New York Times, December 14, 1997
Ethnicity and Disney: It's a Whole New Myth

By Edward Rothstein

IN JULIE TAYMOR'S TRIUMPHANT Broadway reinterpretation of the Walt Disney Company's "Lion King," the movie's shamanesque baboon, Rafiki, is transmuted into a Zulu-chanting priestess, an African griot-storyteller, hooting and hollering, grunting knowingly and guiding the young lion Simba to his destiny. In the show, Rafiki is thrust to the story's center, just as the generic African background of the animated feature film is thrust into the foreground by Ms. Taymor, with muscular dance and music, ritualistic images and carnivalesque ensemble pieces.

With this new ethnic emphasis, Rafiki's closest Disney ancestor may be James Baskett, who starred as the black plantation-style storyteller Uncle Remus in "Song of the South" 51 years ago. That film has never been released on video and probably never will be (it is available only on laser disk from Japan). In it, Mr. Baskett, whose voice was known from the "Amos 'n' Andy" radio show, charmed the movie's post-Reconstruction Southern children with Joel Chandler Harris's vernacular tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. His performance won him a special Oscar, but the charm had its limits. The New Yorker said that the film consisted of "the purest sheep-dip about happy days on the old plantation." Adam Clayton Powell Jr. said it was an "insult to American minorities" and to "everything that America as a whole stands for."

The ethnic romance of the Broadway "Lion King," with its mixture of Zulu chant and songs by Elton John and Tim Rice, might also have turned into caricature. But it was saved by Ms. Taymor's genius, along with something else: the show's attitude toward ethnicity is not patronizing because ethnicity is no longer being treated as the mark of an outsider. Instead, ethnicity defines a society itself.

This represents a major change in the Disney vision of ethnicity, which is no small matter. Disney films may be the only cultural experience shared by American children, while ethnicity and race are probably the most charged words in American politics.

Ethnically defined characters have been a crucial part of Disney films for many years, both before Walt Disney died in 1966 and after. These characters include the broadly sketched black-American crows of "Dumbo" (1941) singing "I be done seen 'bout everything"; the alley cats of "Aristocats" (1970), who break out into an infectious jazz rendition of "Ev'rybody Wants to Be a Cat," led by the voice of Scatman Crothers; and Sebastian the crab in "The Little Mermaid" (1989), sung by Samuel E. Wright, who gives advice to a calypso beat ("Go on and kiss the girl"). Isn't there also a hint of caricature of black Americans when the Ape King in "The Jungle Book" (1967) yearns to learn the secret of civilization and sings (in the voice of Louis Prima), "I wan'na be like you"?

And not just black culture has preoccupied the Disney empire. Throughout the films -- pre-Walt and post, animated and live action -- ethnic types abound, sometimes associated with national caricatures and even social class. "The Three Caballeros" (1945) is a veritable tour of Latin American stereotypes. "Peter Pan" (1953) has an "Injun" powwow, "Pocahontas" (1995) an American Indian potlatch. In "Mary Poppins" (1964), the middle-class Banks family comes up against the Cockney chimney sweep Bert. "Aladdin" (1992) offended some viewers with its references to Arab culture. "The Hunchback of NotreDame" (1996) has the magically beguiling Gypsy Esmeralda.

Why is ethnicity so central to the Disney oeuvre? The word ethnic, which comes from the Greek word ethnos, meaning heathen or pagan, is a title given to an outsider and implies condescension: the ethnic heathen has rejected the civilized mainstream and has also been rejected by it. And the Disney ethnic character has tended to be interpreted as evidence of racism and insularity shared by Walt Disney and generations of Disney animators, writers and directors.

But while American racial attitudes have changed dramatically over the course of Disney history, the nature of the Disney view of ethnicity has been remarkably consistent until recently. And despite whiffs of condescension (and rare mean-spiritedness, as in the portrait of the Siamese cats in "Lady and the Tramp" in 1955), the ethnic character is treated with unusual affection. The Disney ethnic characters are loaded down by cliche -- in accent, character and mannerism -- but are also admired, even envied (they also get the best songs).

The crows in "Dumbo," for example, are more knowledgeable and witty than any of the flying elephant's circus colleagues. The alley cats in "Aristocats" turn out to be the heroes, possessing far more important skills than the upper-crust "white" kittens. Esmeralda, the Gypsy of "Hunchback," comprehends the trials of Quasimodo because of her own beleaguered ethnic status.

This is no accident. Ethnicity involves complicated relationships between an outsider and a supposed center, between an immigrant and the mainstream, an aspiring lower class and a complacent middle. And these relationships are often the very subjects of the films themselves. Disney movies do not just incorporate ethnicity; they are, in a broad sense, about it.

This is true even if the key characters are not explicitly ethnic. Dumbo is a misfit, Pinocchio a boy without a purpose. Ariel the mermaid is out of place in her underwater world, yearning to be human. In "Beauty and the Beast," Belle is "so different from the rest of us." The outsider -- the hunchback, the child, the disenfranchised princess, the beast -- struggles to join the center or change it.

