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Michelle Anya Anjirbag, "Appropriated Tales: Race and the Disney Fairy-Tale Mode" (Wayne State UP, 2025)
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Michelle Anya Anragab
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
Welcome to New Books in Film, a podcast series on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Pete Kunze. My guest today is Michelle Anya Angrabag, fairy tale scholar and the author of Appropriated Race in the Disney Fairy Tale Mode. The book was published by Wayne State University Press in 2025. Good afternoon, Michelle. Welcome. How are you doing today?
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Good afternoon, Pete. Well, good morning for me at least. Or actually I don't know what time it is, but yeah, I'm all right. It's been a lot of fun getting the book out this year and now sort of seeing it enter the world and very happy to come talk about it for sure.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
I'm fortunate to have you here and I'm glad we have a chance to dig into some of the major contributions being made by this study.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Thank you.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
Before we dive in, I was hoping you could give folks a sense of your background and your training.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Yeah, of course I've had a little bit of a weird route into fairy tale scholarship and children's literature scholarship. I actually started kind of in a pre med place when I started studies and the university I did my undergraduate at had very, very strong and robust general Ed requirements. So I found myself in anthropology classes, which made me realize how much I loved the idea of learning about how stories transmitted. It was always Something I loved from an entertainment perspective. Fairy tale adaptations, fantasy that drew on fairy tales. And suddenly I had the door open to realizing that actually I could do this in a more structured way, in a way that was about building knowledge and not just enjoying the stories. And. And yeah, I changed majors. I went and did an English major with an anthropology minor and an Indigenous Studies and Native American Studies minor. And then from there I kind of diverted into publishing for a bit, which gave me a different view on the idea of how do we make media. Then went and did a master's that was in again, another slightly off center field for my interest. I did something that was looking at Enlightenment, Romantic and Victorian literature in Scotland, which again was very, very broad in what it taught us. So it was not just literary studies, but poli sci, sociology, economics, and kind of the foundation of what we think of as our normal humanities curriculum today. In a lot of ways. Yeah. And that all just sort of then led me to going to journalism for a little bit and then back to a PhD at Cambridge where I ended up in the Children's Literature center over here. And I guess that's, that's where the story ends or begins, depending on how you look at it. It's so just a lot of different ways of thinking about how do we tell stories, what kind of information do we think is important, who gets to speak in different environments, who gets to be heard, who shapes media. And I've been really fortunate to have a lot of varied experiences in that which have all fed into what I've brought into my academic research. So, yeah, a little bit, a little different, a little bit nonlinear, but I've been very happy to have the experience.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
Great. And so why Disney? Why did you focus this study on this body of work from this company? How does it kind of coalesce these kind of varying interests and investments you've had over your career?
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Yeah, so it wasn't something that I walked into my doctorate knowing that I was going to do. I thought I was going to be looking at kind of pop culture more broadly. Um, but as I was focusing as, as you, I'm sure, remember from your own doctorate, a lot of that research is about how do you focus and narrow and draw the boundaries around what you're trying to ask so you can get more clear lines. I realized that Disney produced so much as of 2019, its market share was absolutely massive. It extends into so many different places that aren't just media. You know, they're real estate holdings, their, you know, the vacations, the Educational holdings. Just so much is produced under a single corporate umbrella. And in a way that's very, very different, I think, than, you know, PBS's children's works or even like the BBC, CBB's products or, you know, Henson Workshop and Sesame Workshop. Disney's imprint and footprint are both so big and so vast and also very, very sneaky. It has so many different names that it can trade under. A lot of people realize when they're watching or interacting with Disney media or Disney owned properties and at the same time as they keep pushing out versions of fairy tales. I was noticing that when I was interacting with children in different educational settings or just talking to people like, the idea of what makes and shapes a fairy tale has definitely shifted. The expectations we have for this kind of story have shifted. And a lot of that has to do with Disney being a first touchstone for so many people when it comes to thinking about what is a fairy tale. And it's one of those things where sometimes things are so big you think you don't have to look at them because everyone just implicitly knows what they are. But my view on that was actually we have to look at the thing that has become normative. We have to look at the thing that has become so big that we assume everybody understands it because it is reshaping our media spaces and it's reshaping our story spaces. And for me, that was a very important thing to redirect attention to.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
Yeah, I mean, can you give us a sense of where studying Disney falls in fairy tale studies? Like, how have scholars of fairy tales understood, conceptualized, responded to this kind of massive global influence that Disney has made on this area of cultural production.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Yeah, I mean, I think that's, it's one of those things where it's going to very much depend on who you speak to. There are some people who are absolutely certain that this is the worst thing to have happen to fairy tales and children's media point blank forever. And in certain ways, in certain cross sections of analysis, they're not wrong. The flattening, the homogenization, the removal of danger, in some ways that has changed the appearance of what the texture actually is. And there are things that need to be openly discussed when it comes to thinking about what kind of media children receive and not whether it's good or bad. I don't like a good or bad binary for analysis. But you know, if we move it towards, let's talk about what these stories are doing and how they're opening up conceptions of how Life works for children. I think that's personally a little bit more useful. There are other scholars that have very much looked at it from kind of.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
