The One Where I Ruin Disney Movies
When you realize the Disney heroes are American and the villains are anything but
It’s comical, pathetic, and concerning that the creators of The Emperor’s New Groove somehow did months of research on Incan society. Apparently, the creators went through centuries of archeological artifacts before making the film, and the directors talked at length about Incan Peru in their press tours after the film was released. All of this is true even though the Incas and Peru are never once explicitly mentioned in the film. They merely hoped to hint at it through the design of the movie.
Archeologists who have studied The Emperor’s New Groove have noted that the artifacts in the background span 3,000 years and 275,000 square miles1…the Incan empire did not last that long or spread so far.
In other words, Disney picked and chose what they wanted; completely mis-represented a culture; and presented it to their audience of millions of viewers. The biggest problem: Most viewers—who are children—will learn about Incan culture for the first (and often only) time from this movie.
And that’s the topic for this newsletter: Particularly through accents, how does Disney spread its worldview and its ideologies about language through its movies?
Children Watch a lot of Disney
Before I start hating on Disney movies, I need to tell you why this is important. Disney movies seem innocuous and fun-loving, however, they teach children lessons—lessons about the world, lessons about different groups of people, lessons about society—and these lessons are chosen by one corporation.
One corporation can choose a message to spread to billions of children, a message which reflects a certain view of how the world works. That’s a lot of power.
While they’re not only consuming Disney, on average, U.S. children between the ages of 8-12 watch 4-6 hours of TV a day—that’s around 30 hours a week.
And this is not a passive activity for them. Research has shown that children—especially young children—are absorbing information from the screen. Wenke (1998) even posits that young children begin to form subconscious associations between characters’ accents and actions in movies. This becomes a problem when all the heroes appear to have U.S. standardized accents and all the villains appear to have foreign accents2.
The Accents in These Movies Make No Sense
Lippi-Green did an analysis of 38 Disney movies and noted whether the characters in these movies had particular accents. She found that most of the characters—regardless of setting—spoke something approximating standardized American English. In fact, in all 371 characters analyzed, 91 characters logically should not have spoken English. Of those 91, only 34 characters spoke accented English.
This looks like Aladdin taking place in a fictional Arabic country in which Aladdin and Jasmine are American, but most of the other characters (including villains) have Arabic accents.
It’s not crazy to think that children may watch this and internalize that foreigners—especially with Arabic accents—are scary. And that people with standardized American accents are charming, kind, literal princes and princesses.
In Beauty and the Beast—which was not written by Disney, but rather by a French writer in 1740—is another example. Logically, they’re all in France; they should be speaking French (at the very least French-accent English). But au contraire, in the trailer, you can hear American accents coming out of characters with French names. They’ll at times give the audience a “bonjour” to remind them that the movie is, in fact, in France.
But there are some noticeable exceptions: “the sexy chamber maid, the amorous butler, and a temperamental cook,” (Lippi-Green, p. 109). Looking closely, two characters draw on the French stereotype of being sexy and romantic. And the cook draws on the other French stereotype of being hot-tempered.
Not great for children who might have never met a French person! All of this could have been avoided if all of the characters—good and bad—spoke French or French-accented English. The insistence of strategically placing certain accents in stereotypical characters is how Disney influences children to adopt these beliefs about accents—and the people who have them.
Has Disney Improved Since the 90s?
Newer movies, like Zootopia, still appear to squeeze some shortcuts-through-stereotypes into the film. Making the elephant yogi, for example, have an Indian accent is the epitome of using a stereotype for a cheap laugh.
However, there have been improvements. As a Colombian tired of hearing cocaine jokes, Encanto was a welcome surprise. While I’ve only seen half the movie (one of these days I’ll finish it!), I appreciate the Colombian soundtrack, scenery, foods, etc. Watching the movie, it clearly depicted Colombia and the actors sounded familiar to me; they sounded like my Colombian family. It was special to hear.
That being said (just a bit of criticism), the younger main characters do appear to have less Spanish-accented voices than the older characters, which is odd because the movie takes place in Colombia. It reminds me of the rhetoric in the U.S. that frames Spanish as a heritage language (connected to the past) and English as the language of progress and the future—not a great image.
But it does seem that Disney has learned a lesson or two since the days of The Emperor’s New Groove.
Conclusion
It’s no coincidence that if you ask ten people to describe the following accents—U.S. southern accent, French accent, German accent—they’re likely to give similar answers.
U.S. southern accents tend to be associated with ignorance, French accents tend to be associated with sexiness, and German accents tend to be associated with intimidation.
People may have these associations whether or not they’ve ever met a U.S. southerner, French, or German.
The problem is there’s plenty of U.S. southerners who have a twang in their voice and who are intelligent. There’s many French people who are rather…not sexy. And there are German people who are bubbly and kind.
In other words, these are stereotypes. Stereotypes perpetuated by Disney.
And it is no coincidence that there are no negative stereotypes about the speakers of standardized American English—the “accentless” variety that keeps the accent reduction industry booming.
Discussion Questions
I would love to hear what you think! You can either reply to this email or comment below (paid subscribers) and tell me:
Has your accent (or someone who sounds like your family) ever appeared in a Disney movie? How was it portrayed? Why do you think it was portrayed that way?
Do you think how you perceive accents has been influenced by the media? Why or why not?
Keep Learning
Most of the information, from the information on The Emperor’s New Groove to the entire concept of Disney movies teaching children to discriminate against certain accents comes from (you guessed it) English with an Accent by Lippi-Green.
I also used this thesis for an analysis of Zootopia, this article on Disney movies teaching kids to discriminate, and this article on the same topic. Finally, I used this article released by Disney about Encanto.
The above is paraphrased from Lippi-Green English with an Accent pages 110-111.
I’m using terms like standardized U.S. accent (which again no one speaks), foreign accent (which is a bad term because accents, like Arabic accents, are extremely present in the U.S.), and [X country] accent (which is not great because not everyone from the same country has the exact same accent). I’m using these terms because most people know them, but keep in mind that they’re very limited/limiting.