Tison Pugh and Susan
Aronstein, eds. The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy Tale and Fantasy Past. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Reviewed by Russell A. Peck
(russell.peck@rochester.edu)
This collection of fourteen essays provides a balanced and
often quite witty assessment of Disney’s films, TV shows, marketing strategies,
theme parks, personal philosophies, pedagogy, social and political practices of
Walt Disney and his Corporate Legacy. My remarks on the volume are descriptive.
My goal is to give readers a detailed sense of the book’s contents,
particularly ideas they might wish to pick up on to develop ideas of their own.
Although the essays are sometimes marked by familiar criticism pertaining to
Disney’s conservative rightwing politics, inherent racism, and gender biases,
the authors do make considerable effort to appreciate the artistry and
technical skills of Disney’s work, with thoughtful allowances for the integrity
of the nostalgic vision of Disney fantasies and their imperialistic global
messages. The collection speaks well to a scholarly audience, while, at the
same time, addressing intelligently a broader audience that includes virtually
anyone who has ever seen a Disney movie or TV program or been to a theme park —
that is, about everyone who has grown up in America or elsewhere. The
bibliography is excellent.
1. Tison Pugh’s
Introduction, “Retroprogressive
Medievalisms: Where Yesterday is Tomorrow Today,” introduces terminology to
which most of the subsequent essays adhere to get at what Baudrillard calls
Disney’s “play of illusions and phantasms”(1). Pugh emphasizes that all the
essays in the volume “explore Disney’s mediation and re-creation of a fairy-tale
and fantasy past, not to lament its exploitation of the Middle Ages for
corporate ends, but to examine how and why these medieval visions prove so
readily adaptable to themed entertainments many centuries after their creation”
(2). Citing Hayden White on the manner in which historians give meaning in
their narratives through an allegoresis of real events, Pugh proposes a
similar theory behind Disney’s “overarching sense of play” that creates a
hyperreality more true than factual to celebrate a “sacrosanct vision of
children’s culture as perpetually innocent”: “It’s only for children, it’s only
fantasy, it’s only a cartoon, and it’s just good business” (3). Pugh
illustrates the basics of such a vision by discussing the theme-park rides
designed around the film Pirates of the Caribbean, with its tropes of
countercultural conformity and innocence that affect even the pirates
themselves as they learn to conceive through the simplicity of children the
possibilities of a happily ever after ending, that the theme parks pick upon in
piratic extensions of ideological continuity between yesterday and tomorrow —
familiar Disney identities that rob from each other to be perpetually
“refabricated under a rubric of children’s innocence” (5).
Part I: Building a
Better Middle Ages: Medievalism in the Parks.
2. Stephen Yandell, “Mapping the Happiest Place on Earth: Disney’s
Medieval Cartography.” Disney parks prioritize the guests’ feelings of comfort
and familiarity. The imagineers recognize that getting lost can be fun; as
Eddie Sotto explains, “fear minus death equals fun” (22). The pleasurable state
of being safely lost gives families the chance to explore the familiar and
unfamiliar simultaneously, according to childhood fantasies. Yandell compares
the layout of Fun Maps for Disney theme parks with the thirteenth-century
Hereford mappaemundi, which places Eden (and the east) at the top, and
Europe and Africa left and right at the bottom separated from Eden by the River
Tanais (Don) and the River Nile and from each other by the Mediterranean. The
Disney parks place Fantasyland at the top, Frontierland and Adventureland to
the left, and Tomorrowland to the right, with Mainstreet U.S.A., which governs
the flow of traffic into the central hub, in place of the Mediterranean. There
are plenty of vacant spaces where one can get “lost,” but not really, what with
the wanderer’s deep-seated familiarity with even the scariest places within the
Disney world that lurk in the wanderer’s hearts and memories. Yandell relates
films like Treasure Island to such a hub-and spoke layout of all Disney
parks, citing Umberto Eco’s observation that “the pleasure of imitation . . .
is one of the most innate [delights] in the human spirit” (29) to get at the
delight of imitating imagination, as visitors proceed through the park
according to directions of their own choosing, even according to one’s desire
to be subversive while at the same time purchasing with real money treasures
from the gift shops to enhance their fondest memories.
