8424: Disney Discrimination…?

From The Chicago Tribune…

Animated Hotties

Just what are your kids learning when you use “Cinderella” or “The Little Mermaid” as a baby sitter?

Besides, that is, driving you up the wall with repetitious, high-pitched renditions of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” or “Under the Sea”?

A study from Appalachian State University in North Carolina says you’re teaching them to distrust pretty much anyone who couldn’t appear on the cover of Vogue or GQ. The researchers reaffirmed what most parents know: Disney movies depict physically attractive animated characters as good, and ugly characters as bad — as in, the puppy-stealing Cruella De Vil (“If she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will”).

But professor Doris Bazzini, chief author of the study, says nobody ever had taken a thorough look at just how much more virtuous the better-looking Disney characters are than are the homely ones. The physical attractiveness of characters “predicted how positively they were portrayed,” the researchers found. If this theme sounds familiar, think back to the mid-1990s and a kerfuffle over Pocahontas, in real life a 17th-century Algonquin, but in Disney’s rendition an ethnically indistinguishable hottie.

Nobody wants his or her kids assuming someone with warts has a toady personality. Bazzini cautions, though, that the stereotypes in Disney movies reinforce what researchers have found to be a proclivity among people of all age groups for trusting good-looking people: Earlier studies found that watching movies with comely good guys can influence adults to say they would prefer to befriend people who are attractive over those who aren’t.

Bazzini determined that kids ages 6 to 12 actually are less susceptible to such bias in Disney movies than adults are to the same bias in movies for grown-ups: Kids who watched “Cinderella” weren’t any more likely to choose a good-looking friend than those who watched “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Maybe instead of blaming Disney’s influence on our children, we parents ought to admit that our own prejudices don’t fall far from the tree.

Bazzini and her co-authors note, though, that kids are still impressionable — and this bias can increase with more and more movie- and TV-watching.

What’s a parent to do when it’s time for the kids to sit still while dinner’s cooking?

There are always audiobooks — or better yet, real books. If you still need help, maybe it’s best to avoid Cinderella and other humanoid cartoon characters and instead enlist Mickey, Bugs and Shrek.