The.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Metafictional or narratological standpoint. So looking at the films in a structural way, how are the films playing with fairy tale tropes and patterns and then communicating something about how and where fairy tale is situated within a society? Who is it for? Who is represented within it? Who gets a happily ever after? I think I resonate most with the people who tend to think about Disney as part of a wider network of fairy tales. And I think all of us wish that they weren't necessarily the most visible network of fairy tales. But perhaps, and this was my experience in the 90s, I was interested in the films, but it opened doors to literacy and textuality and other stories. And I think, for me, I would like to see more of a consideration about how they can be a starting point, not an ending point. You know, you have a child who gets obsessed with Cinderella for whatever reason, the Disney version, and then can be taken in a direction and point to other versions that they may not be exposed to, but without any kind of moral judgment about which version they're interacting with. So, to be honest, I think in terms of where does Disney sit within fairy tale studies at this point in 2025, you probably have as many answers as there are scholars. But I also think that's a good thing. I think that's not something that we had necessarily 30 years ago in terms of how people looked at the corporation, where it was a little bit more, shall we say, antagonistic, where it was the Big Bad in the cultural sphere. Now I think there is a bit of a shift to recognize that it exists in. Therefore, we must talk about what it is and what it does and how it is received. I don't know if that made sense.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
No, actually, that sets up my next question, which is kind of thinking about this from kind of a critical study of Disney perspective. Right. And there had always been that kind of Frankfurt School, critical pedagogy approach to Disney. Right. I mean, we can look at Richard Schickel, Ariel Dorfman, Oman Mudalart, more recently Jack Zipes and Grace Pollock and Henry Gero. But I think in the last decade or so, we've really seen an explosive research on Disney identity and ideology. And I'm wondering how you see your book kind of fitting into and extending that conversation.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Well, I think what I would start with is what I would hope that my book manages to do is that it starts to get away from the question of, is Disney good or bad? Had? And much more. Starts to address the question of, in this particular vector of representation, of narrative creation and construction, what does the corporation do? Because I think that sometimes that is a step that has been skipped or glossed over in the scholarship. I think that I try to focus more on actually outlining how narrative is shaped, how certain kinds of representation are shaped, how these things interact with different cultural moments, how they are situated in historical contexts, and then from that analysis, move forward into what can be made better, what can be done better, what needs to be looked at a second or third time and reassessed and reevaluated. That's what I'm really hoping that this book starts to do. I do not consider this an end point in this field or in this area. I really hope that this is a beginning. I hope this inspires people to look at other vectors of representation. I think we can ask deeper questions about gender, which I did not have space to do. We can ask deeper questions about ability and disability. We could ask deeper questions about national configurations, which I point to here. And I do have work coming out that I think we'll get into those questions a little bit more. But also there should be as many perspectives on this, I think, as there are scholars. So really what I'm hoping this is is an invitation to reconsider what we think we know about an almost ubiquitous media space and start pushing further.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
Excellent. So another aspect of this study is its kind of exploration of adaptation. Right. And its contribution to adaptation studies. So why is adaptation a useful way to examine not just fairy tales, but the cultural politics of Disney? And how in particular, are you thinking about the distinction between adaptation and appropriation?
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Oh, yeah. So a couple of. Couple of different ways. I think I can take that right now. And I'm excited that you asked this, because the more I've thought about this work and the more I've continued onwards and what I'm doing after I finish the manuscript, I think for me, adaptation has become sort of my favorite toolkit, not just for Disney, but for old media, because it calls us to look at media relationally. And by looking at things relationally and getting away from sort of teleological progressions of story or looking specifically for origin and thinking that there's a straight line to be drawn from one originating story forward into the future, I think that idea of relation actually lets us break up, even sideways, different concepts of hegemonic culture that we've really, especially in. I Think Western media spaces, Western education spaces that we are indoctrinated into. And I mean indoctrinated into in the sense that all culture brings its members into a certain pattern of thinking. It is up to those members to challenge what they are told to think or what they are taught to think. Not told to think necessarily, necessarily, but by looking at Disney as a link in a chain rather than a necessary endpoint or an incorrect endpoint, which I think was one of the perspectives from a lot of people that if you look at something like a German iteration of Snow White, like the Grimm's Snow White, and then you look at how it's changed in the 1937 film, suddenly have this very almost defanged story. But if we instead look at, you know, what does the Grimm story do in its time and its context? And let's also then look at what does the Disney version do in its time and in its context? And what kind of conversation can we draw through a cross period approach that considers both of these as adaptations in terms of being not just they've gone through the process of adaptation, but they are product. Each is in itself an adapted product of something that somebody else had heard. How can we think about how story functions? So for me, I guess, and sorry if this is becoming incredibly abstract as a way of thinking of this, but for me, that idea of adaptation is really about how do we start to think of these things as parts of chains, as parts of networks, as things that are existing in relation to each other rather than in a genealogy. And by doing that, that actually lets me get into the idea of appropriation even more. Because as Julie Sanders writes about, adaptation and appropriation are both methods. But, you know, also we can land on the fact that appropriation has two different kinds of definitions. One of them has to do with the idea of loosely taking symbols as part of the process of adaptation, not making a one for one recreation, but rather a more loose recreation, aligning perhaps with Bluestone's idea of the paraphrase. Adaptation is a paraphrase. But you also do have the idea of cultural appropriation that happens simultaneously. And when we hit, especially like 1989 onwards, I think we see these dual forms of appropriation happening at the same time in Disney products. They are loosely borrowing story material, but they are also very much loosely borrowing and dressing up in different cultures and holding those things together and putting them in context and putting them in relation to each other and thinking about what is made and what is made in the sense of enemy. Ksaha's concept of how we make race. In particular, how is race made? How is identity made when you have almost a process of cultural ventriloquism? And I believe that's Marjorie Garber's phrase, the idea of kind of putting on a culture and projecting it rather than having it come from a more authentic place. So sorry, I've rambled a little bit there, but the, the adaptation toolkit really lets me then open up into really considering appropriation on multiple levels, which I think leads to a very interesting conversation in this media space at Capella University.
