My response to Giroux's "Animated Youth"

Before I begin, I'd like to say two things:
1. Giroux has this magical talent where he takes something fun, and murders it. This article was terribly boring to read for the most part and had way too many big word that very easily could've been replaced with simpler synonyms.
2. Disney has officially been ruined for me. More specifically, Aladdin is my favorite Disney movie and Giroux took that movie and made it evil. So thanks, I really appreciate that Giroux.

Now, I'll move on to the real academic response. I have to admit that Giroux did open my eyes to a wide range of problems with Disney movies that I had never even considered in my lifetime. When I think about Disney criticisms, I think of gender roles-- how the princess always "needs saving" by the prince charming-- or I think of how 99% of Disney princesses are white and wealthy. However, Giroux goes so much farther than that. He analyzes very small details in such a way that seems almost pessimistic. I mean, he calls Belle a Disney feminist, but then goes on to say that she's really just a prop for solving the Beast's dilemma. And I say pessimistic because what eight year old girl is going to think "Oh, the Beast is just using Belle for her power to turn him back into a man." Let me answer that, NOT ONE. As an eight year old girl, I saw true love. I saw a girl that looked past the ugly outside into the soft heart of a man and fell in love-- Belle solidified the idea that beauty is on the inside, and we should never judge a book by its cover.

I agree with Giroux in the sense that Disney has a conservative way of setting social standards for children, but I question how much of an affect this actually has on the youth that these films are presented to. The least stretched ideas of Giroux are:
(1) that showing Arabs as terrifying, ugly villains can promote hate of middle eastern citizens, and
(2) that the "damsel in distress" storyline can lead to young girls defining their quality of life on whether or not they've found their prince charming.
Other than that, I find that Giroux has overstretched the bounds of what young children can comprehend. As a child, I never developed marginalized self-love because there wasn't a Disney princess with the same skin color as me-- the thought never crossed my mind. As a youth, the vogue-like body of Ariel-- as Giroux refers to it-- never made me feel ashamed of my more rounded figure. I never even considered the fact that Disney ALWAYS represented a monarchy as the form of government in its films when the country that Disney was fostered in is democratic. Most of these things meant nothing to me as a child, I simply enjoyed the happy endings of the movie where the bad guy was defeated and everyone found true love. If anything, the most damaging part of Disney is growing up and realizing you'll never be a princess, because your country is actually a democracy.

So, I have to say that Giroux went overboard in his analysis of Disney and ultimately ruined Disney movies for me for basically no reason at all. And I believe that studying Disney analytically should be left for adults to do, because learning that your favorite Disney movie is actually geared to racial hate of Arabs is too traumatizing for young children. I say leave it to the adults because, like Giroux said, Disney is a powerful institution that needs to be held accountable for what it's presenting to it's youthful audiences, but it's not so bad that we need to scare the children. Let's get more people of color in Disney movies and give women jobs that incorporate more than being pretty trophy wives and let's see the working class represented in a more positive light. But, let's not destroy children's hopes and dreams and the "pleasures" that they find in Disney movies.