This week I watched "Mickey Mouse Monopoly,"a video by Chyng Sun and Miguel Picker about Disney, childhood, and corporate power. I highly recommend it!
The reason I wanted to blog about it is that I was struck in particular by the discussion in the video of how marketing towards children affects their play, particularly their storytelling. The stories Disney tells in its movies are in many way secondary to the merchandising of products related to the movies, and as such those products become embedded with the particular narratives Disney has attached to them.
In essence, when a child is given a toy for which she already knows the story, her spontaneous creative abilities become displaced. She uses her Cinderella doll to tell the (Disneyfied) version of Cinderella, she plays out the (Disneyfied) story of the Little Mermaid in her Ariel swimsuit. She already knows what happens in the story, so she does not create her own. I remember experiencing this myself as a child - my friends and I would decide to play, for instance, Sleeping Beauty. If there were the right number of friends, it all worked out: we could have one princess, three fairies, a wicked queen, and a prince. But if more than three friends wanted to be fairies, or worse if more than one of us wanted to be the princess, a wall was hit. That's NOT HOW IT GOES, someone would protest. After all, we'd seen the movie a dozen times. We remembered.
One of the things I got out of Fragile Moments was that play is how children learn, and how large a part reiteration plays in that learning process. So in repeating the stories we'd been told by Disney films, my friends and I were not only not learning anything new ourselves, but reinforcing the messages in those films. Some of those messages are innocent or even lovely, but many of them are not. I have distinct memories of being a little girl and thinking about how when I grew up and was beautiful, I would look a particular way, and that way was directly modeled on the consistently wasp-waisted and willowy Disney heroine. I was told by Disney that that was what a pretty lady looked like, and moreover that pretty women were always the good ones who lived happily ever after, so of course I wanted and intended to look that way (despite some nagging suspicions that with my big nose and puffy hair, flat chest and long face, I bore a closer resemblance to an Ugly Stepsister.)
Through marketing, Disney has the power to approve certain narratives and not others, and this is particularly sinister when one considers Disney CEO Michael Eisner's 2005 pronouncement: "To make money is our only objective." This is an above-board admission that disrupting children's play is an effective way to be profitable. It really made me reflect on Fragile Moments, and how much learning hinges on the spontaneity of play. Upsetting, to say the least!
Works cited:
Mickey Mouse Monopoly : Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power. (2001) Producer, Writer: Chyng Feng Sun . Director, Co-Producer: Miguel Picker. An ArtMedia Production. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byaMd_PNyIY
Wien, C. A. & Callaghan, K. (2007). Fragile moments: Artists co-constructing creative experience with children, parents and early childhood educators. Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Exchange.
I remember seeing that film in Fem theory my first year of university. I agree. When we give children a toy with a strong narrative already attached, we disadvantage them from creating their own narrative. Although, I have seen instances where children have adapted their own use for disney toys.
ReplyDeleteYou'd be interested in a foundational work in the field of 'critical' early years studies... Kinderculture:the corporate construction of childhood by Shirley R. Steinberg, Joe L. Kincheloe
ReplyDeletehttp://books.google.com/books/about/Kinderculture.html?id=3Fo6oLzOb5QC