- [18:19]
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
Excellent. So I have two tough follow ups for you, and one is. Here's the first one. You know, authenticity. What does that look like for you? What does that mean for you in assessing this? Not. Not personally, no.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
No, that's fine. You know, it's one of those things that's always been grappled with because as I write in the book, I am a third culture kid. I very much had to kind of figure out where to fit in between different cultures and being brought up in a culture that was neither of my parents cultures. So how I think the way I handle authenticity in this book and in my work is also very much in relation to how I do handle it on a personal level. But from the analytical side of it, I think that the concept of nothing about us without us is a very, very important starting point. I think that, you know, if something is authentic, not because you as a third party are viewing it and goes, oh, that seems like my idea of a culture. Authenticity is realized when people who belong to the culture that is represented can confidently say that they see themselves represented in the work. So when evaluating authenticity in this book, I was going to communities. I was looking at community responses in public forums. I was looking at the criticisms of the company and of films. Because it is so easy for people who don't have a relationship to a culture to think that they are on a cerebral level doing everything right. They're capturing the essence of something, of a culture, of a place. But if you don't actually belong, you don't know what you miss. And the way that I think about this also, and if anyone's come to public lectures, they might have heard me say this before. But if we think about going to a World Foods section in a grocery versus a grocery that is like, for a certain cultural food way, you're going to get two very different versions of the thing. Like, if I go into my average UK grocery store, one of the big chains, and I am looking for, you know, kits for making a certain, like a particular Indian curry, what I'm going to find there, it's going to be close, it's going to be a version of it, but it's going to be very, very different than if I go to the Indian shop down the road and I get one of the curry kits that's produced by an Indian food company. And I think the same thing is very true of story for somebody who doesn't know the thing from the mass market. It's an approximate. It works, it tastes good, fantastic. But for someone who's grown up with it, you know, when it doesn't taste right, and it sounds like a very simple analogy, but it's also the best concept I have for the idea of how do you functionally know if something is authentic or something is appropriated? Are the people who are meant to be eating that food happily eating it? Yeah.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
So let me ask you another provocative question then. And this just comes from a place of thinking through what you're raising with us. Has Disney ever gotten it right or has Disney ever gotten it more right? And to what extent does the global capitalist, mechanical factory nature of Disney kind of foreclose that or even open it up? I mean, I'm curious how you're thinking about this, because on the one hand, I think what's important about your study is you're not approaching this in a trans historical sense where you're like, it's always been bad. You know, it's bad in 1937, it's bad in 2018. Like, you're very much cutting out a moment for us in Disney history and thinking through that moment. So I'm just wondering if you see moments of promise or moments of better practice. And yeah, it is so hard.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
I honestly think one of the best things they did remains the Whitney Houston and Brandi Cinderella.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
Mm. Yeah, it's an interesting moment for them.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Yeah, it's a super fascinating moment. It is unapologetic. It does not explain, it does not couch the idea that otherness has to also come from something culturally other. It does not step out of its way to explain why their Cinderella is black. It doesn't explain a black fairy godmother. And it's such a blip in 1997. It's such a rare moment. But as we've seen with the specials and with the Shondaland interviews and going back to that moment in pop culture, it wasn't unconscious. Everything was incredibly detailed. Everything was thought through. The color saturation, the way the world was crafted, the deliberate saturation of golds and that, like, bringing that fairy tale story land to life. Everything was completely 100% deliberate. And you get this beautiful thing where I think many, many, many young girls and maybe people more broadly, but, you know, like fans anecdotally have talked about, you know, that's the moment where they have a doorway in that, you know, you don't have to be the 1950s Cinderella. You don't have to be Aurora with the long blonde hair. And then even for the things that come out in the 90s before this, you know, you don't have to figure out, are you the same ethnicity of Jasmine to relate to this character? You know, you don't have to figure out, like, are you like, Point Pocahontas? Like, is it allowed? Because hyperspecificity also becomes a way of locking people out of affinity, especially when the people who are doing the creation don't understand what that hyperspecificity does when there's only one. So I still very much go back to one of the best things that they managed to do from 1989 onwards is the Whitney Houston Cinderella, hands down. Yeah. Things that I don't touch on in the book. Like, you also have the animated series for different films. There is a Little Mermaid animated series that had incredible multiracial casting and multiracial representation and also disability representation and also very interesting storylines about belonging. So there. There are pockets where they can do things very, very well. I just. I think that every. I think anything with a giant corporation, you're going to have some things that are done better, and then in the process of making some things better, some other things are going to get overlooked, because it's all gonna boil down, do you have the knowledge in the room to avoid the pitfalls? So I'm not sure I have a good answer. I think there are a lot of opportunities in Turning Red that work incredible. Which Pixar, not Disney Fairy Tale. I think in terms of breaking gender stereotypes, you have amazing moments in Brave, but there are other things that we can criticize that in that film as well. So I have no good Straightforward answer. Just works in progress in all directions.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
