English Composition I - ENGL 1010 - Dr. Whelan

The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."

A collection of essays that explicate Disney ideology through fifty-five years of feature films, including Bambi, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio, and more.From Mouse to Mermaid, an interdisciplinary collection of original essays, is the first comprehensive, critical treatment of Disney cinema. Addressing children's classics as well as the Disney affiliates' more recent attempts to capture adult audiences, the contributors respond to the Disney film legacy from feminist, marxist, poststructuralist, and cultural studies perspectives. The volume contemplates Disney's duality as an American icon and as an industry of cultural production, created in and through fifty years of filmmaking. The contributors treat a range of topics at issue in contemporary cultural studies: the performance of gender, race, and class; the engendered images of science, nature, technology, family, and business. The compilation of voices in From Mouse to Mermaid creates a persuasive cultural critique of Disney's ideology.The contributors are Bryan Attebery, Elizabeth Bell, Claudia Card, Chris Cuomo, Ramona Fernandez, Henry A. Giroux, Robert Haas, Lynda Haas, Susan Jeffords, N. Soyini Madison, Susan Miller, Patrick Murphy, David Payne, Greg Rode, Laura Sells, and Jack Zipes."In this volume of 16 essays about Disney films, several pieces . . . begin the work of filling in a major gap in our understanding of animation." --Film Quarterly

The first book to address the interaction between the Walt Disney Company and the gay community From its Magic Kingdom theme parks to its udderless cows, the Walt Disney Company has successfully maintained itself as the brand name of conservative American family values. But the Walt Disney Company has also had a long and complex relationship to the gay and lesbian community that is only now becoming visible. In Tinker Belles and Evil Queens, Sean Griffin traces the evolution of this interaction between the company and gay communities, from the 1930s use of Mickey Mouse as a code phrase for gay to the 1990s "Gay Nights" at the Magic Kingdom. Armed with first-person accounts from Disney audiences, Griffin demonstrates how Disney animation, live-action films, television series, theme parks, and merchandise provide varied motifs and characteristics that readily lend themselves to use by gay culture. But Griffin delves further to explore the role of gays and lesbians within the company, through an examination of the background of early studio personnel, an account of sexual activism within the firm, and the story of the company's own concrete efforts to give recognition to gay voices and desires. The first book to address the history of the gay community and Disney, Tinker Belles and Evil Queens broadly examines the ambiguous legacy of how modern consumerism and advertising have affected the ways lesbians and gay men have expressed their sexuality. Disney itself is shown as sensitive to gay and lesbian audiences, while exploiting those same audiences as a niche market with strong buying power. Finally, Griffin demonstrates how queer audiences have co-opted Disney products for themselves-and in turn how Disney's corporate strategies have influenced our very definitions of sexuality.

Marina Warner looks at storytelling, at its practitioners and images in art, legend, and history - from the prophesying enchantresses who lure men to a false paradise to jolly Mother Goose, with her masqueraders in the real world, from sibyls and the Queen of Sheba to Angela Carter. The storytellers are frequently women (or were until men like Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen started writing down the women's stories), and Marina Warner asks how changing prejudices about women affect the status of fairy tales: are they sources of wisdom and moral guidance, or temptations encouraging indulgence in romantic and vengeful fantasies? From the Beast to the Blonde considers old wives' tales in all their luxuriant detail and with a strong sense of the historical contexts in which they developed. Ms. Warner's fresh new interpretations show us how the real-life themes in these famous stories evolved: rivalry and hatred between women (Cinderella and The Sleeping Beauty), the ways of men and marriage (Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast), not to mention neglect, incest, death in childbirth, murder, and racial prejudice. As she suggests in her superb closing chapter, happy endings come only after stumbles and falls; yet in some sense the story of tale-telling is never done.

This book charts the complex history of the relationship between the Disney fairy tale and the American Dream, demonstrating the ways in which the Disney fairy tale has been reconstructed and renegotiated alongside, and in response to important changes within American society. In all of its fairy tales of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Walt Disney studios works to sell its audiences the national myth of the United States at any one historical moment. With analyses of films and television programmes such as The Little Mermaid (1989), Frozen (2013), Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Once Upon a Time (2011-2018), Mollet argues that by giving its fairy tale protagonists characteristics associated with 'good' Americans, and even by situating their fairy tales within America itself, Disney constructs a vision of America as a utopian space.

For many, the middle ages depicted in Walt Disney movies have come to figure as the middle ages, forming the earliest visions of the medieval past for much of the contemporary Western (and increasingly Eastern) imagination. The essayists of The Disney Middle Ages 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. What results is a scrupulous and comprehensive examination of the intersection between the products of the Disney Corporation and popular culture's fascination with the middle ages.

E-book
Until the 1990s, animation occupied a relatively marginal presence in Hollywood. Today, it is at the very heart of both the film industry and contemporary popular culture. Charting the major changes and continuities in Hollywood animation over the past thirty years, this groundbreaking book offers an authoritative history of Hollywood animation since the 1990s. Analysing dozens of key films, including The Lion King, Toy Story, Shrek, Despicable Me, Frozen and Moana, it examines the emergence of new genres and stylistic approaches, as well as the ongoing blurring of boundaries between animation and live-action. Identifying narrative and thematic patterns, and the developments in industry and style, the book explores how animation in the United States both responds to and recapitulates the values, beliefs, hopes and fears of the nation.

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In 1937, the first full-length animated film produced by Walt Disney was released. Based on a fairy tale written by the Brothers Grimm, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was an instant success and set the stage for more film adaptations over the next several decades. From animated features like and Bambi to live action films such as Mary Poppins, Disney repeatedly turned to literary sources for inspiration--a tradition the Disney studios continues well into the twenty-first century. In It's the Disney Version : Popular Cinema and Literary Classics, Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode have collected essays that consider the relationship between a Disney film and the source material from which it was drawn. Analytic yet accessible, these essays provide a wide-ranging study of the term "The Disney Version" and what it conveys to viewers. Among the works discussed in this volume are Alice in Wonderland, Mary Poppins, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, Tarzan, and Winnie the Pooh. In these intriguing essays, contributors to this volume offer close textual analyses of both the original work and of the Disney counterpart. Featuring articles that consider both positive and negative elements that can be found in the studio's output, It's the Disney Version : Popular Cinema and Literary Classics will be of interest to scholars and students of film, as well as the diehard Disney fan.

E-book
With stakes in film, television, theme parks, and merchandising, Disney continues to be one of the most dominant forces of popular culture around the globe. Films produced by the studio are usually blockbusters in nearly every country where they are released. However, despite their box office success, these films often generate as much disdain as admiration. While appreciated for their visual aesthetics, many of these same films are criticized for their cultural insensitivity or lack of historical fidelity. In Debating Disney: Pedagogical Perspectives on Commercial Cinema, Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode have assembled a collection of essays that examine Disney's output from the 1930s through the present day. Each chapter in this volume represents the conflicting viewpoints of contributors who look at Disney culture from a variety of perspectives. Covering both animated and live-action films as well as television programs, these essays discuss how the studio handles social issues such as race, gender, and culture, as well as its depictions of science and history. Though some of the essays in this volume are critical of individual films or television shows, they also acknowledge the studio's capacity to engage audiences with the quality of their work. These essays encourage readers to draw their own conclusions about Disney productions, allowing them to consider the studio as the hero--as much as the villain--in the cultural deliberation. Debating Disney will be of interest to scholars and students of film as well as those with an interest in popular culture.