3. Martha Bayless, “Disney’s Castles and the Work of the Medieval in the
Magic Kingdom.” The ultimate origin of Disney’s castles is the Neuschwanstein
Castle in Bavaria, itself an unfinished story of romance, which Disney (and
America, in works like The Little Princess and Meg Cabot’s The
Princess Diaries) has transformed into a female domain, “a domestic space
for the enactment of American female transfiguration” (40). Bayless explores
Disney castles, particularly those of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella,
which serve the films in ways akin to the framing of medieval dream visions
such as Pearl, Piers Plowman, and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. Disney’s
dream castles, rather than being martial fortifications, are sites made
personal, child-centered places that reenact adult histories to celebrate the
idea of family, home, and happy endings. Despite the fact that such a vision
ignores commonplace real life evidence that, for most Americans, weddings and
married life are no guarantee of such happiness, “within the smaller realm of
the domestic, moments of play, transformation, and celebration are still
possible. This is the promise of the castle” (54). Nowadays, even children know
that.
4. Susan Aronstein, “Pilgrimage and Medieval Narrative Structures in
Disney’s Parks.” Aronstein begins with Karal Marling’s unironic observation
that “A trip to a Disney park is like going to heaven. A culmination of every
dream and hope. A summation of the American life,” and proceeds to draw
parallels with medieval pilgrimages that mix piety and the materialities of
travel. She uses St. Gregory’s enthusiasm for souls inflamed with love adorned
by elaborate imagination that plays out in Disney spaces, according to Mike
Wallace, in ways akin to the Corpus Christi cycles. Aronstein imagines how V.
A. Kolve’s chronicle of the mystery plays (thrilling for medievalists, at
least) might be brought to bear upon the Disney experience as it transforms, as
if by magic, Americans back into the verities of a dangerous frontier filled with
the piety of adventure. Disneyland’s dark rides are “sermons in fiberglass” (62
ff.) that reaffirm the fairytale mythologies of childhood, from Neverland to
the Jack stories. Aronstein concludes with remarks on the marketing of magic
within Disneyland’s elaborate commercial systems. Just as medieval folk doted
on the York Cycle for its pageantry, they also went there for the concessions —
from yummy tidbits to maypoles and circle dancing with their friends.
Part II: The Distorical
Middle Ages. [“Distory” is “history”
as Disney revisions it.]
5. Paul Sturtevant, “‘You don’t learn it deliberately, but you just know
it from what you’ve seen’: British understandings of the medieval past gleaned
from Disney’s fairy tales,” offers a fresh perspective quite different from
other essays in the volume in that the Disney experience for British children
is not like the American experience; for them there is less confusion about
what’s really medieval and what Disney makes up. Sturtevant uses questionnaires
distributed among elementary school age groups, who recognize immediately
Disney’s skills at making up realities quite apart from the castles and
medieval history they have grown up with and know so well. Still, they love the
films and enjoy them as much as any children do for their fairies, magic,
goblins, dragons, pirates, and cultural affinities, recognizable medievalisms
through which Disney shapes their fantasies. Sturtevant does not mention it,
but it could be that their growing up with British pantomimes may also help
British children to appreciate, without being confused, the contradictions
within Disney’s fantastic entertainment on both sides of the dim margins between
childhood and adulthood. They have enjoyed such distortions since they were
three years old, or younger, depending on the strength of granny’s back!
6. Erin Felicia Labbie, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Animation and Alchemy in
Disney’s Medievalism.” Labbie juxtaposes the first Fantasia (1940) with
the second (2010) to explore the interface between the animated Sorcerer’s
Apprentice (1940) and the one with human actors (2010), using Disney’s TV
episode on “The Story of Animated Drawing” to get at complex adjustments of
imagination as technologies displace each other to enhance old ideas in new
ways, a sophisticated alchemy with which we, well fed by TV, are quite at home.