Yeah, I think the Cinderella in the 90s is fascinating. Right. Because not only is it a. It's a television special. Right. It's not a feature release. And then I've got a foot in theater and performance studies and there's a great speech by August Wilson where he basically argues like putting black bodies into white stories is not progress. Right. It's perpetuating the narrative of, of a white supremacy. So I think that there's these Disney for me at least. And this I think comes through in your book as well. It's an entry point for a lot of these debates. Right. And I think that people who are interested in that, both intellectually and pedagogically, will have a lot to take away from your book as a result.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
I hope so.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
So you're tackling big questions. I think we've made that clear in our conversation so far. And also I should note because I hope many of our listeners are early career researchers. This is a revised dissertation. So a two part question would be, can you tell us, once you decide you're going to tackle this question of race, fairytale, Disney adaptation, appropriation, how did you think about kind of corralling that? Yeah, let's start there and then I'll come to part two.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Yeah, yeah. So I think I would want to point out that there was a completely different process for the dissertation than there was for turning it into a book. And thinking about shape and boundaries and things like that in the dissertation was completely different from the book. And even though they're both around the same length, you know, 80,000 or so words, for me, the doctoral research came from a place of having to answer questions that I'd never been able to articulate to myself. So my doctoral work was very autoethnographic. It was very much exploring how my own perceptions of myself in a lot of ways were also running up against this kind of thing, thing that was being projected at me as kind of idealized Americana culture, you know, because that's what Disney was in the 90s. It was this kind of idealized world that stood in for American culture, especially if you weren't necessarily born into that generationally, it was considered safer than a lot of the other children's networks that were out there at the time. Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon were not things that were encouraged in my house. When, when I grew up, it was like, you know, Disney was allowed and otherwise it was like we watching like Jeopardy. And Wheel of Fortune in the evenings and cptv. Those Those were the safer, more sanctioned programs we had access to. But it was also this. This process of going, you know, when. When you're talking and playing as children, where do I fit? I was a massive bookworm. I. I very much resonated with Bella as a character, as a child. But if, you know, you're playing Disney princesses in school because I looked the way I did, it was, oh, you're Pocahontas or you're Jasmine, and sort of navigating that. And those are little things that, you know, I'm not going to sit there and pretend that it had such a massive impact on my life that I definitely went and did a doctorate in Disney. That's definitely not what happened. But it was something that, when I started looking at the media as an adult with a scholar's set of critical tools, that I was going, oh, I actually need to kind of tease out what were my child perceptions of this? How did this not fully shape, but definitely influence how I was mediating my version of the world? And how did that also reflect back onto how I was mediating my image of myself and where I belonged? So that was a big, deep, personal question that I didn't even realize I was grappling with until I think I was two thirds of the way through what I thought was the dissertation. And once I fixated on actually this is this unanswered part, I had to go back and rewrite a large amount of it kind of in the third year. When it came to drawing the boundaries around what I was going to be looking at, I sort of realized early on that the entirety of Disney was not going to be a manageable corpus. As you well know, that is easily 400 films across a bunch of different networks and media going back from 1937, especially when you hit that live action heavy period where you've got like, Zorro and the. I think there's a Knights of the Round Table series and the Davy Crockett series and all these things that were also Disney productions happening in the 60s and 70s. So I kind of started with the idea of Disney classics, like, what were the things that were most heavily marketed as Disney? And then I really realized that I just wanted to be looking at what I define as the fairy tale and the folklore esque. When I realized again that my gateway into reading, my gateway into media and entertainment, had always been fantasy and fairytale. So it was a personal choice, really, to look at that in that narrow way and cut out anything that didn't fit that. But it Also meant that I could very much grapple with what I have been learning about as a fairy tale scholar, about theories of narrative transmission, about textuality, about moving from the oral to the literary, and kind of extend that into, so what happens when we're moving from the literary that's been consigned to the nursery and then turned into this other thing in this other format? So, yeah, some of the boundaries happened because they had to happen. I could not grapple with the entirety of the corporation in 80,000 words. And some of the boundaries really came about because I strongly believe that research is personal, that we, as much as we get told about the empirical methods and kind of creating separation and distance, as researchers, we do bring ourselves to what we do. So I leaned into that. I really brought myself into that sphere and pulled out the questions that I'd been holding onto for a long time. So, yeah, that's how the lines were drawn for the thesis, at least.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
And then. So the second question then is, you've written this, right? And you did your doctoral work in the uk, so you write the thesis, not the dissertation. Very Americanist of me. I use both.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
I still don't know which is correct.
