, Disney’s materials have always been voluntary, optional, while the examples cited are mantras implanted by law or worse. Disney has been an option for parents and children, not politicians or religious.
Dorfman and Mattelart accuse children’s literature of substituting the educational function of parents, criticizing that it comes from the same movements that, at that time, and still today, precisely deny parents that work, for the benefit of society, the state , or the church.
Beyond seeing Moors with tranchete where there are none and intentions of ideological penetration in the characters and situations that are presented in the stories of the characters of stories for children and adolescents, the reconversion of Disney to adapt to the new times in which the fight against discrimination and the defense of diversity prevail, regardless of whether there is an ingredient in it that seeks the survival of the company by adapting it to the prevailing circumstances.