Mickey’s impatience with medieval alchemy, akin to the complaints of Chaucer’s
yeoman in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales,
demonstrates admirably what Peggy Knapp calls the “image of alienated labor in
the strongest sense . . . [where] capitalism is intent on making things more
plentiful, bigger, less measurable on a scale based on the worker growing food”
(107-08). Labbie concludes by relating the magic of alchemical creation to
magical animation that captures dreams by what Pugh characterized as
“retroprogesssion,” with the 2010 Sorcerer’s Apprentice reifying the original Fantasia
through a different kind of animation, with “real/reel” people in a nonlinear
cartoon of history and time.
7. Rob Gossedge, “The Sword in the Stone: American Translatio
and Disney’s Antimedievalism,” discusses Disney’s reluctance to undertake an
Arthurian tale — “That king was a cuckold. Who the hell cares about a cuckold?”
(117), though he purchased the rights to T. H. White’s story early on in 1940.
But White’s “The Sword in the Stone” is largely a happy affair, and after the
success of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot (successful despite Disney’s
refusal to give them rights to White’s first installment of what was to become The
Once and Future King) and JFK’s picking up on the success of the musical as
a marker of his presidency, Disney quite hurriedly produced their movie to open
on Christmas day of 1963, mindful that the Kennedy’s were setting out to
remodel the White House as a new Camelot, which, I would add, might account, in
part, for the film’s antimedievalism: Disney and the Kennedy’s came from
different sides of the aisle. Disney’s film picks up on the education theme of
White’s story, but takes great liberties with what White took seriously,
mocking White’s medieval tale repeatedly, what with the Sorcerer’s
Apprentice-like dishwashing scene, the timely puns on the early 1960's, the
squirrel romance not found in White, the greatly altered Mim episode, and jokes
about “these backward medieval times” (125). The film avoids any hints of
Wart’s birth and ancestry, a subject Disney did not want to touch. Wart’s
speech is pure American, as opposed to Kay’s Cockney, which gives Arthur all
the legitimacy he needs. Merlin, who can live in the future, insists that Wart
get those silly medieval ideas out of his head, and Wart himself quickly learns
of the backwardness of those times as he sets out to modernize his thoughts.
When Merlin returns from his Bermuda vacation he encourages Wart — “‘Boy, boy,
boy, you’ll become a legend. They’ll be writing books about you for centuries
to come. Why they might even make a motion picture about you.’ Indeed ‘they’
did — many. But Disney’s Sword in the Stone, ultimately, was not really
one of them” (129).
8. Kevin J. Harty, “Walt in Sherwood, or The Sheriff of Disneyland:
Disney and the Film Legend of Robin Hood,” provides a detailed survey of the
disneyification of the Robin Hood legend, hinted at in the Robin Hood typology
that creeps into “The Sword in the Stone” in 1963, but was first explored in The
Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, dir. By Ken Annakin (1952), which plays
upon fears of an enemy within, with a touch of sympathy for McCarthyism in its
advocacy of social responsibility. In all the Disney productions, Robin is the
quintessential good guy. None of their early Robin Hood efforts were big hits,
though they experimented with mixed agendas that were in their ways even daring
in their race and gender bending. In the Disney made-for-television adaptation
of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, entitled A
Knight in Camelot (1998), Hank Morgan is played by Whoopi Goldberg; this
was followed in 2001 by Peter Hewitt’s Princess of Thieves, with Keira
Knightly as Robin Hood’s daughter Gwen. Both films, first aired on The
Wonderful World of Disney, give women considerable agency, going all the way
back to The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, with Joan Rice as
Marian. But the best known Disney Robin Hood is the animated film directed by
Wolfgang Reitherman (1973), who also directed the animated The Sword in the
Stone. Harty notes that Disney had been interested in the Reynard the Fox
story from the mid-1930s, but worried about having a crook as his central
protagonist. Such concerns fade, however, when the tale is combined with an
animated Robin Hood narrative and the animals can be animals but good people simultaneously.
Harty’s discussions of The Rocketeer and Princess of Thieves are particularly
excellent, including insightful remarks on their conclusions, where Disney
corporation’s courage of their convictions cops out, settling instead for the
Disney doctrine of women being pretty and marriageable. All the films adhere to
Disney’s dictum that “we want to have a point of view in our stories, not an
obvious moral, but a worthwhile theme,” namely “opposition to tyranny and
oppression, concern for the downtrodden and disempowered, and a happy ending”
(149).