- [33:41]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
So your, your, your doctoral achievement project, how did that become a book? Can you talk about that process of, of how you kind of went back to that project and.
- [33:52]
Michelle Anya Anragab
Yeah.
- [33:53]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
And kind of fashioned your monograph out of it?
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Michelle Anya Anragab
I mean, I, I knew I always wanted this to be a book because while I was doing it, I was running into so many places where I was going. I wish there was a book that addressed this. Instead of feeling like I had to kind of push forward and cobble together different things. I was upset that no one had done the cobbling together of the theories yet. And I had to do that work myself, which is ironically the job of the doctorate. But, you know, when you're in the middle of it, it feels very unfair. So I was very, very lucky in my examiners. My internal examiner was Dr. Zoe Jakes at Cambridge. My external was Dr. Christina Bacchilega. And I had genuinely, one of the most incredible conversations of my life in the process of my viva. And while we were discussing my work, all of us were talking about what happens next for this research and how does that get shaped. So it was never really a question of if it would become a book. It was more of a, how will this happen? How am I going to pull this off? I was very lucky as well to meet Ann Duggan at a conference. And I knew she worked on the. She was you know, the series editor for the Wayne State fairy tale series, the Danahasa series in fairy tale studies. And to be honest, I wasn't sure if she would have an interest in a Disney book. But I also knew that she has a reputation of being an incredibly generous scholar and got the chance to talk to her. And she was excited about the topic as well and suggested refine it, get the proposal together and send it through and apply. And that was really the pathway to that becoming a book was I had support, I had encouragement from scholars who I can only dream of one day reaching their levels of achievement. And I had a lot of help learning how to write a book proposal, learning how to understand the difference between a book and a dissertation or a thesis because they are different genres. And I think we don't talk about that enough with early career scholars. But one of the lessons that I learned while doing this, not just with Anne, but working with the press, was that the the book very much needs a clear through line. The book needs to be organized in a way that somebody can pull a chapter out of it on its own and have it still be intelligible, as well as gain something from having the entirety of the thing. And I really needed to think about when turning it into the book. I need to think about about how was each chapter going to add something on its own to the field of scholarship, so simultaneously thinking of the whole but thinking about the chapters as if they were almost separate articles that could do their own work. So yeah, I feel funny taking credit for this reaching its book stage because I know it's from the generosity of scholars who believed in the project and my ability to pull it off as much as anything that I actually did by writing the manuscript. If that makes sense.
- [37:33]
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- [38:32]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
My name is Percy Jackson. Getting in trouble is like breathing for me.
- [38:36]
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- [38:45]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
Three of you must quest to the Sea of Monsters. Let's go do the impossible. I'm not gonna let some stupid monsters stand in my way.
- [38:56]
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Percy Jackson and the Olympians. New season now on Disney and Hulu. Learn more@disneyplus.com whatson yeah, no, I mean.
- [39:03]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
I think that it speaks well to the practicalities of putting a project together, but, you know, there's often that kind of performance of knowledge and having read things in the dissertation or thesis that then becomes kind of the here I am world in the book. So a lot of your attention here is on the Disney Renaissance. This period generally understood to be kind of late 80s Little Mermaid area to probably Tarzan.
- [39:38]
Michelle Anya Anragab
Yeah.
- [39:39]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
And during this time, it's a particularly rich time for you to kind of do this kind of work because so much attention is being placed on the global market for Disney at this time. And also, for better or worse, I'll let readers guess where you stand, you know, trying to hail audiences of color, domestically Speaking for the U.S. domestically and abroad, in ways that they had not in the past. How is this shaping the storytelling during this time?