Meanwhile, the identifiably ethnic characters aid in those struggles: Geppetto tries to help Pinocchio become a boy; Sebastian helps the little mermaid become human; the dwarfs help Snow White; the inner-city cats help the Aristocats. The typical Disney film presents a joint triumph: the ethnic character ends up becoming mainstream, and the mainstream ends up learning from and accepting the ethnic character.

IN THIS LIGHT, THE DISNEY oeuvre seems an embodiment of old-fashioned liberalism, something that seems bizarre given Walt Disney's reputation as a man of the right (any chance of his obtaining true liberal credentials ended with his anti-Communist testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947). Still, until the recent past, when their view of ethnicity began to shift, Disney films -- reaching back to "Dumbo," and even encompassing the paternalistic "Song of the South" -- proclaimed a melting-pot liberalism. The dominant idea was not conformity but mutual accommodation.

Walt Disney's latest biographer, Steven Watts, points out in his forthcoming book, "The Magic Kingdom," that in the 1950's the Disney studios also engaged in an almost radical celebration of American self-reliance. But this tendency, too, became a celebration of the melting pot, in which ethnic characters, like the Mexican-born Zorro, were heroic iconoclasts. In Disneyland, Disney envisioned an idealized America that incorporated exotic lands and foreign climes. Even the star of "The Mickey Mouse Club" on television was the young Italian-American Annette Funicello.

In fact, in contrast with many other popular forms of entertainment, few ethnic characters, even in the early Disney films, are villains. In "Bambi" (1942), which in its eco-pieties anticipates "The Lion King," the enemy is man himself, the hunter and fire maker. In "Dumbo" the most unlikable characters are the other elephants, who dislike anyone different from themselves. In "Hunchback," the villain hates Gypsies, the poor and the crippled. Evil is far more often associated with pretense and social climbing than with being ethnically different.

THIS THEN WAS THE CENTRAL myth of the Disney entertainment empire, a variation on the American dream that tapped into children's fantasies and adult political hopes. In a way, it was almost opposite of the grandly popular myths of opera that dominated 19th-century European culture.

Opera, like Disney genre films, came into its own with the efforts to create unified nations out of disparate peoples. But in opera, the outsider often threatens the social order, and the conflict between the ethnic character (think Carmen) and the mainstream (think Don Jose) often ended in tragedy. No triumph came without pain and complication. Disney's optimism allowed none of this; the view of society was ethnically rich, but it was a civilization without discontents.

Such optimism couldn't be sustained. In the 90's, the Disney myth started to dissolve, leading to a string of meandering, strained films. Ethnicity remained prominent in "Aladdin," as if out of habit, but was unrelated to anything else in the film. "Pocahontas" signaled the first real signs of change, overturning Disney liberalism and exchanging it for assertions of ethnic independence. The film "The Lion King" rejected the Disney myth more completely by focusing on a new notion of ethnicity: its hero was not an outsider yearning to join the center or thriving outside it but a disinherited heir who had to recapture his ethnic kingdom. "The Lion King" is not about accommodation and influence but about ethnic identity.

This means that the outsider is not someone to be admired or learned from, like the Tramp or Uncle Remus or Sebastian. He is a villain who threatens the ethnic future. Scar is literally a heathen, a pagan who rejects the Circle of Life and African animal society; he is portrayed as an ethnic caricature who is really an anti-ethnic. Simba tells Scar he is strange; the villain replies in a precious drawl, "You have no idea."

Partly because the film never makes much of Simba's native culture, the ethnic stakes never seem very high. But Ms. Taymor has fully uncovered the new Disney myth with her production's African-style celebrations and chants. The film's subtext comes to the surface. The ethnic world is being threatened by Scar; it is that world that Simba must preserve by accepting his identity and celebrating its centrality.

This transformation of the Disney myth reflects changes in the larger society as well. The melting pot is out; ethnic identity is in. Accommodation is no longer the issue; self-assertion is. But nuance is hardly more plentiful. It will be revealing to see what happens if Disney comes through with its proposed version of Verdi's opera "Aida." That opera focuses on the demands made by ethnic and national identity and their conflicts with personal desire. Private and public clash; tragedy emerges from the fray.

Will Disney allow itself to reveal the dangers behind its new myth? Is there room in the Disney universe for a sense of complication, or even for old-style reconciliation? The issues are not Disney's alone.

GRAPHIC: Photos: INTO AFRICA Tsidii Le Loka as Rafiki, who is transformed into a griot-storyteller in the Broadway version of "The Lion King," bringing folkways closer to the story's center. (Joan Marcus/Marc Bryan Brown/Disney); ORIENTALISM Ethnicity was included as a factor in "Aladdin" as if by habit. (Walt Disney Company); BELOVED CARICATURE The crows in "Dumbo" (1941) weren't the villains. (Photofest); HAPPY DAYS? James Baskett, center, with Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten in the 1946 Disney film "Song of the South." (Photofest)