9. Amy Foster, “Futuristic Medievalisms and the U.S. Space Program
in Disney’s Man in Space Trilogy and Unidentified Flying Oddball.” Foster deconstructs the Disney TV
trilogy Man in Space, launched in 1955, and Unidentified Flying
Oddball (1979), a space Odyssey based on Twain’s Connecticut Yankee,
celebrating the superiority of US technology but ever so different from A
Knight in Camelot. Disney was intensely interested in the American space
exploration. Not only did he produce the TV trilogy; he also built space travel
into the park Tomorrowlands with their various space rides. Disney used the
television show Walt Disney’s Disneyland to promote spaceflight even
before the U.S. government officially sponsored a federal space program. The Man
in Space series premiered over two and a half years before the Soviet Union
launched Sputnik. Disney had Willy Ley, Wernher Von Braun, and Heinz
Haber appearing on his space programs to promote space flight, all three of
whom saw TV as an outstanding means of promoting the space program, which was
presented as “a Promethean struggle for survival” (157). Both Haber and Von
Braun had been deeply involved with Hitler’s rocket program; Disney was
masterful in sidestepping their Nazi histories in his “distorical” savvy. Foster
discusses the traumas of the Vanguard disaster as Disney continued to promote
the program and even to coerce U.S. presidents to support space exploration
when they would have preferred other agendas. In Unidentified Flying Oddball
Tom Trimble uses his technological advantages (including his spacesuit to avoid
the dangers of being burnt at the stake) and, in the American way, validates
the values of gadgets and technology. Disney believed in “glorifying ordinary
Americans” (164), and Trimble is one of those who demonstrates that salvation
lies in scientific advances capable of saving us from a rat infested medieval
world so that we can invent a twenty-first century for the whole world.
Part III: Disney
Princess Fantasy Faire.
10. Clare Bradford, “‘Where Happily Ever After Happens Every Day’: The
Medievalisms of Disney’s Princesses.” Bradford discusses the “curious mixture
of stiffness and seductiveness” of all the Disney princesses, regardless of
race as they flutter their eyelashes, smile and laugh beguilingly, curtsey, and
invite play by adjustment of their hand positions (171). They “naturalize and
authorize traditional gender roles by deploying discourses of courtly love and
narratives structured by the motif of the Fair Unknown” in search of a premodern
patriarchal order that culminates in marriage (173). Bradford divides her
presentation into three sections: “The Mists of Time(lessness): Cultural
Capital and Disney’s Princesses”; “‘Some day my prince will come’: How to Be a
Princess in Ten Easy Lessons”; and “‘My heart belongs to Daddy’: Fathers, Bad
Boys, and Disney Princesses.” Her examples for discussion are the half dozen
Disney fairy tale films, from Snow White and Cinderella to Beauty
and the Beast, and recent films like Tangled and The Princess and
the Frog. “Both the website and the films disclose cultural anxieties
around gender and sexuality, anxieties that manifest in the contradictory
discourses that swirl about them. Nowhere are these contradictions more
apparent than in the ideological functions performed by Disney’s medievalisms”
(186).
