I like Disney movies. That's not a very big admission to make, it's a taste I share with countless other people, but aside from the obvious reasons for liking Disney Princess movies, I find myself fascinated by a specific subset of Disney movies; the ones depicting cultures and folktales from outside the Anglo-white cultural milieu. Moana, Aladdin, Mulan, Encanto, Pocahontas, and so on; these films fascinate me. Not always because they're good (Encanto is a masterpiece that made me ugly cry, but Pocahontas is a fetishizing pile of apologia, and Aladdin is full of Orientalist caricatures), but because they're all, to some extent, filtered through the white gaze, and created for a primarily white audience.
So I end up asking myself, why am I engaging with these works in particular? It wouldn't take *that* much effort on my part to find, say, one of the Chinese productions of Mulan with English subtitles, or a non-Orientalist translation of 1001 Nights, or a Colombian magical realist film. Why Disney?
And, why do I *want* a Disney Princess movie about Esther?
The cheap answer is that I'm white, and Disney is mainstream. They have a huge amount of money to pour into marketing directed at people like me, and like it or not, works with high production values marketed towards a white audience sell. Disney's highest-grossing animated films, the two Frozen movies and Zootopia, are stories about white people - literally, in Frozen's case, and allegorically in Zootopia's. So, the cheap answer goes, the best shot at representing a given culture or piece of folklore in the mainstream is to send it through Disney's high-budget machine and market it to a white, English-speaking audience, and I watch these movies because they're marketed towards me.
But I'm not satisfied with that. It doesn't feel great to think that stories have to pander to the white gaze to become mainstream. And don't get me wrong, I like these movies! But why should these stories have to be palatable to people like me to be mainstream? Why should they have to be filtered through Disney? And why do I want that for *my* culture?
When it comes to Yidden, there's no shortage of us in Hollywood, to the point that "Hollywood elites" is among the many dogwhistles used by antisemites to refer to us. Hell, Bob Iger, the *CEO* of the Walt Disney Company, is Jewish. When it comes to behind-the-scenes, we're not exactly underrepresented. But we don't see Jewish stories coming out of Disney, and I don't know how I feel about it. There's a part of me that feels slighted at our lack of representation in the fiction, and I think that's the part that yearns for Queen Esther to become a Disney Princess. But on the other hand, do I actually *want* to see Megillat Esther filtered through the Disney machine for a white goyish audience?
I guess it's better than Disney churning out film after film with nothing but mayonnaise, but it still just kinda sucks that these films had to be made by Disney and filtered through the white gaze to go mainstream. Robin Williams as the Genie is great, but how much better could Aladdin have been if the same budget had been used by an Arabic animation studio? What kind of film could Pocahontas have been if it was written for a Powhatan audience, rather than for a white one?
What kind of film could Megillat Esther become, if it was made by and for Jews?
I think I'm gonna go watch Mulan 2009.