Theories

Disney’s rich history, vibrant contemporary films and massive following support many important communication theories, starting with Harold Lasswell’s belief in master symbols. To him, the media’s influences come not from powerful messages but rather the vulnerable minds of its audiences. Master symbols, however, are well-crafted, large-scale ideas and communications that are cultivated to induce specific and strong emotional reactions (Baran & Davis, 2009).

Symbols are obviously plentiful throughout the dozens of Disney animated films. Animators, however, illustrate the concept of families and parenthood with a staggeringly diverse set of symbols: gods and goddesses, superheroes, kings and queens, animals, toys, trolls and teddy bears.

Herbert Blumer examines how people interact with symbols and learn about culture with symbolic interactionism. He argues that people give meaning to symbols, which in turn come to control people. George Herbert Mead, however, describes symbols as “arbitrary, often quite abstract representations of unseen phenomena” (Baran and Davis, 2009). Using the process of learning to play baseball as his example, Mead illustrates how people use symbols to create beliefs of the individual and how the person interacts with the larger social order, society or culture. “Symbols mediate and structure all our experience because they structure our ability to perceive and interpret what goes on around us” (Baran and Davis, 2009). The countless symbols present in Disney movies help children understand the environment and comprehend the loss of a parent.

Children, the primary target audience for Disney animated films, are particularly impressionable and susceptible to master symbols. This audience also makes social cognitive, learning or modeling theories especially salient. This collection of theories focuses on how people learn from various stimuli in their environment, including peers, media and more. “Parents and teachers, of course, play a big part in helping children to learn and socialize, but the media play an increasingly important role, too” (Laughey 2009). Although authors commonly analyze these theories in the context of television and violence, they can be applied to animated movies and children’s personalities, socialization, development and interaction within family structures.

George Gerbner developed his cultivation analysis theory with television violence in

mind, but the theory is relevant to Disney animated movies as well. Cultivation analysis theory states that despite the media propagating a worldview that is inaccurate, the views become reality because of media’s salience. More broadly, media’s cultivation creates cultural frameworks or commonly understood knowledge. Cultivation occurs by mainstreaming, in which media symbols dominate all other sources of information, or through resonance, when viewers watch something similar to their own lives (Baran and Davis, 2009). The concept of the evil stepmother is an example of Disney animated movies’ cultivation. The vivid imagery and drama often transfix children, who are susceptible to mainstreaming or narrowly focusing on what is in front of themselves. Many children first interact with stepparents in negative, distrustful ways in part because movies have shown children that the new parents are not genuine. For example, Cinderella’s father married Lady Tremaine so that his daughter could have a mother. When he died, the stepmother and her two daughters joined forces to abuse and mistreat Cinderella. Previously, the vain and evil queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs forces her stepdaughter, Snow White, to work in the kitchen for fear that her beauty would pass her own. When the Magic Mirror deems Snow White as the fairest in the land, the queen orders the huntsman to take her stepdaughter into the forest and kill her — even asking him to return with her heart in a box as proof.

Evil Queen and Stepmother from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Without question, children imitate and identify with Disney characters. Girls frequently dress up as their favorite princesses in an example of imitation, or the direct reproduction of observed characteristics. Baran and Davis, though, separately define identification as a “special form of imitation that springs from wanting to be and trying to be like an observed model relative to some broader characteristics or qualities” (2009). Children identifying with a particular character might value the character’s independence, sense of humor or response to daunting challenges such as death of a parent.

Psychologists Neal Miller and John Dollard argued that learning occurred when people imitated behaviors and received positive reinforcement (Baran and Davis, 2009). Behaviorists further developed these ideas into operant learning theory, which asserts that people learn when they: are presented with some sort of stimulation, respond to the stimulation and have the response rewarded or punished. Although Baran and Davis describe many flaws and limitations to these theories, they might be more relevant and applicable to children’s simpler minds and more wild imaginations.