11. Kathleen Coyne
Kelly, “Disney’s Medievalized
Ecologies in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty.” Kelly’s quite wonder-filled essay
works along the interface between technology and aesthetics where Disney excels
so magnificently. She looks past the human characters to focus instead on
Disney’s cinematic backgrounds — the natural settings and ecologies that evolve
colorfully out of Ruskin, the pre-Raphaelites, Rackham, Maxfield Parrish, the
Swedish illustrator Gustaf Adolf Tenggren (who worked for Disney in the late
1930s), and the American realist painter Robert Henri, following Henri’s dictum
that “the great painter has something to say. He does not paint men, landscapes
or furniture, but an idea” (191). In Snow White, one of Disney’s main
ideas is conservationism, the “idea of a pristine, unspoiled nature to
be used and enjoyed by all,” an idea that through his “medievalized nature” he
“in a small but significant way, participated in mid-twentieth-century
discourses on the environment” (191). Kelly offers a brief history of animation
that leads into the complexity of the Disney Company’s innovations in camera
work that film as many as seven layers of artwork, moving at different speeds
to create a proto-3D “depth and dimension not seen before in animation” (192). Disney’s
forests generate “a strong desire to be transported to them”; they exist “not
some where, but some time,” borrowing words from Winston
Churchill’s famous assessment of the legend of King Arthur: “It is all true, or
it ought to be; and more and better besides” (195). The Russian director Sergei
Eisenstein called Snow White “the greatest movie ever made” (196),
emphasizing its importance in bringing color and the sublime into the gray
lives of post-depression American workers, slaving away at sweatshop jobs or
rural projects not of their choosing. Kelly, in her discussion of “remediation
and realism,” wittily reads Disney’s “exploitation of already known
representations of the Middle Ages as a brilliant (and punning) application of
the ‘natural’ law of conservation” (200). After all her smart discussions of
Disney as conservationist in relation to other conservation movements in
America, from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Farley Mowat’s Never
Cry Wolf (1963) to Max Yasgur’s Farm, Woodstock, and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, I am amused by
Kelly’s gesture to distance herself from Walt in her notes: “It is a rare
scholar who does not criticize Disney for sexist, racist, and classist
representations. In agreement with such critiques, I find The Little Mermaid
to be egregiously racist, speciesist, and obesist, and consider Tangled
to be a facile, bourgeois exploitation of girl power” (204 n4) — home safe!
12. Ilan Michell-Smith,
“The United Princesses of America:
Ethnic Diversity and Cultural Purity in Disney’s Medieval Past.” This essay
addresses questions surrounding the Disney Corporation’s efforts in the last
two decades to provide ethnic diversity among its icons with non-white Princess
movies, all of which are symbolically “medieval” in that they are set in a
distory past, where the modern world has not yet arrived — Aladdin,
Pocahontas, Mulan, and The Princess and the Frog, the last (the most
modern) being set in a New Orleans of the past. All of them, however, further
Disney’s American and Eurocentric agendas. “The protagonists, despite their
varying sociotemporal settings, are modern American girls who find themselves
in conflict with ancient and repressive regimes, and so they together symbolize
an inevitable mixed-race American culture that is emerging for all people, in
all places, and at all times of the past.” Towards the end of each film the
“traditional culture is compromised or even undone” (210). These free-form
integration conflicts and contradictions typify in some ways a modern America,
“where business women, soldiers, and activists can also be damsels in distress
and decorated brides” (211), thereby getting at the trickiness of
multiculturalism in America. The films tend to avoid complication by depicting
white people, where they factor in, in distinct home areas of their own “to the
point of rewriting colonization and conquest into a peaceful parting of the two
groups” (213). The separation destabilizes the very concept of “Princess,”
“because the Princesses themselves are kept irrevocably apart by their
ethnicities and their specific and individual geographical settings” (214).
Multiracial Disney princesses occupy a double identity even as “they take turns
laughing and smiling as if they are all part of a single choreography of demure
femininity” (214), what with their different skin colors evenly distributed
(215). These contradictions become particularly evident on website
presentations, where the princesses are separated as icons apart from their
originary film stories where they have more distinctive and coherent
identities, where they can sing of their sense of a whole new world, or lecture
the men in their stories on what’s going on, or, like Tiana, reject “this old
town” and its people who always “take the easy way,” even as she gets married
at the end, still running her own show, albeit in homage to her father. Mitchell-Smith
concludes by reminding us that children are quite “able to negotiate and manage
their intake of ideas, and the consumption of culture might not be purely
imitative,” that in these fantasy worlds “irresolvable tensions in contemporary
American female identity can somehow coexist” (222) or be negotiated.
13. Allison Craven, “Esmeralda of Notre-Dame: The Gypsy in Medieval View
from Hugo to Disney.” After a review of Hugo’s basic plot and his own
medievalisms, Craven explores the spectacle of Notre-Dame itself as a virtual
character on its own, while reviewing the numerous earlier film versions of Hunchback.
