I know many may have already thought this through but I just wanted to write it down for the books...the very first animated movie in the history of man definitely has undertones of the time when it was made.
I'm just gonna say it. Snow White is a movie which has racist tendencies and portrays male and female in it's "fairest" form, which is an unobtainable and ridiculous portrayal that neither men or women can live up to. First of all, who is the fairest of them all? Snow White, right? Fairest can be used in two meanings here! Not only is she supposedly the most beautiful but she is the whitest! The most beautiful woman in the world is the whitest woman in the world. This is the portrayal of the fairest woman in the world. She should:
be the whitest woman (oh my gosh, racist!)
have the highest voice
have unrealistically red lips
love all animals and have the power to draw them to you
be willing to break into houses in order to sleep on a bed instead of the ground (I feel like this is probably the one that is most telling of our heroine and is also the one that I have the most problem with children seeing)
love singing
want to and actually do clean others' houses if you find their home too dirty for your taste (which actually seems quite rude...people live differently. did you notice how when the dwarfs came home, they did not seem to really appreciate that someone had moved things from where they had been placed? I wouldn't like it either!)
ignorantly assume that everyone is trustworthy, even if they look SUPER shifty (which is just stupid. I understand that in some situations, naivete is attractive, but come on...have some common sense)
be relatively healthy in build (I've no problem with that one lol)
assume the authority position over anyone shorter than you (if they're obviously older than you, as the dwarfs are, I can't see how that is considered respectful. Shouldn't Snow White be grateful for even letting them allow her to stay instead of bossing them around?)
be happy pretty much all the time (no one can be happy all the time.)
there are similar unrealistic undertones of what a "handsome prince" should be:
he should be able to sing
also be white
also have unrealistically red lips
be taller than the woman he loves (the dwarfs in the story all seem to love Snow White just as much, if not more than the prince)
and, as is common in many Disney movies, he should be willing to kiss a complete stranger if she is pretty and expect her to be happy about it and come with him off to a different land far away from anything she is familiar with.
**It has been brought to my attention that I might come off as having something against the heroines of movies I talk about. I do not have anything against the characters, but against the writers who write the characters as the kind which children should want to be like and then giving them characteristics which would cause people in society to become more malicious and selfish than they already are. I have a problem with people who feed children immoral, unethical ideas and lifestyles through entertainment.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
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1 comment:
This is why we should look to Proverbs and other texts in the Bible for descriptions of the ideal personality, and not to Walt Disney, who was an anti-Jew commercialist.
Though I've always wanted to be an Imagineer...
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