A vein of social cognition or social learning is modeling theory, otherwise known as observational learning. This theory states that people can learn just by observing a behavior — there is no positive or negative reinforcement. Another path includes inhibitory effects, which reduce the likeliness of learners to repeat behaviors after witnessing a model punished for those same acts. For example, children are probably less likely to act out against a parent after watching Merida’s horror after she angrily turned her mother into a bear in Brave.

On the other hand, disinhibitory effects occur when a person sees a model rewarded for a prohibited or dangerous behavior. The learner is more likely to engage in that behavior after witnessing the vicarious reinforcement. In Tangled, Rapunzel lies to the woman she believes to be her mother and runs away with a man with whom she falls in love — clearly behavior real-life parents would not want their children replicating.

Baran and Davis also describe occasions when learners ignore possible negative consequences and perform a behavior previously associated with punishment. Social prompting supports dangerous behaviors if the incentive or reward is sufficient. Disney characters frequently encounter social prompting when weighing personal safety with the survival and happiness of the family or community. For example, Penny from The Rescuers faces death to escape her captors and keep her teddy bear safe.

Characters and viewers alike are also prone to priming, which Laughey describes as occurring when “exposure to media triggers thoughts and feelings pent-up from the past” (2009). Disney animated films have carved out its own niche or genre of music, stemming from 16 Academy Awards and 22 nominations for best original song or score. Music is a prime source for information about a given scene, and Disney composers have portrayed parental death with both deep and somber tones as well as shrill and chaotic clamor. Viewers especially are prone to priming if they identify with or believe in the character or challenges he or she faces. Much like selective exposure or cognitive consistency, in which people consciously and unconsciously consume media that support previously held beliefs, viewers can freely interpret the meanings behind interactions and plot developments in the movie.

According to Marshall McLuhan, changes in communication technology can produce profound changes in both culture and social order. Disney’s largest, or at least most noticeable, technological transformation involves the transition from hand-drawn animations to computer-generated imagery, or CGI. Although the new medium has not directly changed the stories being told, CGI provides more depth and realism to animation, making the messages and themes feel more real.

On the other hand, Disney animated films reflect elements of postmodernism, in which Laughey describes imagery as simultaneously fundamental and disposable when it comes to understanding the world or environment. Although the vivid pictures are hugely important tools to convey a message, postmodernists argue they are not given the full context or explanation they deserve. This could help explain why, for example, Mulan or the children in The Incredibles can seemingly kill with ease without suffering any mental ill effects. Related, Jean Baudrillard argues that the media-saturated culture promotes simulations of real places or events that replace reality. “We can no longer represent or reproduce the real... because we are saturated with so many media representations that they take on a life of their own in our perceptions of the real world, breaking free from any connection they may have had with genuine reality once upon a time” (Laughey, 2009).

Hand drawn vs. CGI animation

Although Joshua Meyrowitz refers specifically to television, media allows children to see the world before they can adequately comprehend how to interact with it. Media “escorts children across the globe before they even have permission to cross the street,” he wrote (Baran and Davis, 2009). Media bring different social situations or physical locations straight to a person’s home or favorite movie theater. In Disney animated films, animals and toys can talk, people can fly and children can develop special powers.

More realistically, Disney movies commonly show children what it feels like to lose a parent — and how to cope with the loss. Support systems and families exist beyond the traditional role of a parent and a child, and movies such as Frozen illustrate that familial love is just as strong and important as romantic love. Elsa banishes herself from her sister and the village after her parents die, but happily ever after comes when they are reunited. Elsa shows children how to accept actions or traits they might be ashamed of and love themselves for those quirks.

This description of the effects and magic in animated movies reflects Walter Lippmann’s ideas concerning agenda-setting theory. He maintains that people cannot deal directly with their environments as much as they respond to “the pictures in their head”:

For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety… and although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it (Baran and Davis, 2009).