Disney’s animated story is not the first Hunchback for children (there
is an Australian one), but it is the best known and is not unique in dealing
with dark themes (nota bene, Mulan,
the Disney Tarzan, and Atlantis, all films more for adolescents
and adults). But, Craven argues, the violence is softened: Quasi does not kill
Frollo; rather the villain brings about his own demise, thereby preserving the
innocence of a Disney hero. “Disney’s hunchback is regressed to Laughton’s
pre-Oedipal child; thus, the sexual threat to Esmeralda . . . is thoroughly
attributed by Disney to Frollo,” thereby emphasizing Esmeralda’s sexual
maturity and self-possession while at the same time developing the “staple
figures of teenage fiction, the outsider and the underdog” of Quasi’s
“self-actualization” (233). Esmeralda’s fatal attraction for Phoebus “is
adapted by Disney as a lively chemistry and . . . they are initially on
opposite sides until Phoebus rebels and joins Esmeralda’s quest, and is then
rescued several times by Esmeralda and owes his life to her,” whereby a bond
between them is expanded into a sequel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame II: The
Secret of the Bell, in which Phoebus and Esmeralda have a child, Zephyr, “a
rare instance in Disney or any children’s media in which principal characters
reproduce” (234). Craven’s analysis concludes with “Gypsy Magic: Esmeralda and
the Exotic Art of Animation,” which relates Quasi’s bedazzled youth with his
doll replica of Esmeralda and his toy city which charms Esmeralda, amazed by
how much room he has, then goes on to compare the film’s exoticism with that of
Aladdin and other oriental tales as Disney mediates modernity with
medievalism.
14. Maria Sachiko
Cecire, “Reality Remixed: Neomedieval
Princess Culture in Disney’s Enchanted.” Cecire discusses Enchanted (2007) as if it were a kind
of medieval cento. She does not use this term, and I doubt that anyone
at Disney ever heard of this form of medievalism, but it fits her discussion
well. A cento is a text made up of lines from an earlier work rearranged
to make a new work through a reconfiguration of allusions. Cecire’s point is
that much of the pleasure one experiences in seeing the new film (Enchanted)
stems from recognition of the revoicing and refitting of earlier Disney
materials, like a simultaneous recalling of the past and the future. “Enchanted’s
play on the medievalisms of previous Disney fairy-tale films yields
neomedievalisms that are self-aware and even further abstracted from the Middle
Ages than their sources . . . constructs [that] participate in the postmodern
techniques of fragmentation: anachronism, pastiche, bricolage,” as Robinson and
Clements suggest (244). The pop-up book shot at the beginning is particularly
apt for this film in which Disney allusions perpetually pop up to enfold this
intricately self-conscious plot of “textual poaching” in the fields of fan
fiction and fan art, as Disney employs “fannish recombinatory techniques to
‘make sense’ of Disney’s legacy in a contemporary context” (248). Director
Kevin Lima admits that “there are so many Disney references in Enchanted
that he ‘doesn’t know if there’s a number,’ but states that ‘you could watch
this movie a hundred times and still find things’” (248). Lima notes, for
example that the troll in the opening animation wears a loin cloth made up of
various princess dresses and purple earrings pinched from “Ariel’s shell bra”
in The Little Mermaid (249). Enchanted celebrates female
intuition and creativity, but does not undermine the persistent patriarchal
positions of earlier Disney films, which, Cecire suggests, damages the film’s
legacy and economic potential (255). She concludes with an interesting
speculation: In 2010 Disney Pictures announced that Tangled would be its
last traditional Princess film “for the foreseeable future.” However, the first
season of Once Upon a Time, produced by Disney has been the most popular
Sunday night show on TV for adults between 18-34 and women between 18-49. “Like
Enchanted, Once Upon a Time encourages viewers to be textual poachers,
actively seeking out the neomedieval possibilities in mundane modernity and
recombining them to reveal the hidden Disney Princess narratives embedded in
everyday life” (257-58). So maybe there will not be new Princess film for a
while, but their legacy lives on.
Russell A. Peck
University of Rochester
