Oh Disney, no...
Jul. 19th, 2010 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rosdriseSubs are out for the first Nodame Cantabile movie and I'm pretty psyched to have Nodame and Chiaki back on my screen. This of course made me want to listen to Rhapsody in Blue, so I went over to Youtube to fulfill this desire. I reformatted my computer a while ago and have yet to put my music back on it. One of the clips available was from Fantasia 2000. I then decided to check out some clips from the original.
Now, I know Disney doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to racial sensitivity. Many of the problematic examples are representative of the time period in which they were created (Song of the South, the crows in Dumbo, etc) and sometimes they were just in really poor taste (lyrics from the opening song in Aladdin). What I wasn't aware of, was that there is a horrible example of stereotyping in Fantasia. Meet Sunflower, the centaurette:
I'm really pretty speechless. I watched Fantasia a lot when I was younger, and The Pastoral Symphony was one of my favorite parts. I loved horses when I was younger. Where other girls played with Barbies, it was my horses that had all the dramatic storylines. And The Pastoral Symphony had pegasus AND centaurs. Plus, I was a serious girly-girl and thought the centaur ladies were gorgeous. I loved the fluffy, pastel landscape, I loved how everything was just so delicate and perfect.
Now, watching it with a far more cynical eye these days it's hard not to find fault with the clip. And it becomes even more horrific with the knowledge that originally the perfect little centaur princesses were waited on hand and foot by such a blatant and insulting caricature. I just can't wrap my head around how such a character design was worked into the marshmallow landscape and to what purpose? She seems very much at odds with the two elegant and beautiful part-African part-zebra centaur ladies that attend (of course) Dionysus later on. The entire thing is just disgusting and very, very sad.
Of course, the 60's rolled around and the racial climate started to shift considerably. The clips that featured Sunflower were pan and zoomed in to crop her out. And according to a few sources I read, Disney tried to claim that she never existed. Well, she did, and you can see her in this Youtube clip starting at 1:01 - The Pastoral Symphony
Now, I know Disney doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to racial sensitivity. Many of the problematic examples are representative of the time period in which they were created (Song of the South, the crows in Dumbo, etc) and sometimes they were just in really poor taste (lyrics from the opening song in Aladdin). What I wasn't aware of, was that there is a horrible example of stereotyping in Fantasia. Meet Sunflower, the centaurette:
I'm really pretty speechless. I watched Fantasia a lot when I was younger, and The Pastoral Symphony was one of my favorite parts. I loved horses when I was younger. Where other girls played with Barbies, it was my horses that had all the dramatic storylines. And The Pastoral Symphony had pegasus AND centaurs. Plus, I was a serious girly-girl and thought the centaur ladies were gorgeous. I loved the fluffy, pastel landscape, I loved how everything was just so delicate and perfect.
Now, watching it with a far more cynical eye these days it's hard not to find fault with the clip. And it becomes even more horrific with the knowledge that originally the perfect little centaur princesses were waited on hand and foot by such a blatant and insulting caricature. I just can't wrap my head around how such a character design was worked into the marshmallow landscape and to what purpose? She seems very much at odds with the two elegant and beautiful part-African part-zebra centaur ladies that attend (of course) Dionysus later on. The entire thing is just disgusting and very, very sad.
Of course, the 60's rolled around and the racial climate started to shift considerably. The clips that featured Sunflower were pan and zoomed in to crop her out. And according to a few sources I read, Disney tried to claim that she never existed. Well, she did, and you can see her in this Youtube clip starting at 1:01 - The Pastoral Symphony