- [40:15]
Michelle Anya Anragab
I mean, I think one of the very obvious way that it shapes it is they start looking outside of Eurocentric narratives for the materials that they're going to be using to transform into movies. So we do get Aladdin and we get Mulan. In this time, we get. Technically, we get the Lion King. But the lack of people actually present in that movie does not make me feel generous about saying that they actually took a good step forward into representing stories from the entire continent of Africa. But in their minds, they did try to do that. And I think there's a very complex discussion to talk about the further adaptation of the Lion King to the stage musical that might mitigate some of the missteps in terms of considering the Lion King itself, you know, African representation, which they tried to skirt for sure. I think that that was kind of the moment. And I don't think it's just a Disney thing. I think it reflects a lot of attitudes from the US in that time period. You know, not only what I remember of it as a child. But you know, how we've historicized it, and looking back on news and headlines and the way that things were talked about in the 90s, if you were American, the world was yours. That sense of American exceptionalism is incredibly strong. And I think that is very much reflected in both the corporation's commercial endeavors, the creation of Euro Disney forays into China to start cementing the parks. But it's also in the narratives. We have the authority somehow to tell stories from anywhere. We're not bound to British children's classics, we're not bound to the children's canon. We can do anything. And for better or worse, they ran with it. And I think that that period in time, and as I write in the book, I don't necessarily agree with the wholehearted periodization approach, but it's useful for thinking about this and breaking it up. I think the 1990s really, really sets the stage for what then continues to happen in the future. How diversity and representation is handled, how the idea of where the company goes forward in terms of what kinds of stories it tells, how they solidify brand identity in different ways. We have the split split between Disney and Pixar until we don't, until they merge, until we kind of move back towards the idea of a very uniform animation aesthetic that's not hand drawn anymore, it's computer driven. There's just so much that's seeded in this time, but I don't think it's just reflective of the Disney Corporation. I think it is reflective of us attitudes towards the world and its place in it. And it's just magnified in the media space in a massive way.
- [43:31]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
So I was hoping we could take like one case study and just think through it together. And I'm kind of volleying in my mind between Aladdin, the Lion King or Pocahontas. So I want to do a Dealer's choice moment and say, which one do you think would be kind of a nice case study for us to sink our teeth into for a few minutes and talk about, to kind of give readers a sense of how you're thinking about these films?
- [43:57]
Michelle Anya Anragab
I would say let's skip Pocahontas, because you and I were both on a different podcast talking about that recently. So that's in the world. And also it's one I deliberately don't really touch upon in the book specifically because it's not fairy tale, it's misappropriated history.
- [44:12]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
Right, right.
- [44:13]
Michelle Anya Anragab
And so let's not do Pocahontas, but I'll let you pick from the other two.
- [44:18]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
You know, as a boy of the 90s, I am partial to Aladdin. Okay, so let's talk about the. And I think Aladdin is also important, as you well know. But readers may not know Aladdin was really the first of the modern Disney films to inspire a very public blowback by the community being represented. And so I think it's a great one for us to talk about in that case.
- [44:50]
Michelle Anya Anragab
I agree. And there's so much, too, with the fact that it is that movie musical format as well. It is also playing into a lot of different tropes about heroes and villains and how they're represented and colorism in that. Where should we start before I. Before I ramble on?
- [45:07]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
Well, I mean, for those who may have forgotten, you know, where does Aladdin come from and what does Disney do with it?
- [45:17]
Michelle Anya Anragab
Well, so Aladdin is one of the stories told and collected in the Thousand and One Nights, which is first kind of recorded in its form in France in the 1800s by Antoine Galland, except it is not a story from the Middle East. It is generally accepted that this is a Chinese story that is then dressed up in the trappings of the Middle East. And to be honest, if you want to delve into that story and that background, Marina Warner has an incredible book. I believe it's called Stranger Magics. I unfortunately don't have it in front of me to double check that title. But, you know, she does this incredible, incredible deep dive into the Thousand and One Nights and its place in Western culture and how it gets there and how it gets marked as different rhetorically. And then.
- [46:14]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
You'Re right, it's called Stranger Magic, by the way.
- [46:15]
Michelle Anya Anragab
Stranger Magic.
- [46:16]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
Thank you.
