Original disney animation desk5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() “Simba experiences a significant loss with his father dying in front of him, and on camera,” whereas Bambi’s mother’s death was not. “Disney films like The Lion King have a high emotional content,” Higginbotham says. They allow us to both laugh and cry with them,” she says.īambi (1942) made audiences weep when the tiny fawn lost his mother, and 52 years later, The Lion King touched the same emotions and took it even further. ![]() “The emotional investment is crafted through the dwarfs. Disney’s first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), allows its audience to feel loss when Snow White “dies” after eating the poisoned apple. Walt Disney, Higginbotham says, understood that certain primal emotions connect everybody-childhood, fear, loss, the searches for happiness and family. ![]() The class then moves to the corporation and mass marketization of Disney products, and finally to the cultural constructs that Disney upholds and perpetuates-princesses, ideal communities and the concept of living “happily ever after.” It’s then that students examine the Disney myth-the ways the films and products connect to “our desire for community, for family, for love, in a way that speaks to our inner child.”įor children learning to express and regulate their emotions, Disney films often become their models, Higginbotham says. “We use the historical to create critical space in which they can begin to ask questions,” she says. That’s why Higginbotham opens her course with Disney’s biography. When the fandom is so big, clearly, it’s tied into something.” “And when you teach it, you have to be really respectful of people’s attachment. “The connection is very deep,” Higginbotham says. When she began teaching the class, it was The Little Mermaid, in later years Beauty and the Beast. Each year, Higginbotham says, she discovers a film that the class has great difficulty talking about because the students are too close to it. Most of Higginbotham’s students grew up watching Disney films and show up to her class still under their spell. “He understood, really in a smart way, that he could pull people over to his vision if they had a talisman or a touchstone.” “He was doing the right things at the right time for the right audiences,” she says. To Higginbotham, Disney was an innovator, a control freak and a lucky guy. Higginbotham spoke about Walt Disney’s life and legacy-particularly his risk taking and artistry in his early full-length animated films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia-in PBS’s American Experience documentary “Walt Disney” in September 2015. But it’s the Disney myth that moved her to jump up in the first place, and gave her the idea that the castle was her own. ![]() It’s that sensation you feel when you revisit a Disney film.” The Disney company “is the machine that feeds us,” with films, toys, theme parks and the deeply recognizable logo that my daughter jumped up from the couch to greet. “And it’s into the myth that we put all of our ideas. “There’s Disney the man, Disney the company, and then there’s Disney the myth,” she says. Higginbotham, an associate professor of 20th century art, teaches a course on the cultural and visual effects of Disney in American popular culture, as well as a class on Disneyland. This sensation is part of what UVA professor Carmenita Higginbotham calls the Disney myth-“that realm of innocence and innocence lost, and that pure joy you feel when you come back to a Disney film,” she says. The lush, hand-drawn animation and haunting score, which echoes The Carnival of the Animals, the musical suite by Camille Saint-Saëns, pull me viscerally back to my childhood and to seeing the film for the first time, snuggled close to my own mother. The film opens, like many Disney films do, in a forest. She and I are watching Beauty and the Beast, she for the first time and I for roughly the 20th. As the Disney castle slides into place, my 6-year-old daughter rises from the couch and rushes to the screen as if she is greeting a friend. Quickly, a glowing white flag appears and a castle cascades into formation, followed by a signature that’s as familiar to most Americans as the Coca-Cola logo, and finished by a star shooting right to left. The screen starts out a tranquil blue, somewhere on the spectrum between sky and ocean. Spring 2016 - Feature How Disney casts its spell by Molly Minturn ![]()
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