- [46:17]
Michelle Anya Anragab
And then there's another scholar who, of course, I'm blanking on his name. Marzolf. I'm forgetting his first name. Sorry. Bear with me. I will figure this out. I want to say Ulrich Murzov. Yes. Ulrich Maozov. Marle Zolf. He has done incredible work on Aladdin as folktale, and his work is definitely something to check out and something to follow up on if you want to see more in depth of how this story moves into Western culture and its origins. But Disney only very, very loosely takes bits of the folkloric stories that we have been come to known as, like Alibaba, sometimes Ali Baba and the King of Thieves, sometimes. Aladdin has a lot of different knaves. Sometimes there are references to a cave of wonder in the stories, but the general idea is there is this main character who is a Thief who manages to find a secret hoard and gain control of it, again, depending on which versions we're going for. And this is a very, very loose abstraction of the tale. I apologize. But Disney kind of takes this and turns it into this story about the thief with the heart of gold. Aladdin is this person who is down on his luck, who dreams of a better life. We don't actually know much about him in the first film other than he's poor, but when he steals things, he's trying to help those around him with what he steals. There's a great song sequence explaining about why no one likes him. And he meets Jasmine, the sultan's daughter, the princess sneaking out of the castle. And in order to win her heart, he changes everything about himself. So just to show Disney is equal opportunity with the change yourself for romance narrative on gender lines. But, yeah, I think what Disney does with the story is that it really adds a whole bunch of different kinds of storylines and story threads to make it feel like what we would expect from a fairy tale. You have a bit of romance, you have a magical helper in the form of the genie, and you have your happy ending. And in Aladdin, the happy ending, it's not just that your romance is resolved. It is that the genie, who's been set up in this kind of position of eternal enslavement actually is set free because a thief with the heart of gold does the right thing at the end. He gives up his chance to wish to be a prince again in order to set the genie free. And Aladdin is then rewarded with things working out in his favor. That's a terrible summary of the movie. I apologize. But, yeah, I think. Why don't you ask me another question about it before I keep rambling?
- [49:20]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
So, I mean, you know, what was the initial response in the moment from the American Arab community about this film? And how did Disney handle that? And what do you think are the legacies of that? Kind of.
- [49:40]
Michelle Anya Anragab
So one of the publications was that there were very, very questionable lyrics in the opening song that played into kind of the idea of Orientalism as an implicit barbarism. So there's a line about noses being cut off, which is 100% offensive. There's no question about it other than the question of how somebody greenlit that lyric to go forward and didn't ask questions about it. But the responses were more on the negative side because of the amount of stereotype that was leaned into. And we have to remember historical context as well. We are in the middle of military operations in the Middle east and coming off of other military operations in the Middle east in the United States when this comes out, while this is being made, the Arab is implicitly othered in the United States while this is being made. And to have that context and then one of your largest children's media producers having quite a racist and offensive line in the opening number of a song for a film that is aimed at children and families is a concerning thing if you're a member of this community, especially so the company did respond by removing that lyric. But at the same time, other problematic parts of the film do not get touched. We have to think about how is Jasmine dressed in the film. A lot of what they get away with, they skirt by saying Agrabah is not a real place. But they're also playing with ideas of cultural authenticity so they know there's a real place that they're pulling from. We know we're looking at geography and architecture that's meant to recall very specific places. Geographically, we do have a pattern of the heroic figures being more light skinned and being vocally coated with American accents, whereas your villains are darker skinned pretty routinely. And that's not only an Aladdin thing. That's something that we can see as a pattern through Disney film and other film as well. But I think there's probably a degree of surprise that there is pushback in 1992 to the film. I mean, enough that they do make a correction. I think the legacy of it is that when we get to the live action film two decades later or more, there's an overcorrection as to what does it mean to be authentic. And we run into some other problems which I do write about, both in this book and in a chapter for the Oxford Handbook Book of Disney musicals. But I think it's probably the first crack in the glass of Disney acting with impunity and creating race and making race with impunity. The idea that somebody can push back against this, what they do, that it might be received poorly, that it might not just be received poorly, but it might affect their market share. If you are trying to expand your efforts globally, you cannot alienate a region of the globe. So there's this kind of push and pull between creative and corporate and what the goals are in any different direction. I'm not sure that it has enough of an impact to actually make them seriously think about cultural consultants and having people who might be media scholars or cultural studies scholars actually in the rooms when they're crafting these films. As far as I know that has not happened yet and probably needs to, but not that I'm volunteering, but, you know, the legacy of Aladdin shows, number one, that representing the other is commercially viable. But it also does, in many ways, I think, set up a template for misappropriation, and that misappropriation can also be commercially viable. But.
- [53:58]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
So I'm wondering if we can talk then about, say, this period and these films you're working through versus our kind of current moment of the quote unquote, live action remakes. Do you see a discernible distinction? I mean, do you see more continuity than change? How is this moment useful for thinking through our contemporary media moment, particularly at Disney?
- [54:28]
Michelle Anya Anragab
Somebody said the phrase recently somewhere, difference without distinction or distinction without difference. And to be honest, the phrase works both ways. And I think that that's what we're hitting when we're getting to the live action remakes, the process of remediating what they've defined and set up as their canonical works and their classic works. It's a very interesting moment because it could have gone in a lot of different ways. You get this wonderful opener, and I know technically Pete's Dragon comes first and the Jungle Book comes in before it as well. But in terms of the fairy tale films, you get this wonderful opener with Maleficent in 2014. And the idea of it's not that we're going to give you the same exact story, we're going to take this in a new direction. We're going to do something completely different and we're going to show you a different angle on the story. And I think that that was an incredibly powerful opportunity that then is completely backed away from in Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. You know, by necessity, you'd get another version of that in Dumbo, because the last I checked, you can't actually film an elephant talking. But, you know, it's this process of safety. In my mind, they're very much returning to nostalgic repetition as a method of commercial safety, that the parents of current children will have grown up on certain media properties. And then to keep them interested, we can't just put the animation back in theaters. We have to do something that's new, something that's varying what we did before. But we also want to keep it close enough because we know what worked. And I'm not sure how smart of a corporate strategy that is going to have proven to be in the long run. But when it comes to actually thinking about the live action remakes and what that does to the idea of patterns, it Kind of reminds me of how every 10 to 15 years, if you look in, like, the children's section of bookshops, you get a new, very pretty bound book telling the exact same fairy tale text. Just maybe it has pop ups, maybe the illustration style has changed, the text isn't varying or, you know, not much. It's still a beautiful book of children's fairy tales. But we're not offering them anything new. We're offering them what parents and adults feel comfortable with. And I think that's what we've done and what we're seeing happening. And some things just don't have to be remade. I think some things you don't have to reiterate. I do wish, as both a scholar and a consumer, they were doing more work telling new stories. I wish they were, in a way, retreating in the face of certain cultural moments that we're living through. But also, it's a corporation that has very much tried to make sure it is always speaking to whoever it thinks is the status quo of its audience. That's been historically true since its inception. And I don't think we also could have expected them to behave any differently in terms of brand strategy.
- [58:02]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
So as we head into the home stretch here, I'm curious if we can talk about who do you hope will read this book and how are you hoping it might be used or taken up?
- [58:13]
Michelle Anya Anragab
Oh, well, I'm hoping I watch everyone to read it. Everybody should read this book. No, there was a point where I was joking about trying to market it as a sleep aid because I have photographic proof of my husband falling asleep reading the umpteenth draft of it, which is not fair to him. But we all need help sleeping. This is one thing that might also help people. But in all seriousness, I'm hoping that anyone, scholar or not, student or not, with an interest in what does it mean to create a world out of story, picks this up and finds something in it. Because for me, that's what the book is. It's an exploration of. Of who belongs in imaginary spaces. And I think that's a question currently being asked by educators. I think it's being asked in scholarly circles, I think it's being asked in librarian circles, and I think it's being asked now by people more generally. As we're looking at pushes towards censorship, as we're looking at more and more book bans, as we're looking at how the media spaces we live in are kind of flattening out, I'm hoping that this is a book that starts to help people navigate this. And it's not that I have answers, but I'm hoping that I wrote a book that lets people have the language to articulate better questions. And so in many ways, I'm hoping that this ends up in the hands of policymakers and studio executives and anybody who has any hand in putting media into people's metaphorical hands or their streaming devices or anything else.
- [60:05]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
Excellent. And finally, what are you working on now? Are you continuing down this road or have you found yourself pursuing new avenues?
- [60:15]
Michelle Anya Anragab
Few different things. So I talked a little bit about how turning this book or the dissertation into this book was a process of refocusing. So I actually ended up splitting my doctoral thesis in two thematically. So where this book looks at the instances where Disney tries to reproduce something different to its norm, the second book is very much a process of defining what are the norms and thinking about norms and how we shape ideas of children's canon. And classic can be kind of seen on a very real level by again, using Disney as a corpus so that one will not just look at the fairy tale films, but more broadly the feature films. And basically anything that's been given like a Disney classic designation by the corporation or has been pulled from what we consider the English literary canon for children. So that I'm excited about. I'm in the middle of it it. So fingers crossed. We will be more towards not the middle of it soon. But that's really the big thing that's been on my plate. I also am starting to think more broadly about kind of adaptation in classics and the idea of the afterlives of the children's canon. We've seen also in the last 10, 15 years, a lot of media that plays with things, and particularly British children's classics like Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland, but specifically interpolating those stories for adult audiences or for adult consumers. So that's kind of another thing that I'm starting to formulate things around. And I mean, I always have a massive list of things that I want to do if I can only get an extra 24 hours in each day somehow. But those are the big ones.
- [62:14]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
Well, excellent. That sounds wonderful. And I hope when those projects come out, you will come back, you'll invite me. I'd be happy to have you back. Great. So thank you so much for your time today, Michelle. It's really been a pleasure to talk with you.
- [62:29]
Michelle Anya Anragab
Thank you for having me. And bearing with the rambling answers sometimes.
- [62:34]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
No, I mean, when we do these kind of projects. Our ideas are often and multiple and conflicting and exciting and I think we had a really nice conversation and hopefully readers will go out, get the book and think with you through these things.
- [62:51]
Michelle Anya Anragab
Yeah, absolutely.
- [62:53]
Interviewer Pete Kunze
The book is Appropriated Race in the Disney Fairy Tale mode, available now from Wayne State University Press and other online booksellers. This is Pete Kunze and this has been new books and film on the New Books Network work. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.
- [63:23]
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Michelle Anya Anragab
Com.
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Interviewer Pete Kunze
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