How Woke Disney Undermines Modern Mythology
Disney has an important responsibility as a repository for modern mythology, but its woke agenda is undermining that role. This is why the backlash against the House of Mouse has been so severe.
“Laughter is America’s most important export,” Walt Disney once said. As the company that he founded enters its second century of existence, however, controversy — not laughter — seems to be its most recognizable export.
Disney’s traditional image of magical, family-friendly entertainment is becoming increasingly overshadowed by recriminations over politically charged decision-making and is now being tainted by the culture wars that at one time the company seemed to transcend.
The implications of this on culture and politics — and perhaps Western civilization itself — is significant. While Disney, of course, does not enjoy a monopoly on Western culture, for generations it has assumed something of a privileged place as a storyteller and a repository of modern mythology. As such, developments at the House of Mouse have a profound and enduring ripple effect on civilization as a whole.
As most observers would agree, recent developments have not been good, with woke politics and negative reactions to those politics coming to define the brand.
The celebration of wholesome goodness that has long defined Disney has given way to a growing backlash over the company’s decisions to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” in its films and to hire actors and writers who seemingly have axes to grind and agendas to push.
Even Disney’s Chief Executive Officer, Bob Iger, has been compelled to address the issue and concede that the entertainment produced by the company has prioritized politics over storytelling. “Creators lost sight of what their No. 1 objective needed to be,” Iger said late last year. “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.”
Despite pushing for a return to quality storytelling, Iger’s company continues to face a popular revolt from fans, causing financial trouble for the company and forcing it to make difficult decisions about the way forward.
The Acolyte
In recent days, news has broken that the Star Wars “Acolyte” series is being cancelled after just one season, following a barrage of criticism that the Disney-owned Lucasfilm franchise — under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy — is prioritizing identity politics, feminism, and the LGBTQIA+ agenda over storytelling, character development, and quality acting.
Fans have reacted harshly, in particular, to the creator, Leslye Headland, and lead actor, Amandla Stenberg, joking in an interview about the series being the “gayest” Star Wars installment yet, and suggesting that the beloved robot characters C3-PO and R2-D2 were closeted homosexuals. Headland is a lesbian and Stenberg identifies as nonbinary, leading some to speculate that they were projecting their values and sexualizing characters that have traditionally been seen as androgynous droids.
“The Acolyte” series has clearly taken the issue of LGBTQIA+ representation seriously, with one episode depicting a scene in which a nonbinary Jedi knight is referred to by the pronoun “they.” While some fans have praised the attempts to promote queer representation, others have bemoaned the references as heavy-handed, unnecessary political messaging that undermines the storytelling.
Critics have also objected to Stenberg’s racially charged comments that have given the impression of an anti-white bias, with a 2018 interview resurfacing in which Stenberg said that the goal of her movie “The Hate U Give” was “white people crying.” The quote, which she later clarified to mean that she hoped for the film to promote empathy from white people for the challenges faced by black people, has been shared widely by social media users, who in some cases gave the false impression that her expressed hope for “white people crying” was related to the Star Wars series rather than the 2018 movie.
In response to the criticisms, rather than apologizing or acknowledging her poor choice of words, Stenberg released a “diss track” on Instagram, rapping that “the desperation of the oppressors is rising,” and promising to “speak truth to power, keep an eye out for you silly racists.” She also claimed that she’s “sick and fucking tired of repressing my rage,” declaring she won’t suppress her feelings to avoid being “sent to an early grave.”
The Instagram video, naturally, elicited even more anger. Some critics pointed out that Stenberg is racially mixed, with a white father and black mother, and therefore her animosity towards white people could be a case of “daddy issues” or some sort of personal identity crisis.
“So half white Amandla Stenberg decided to sing about how ‘her people’ are being oppressed and how Star Wars fans are racist/bigoted,” @Ninety7Bravo posted on X. “This is the legacy Disney’s Lucasfilm is imprinting on Star Wars.”
Snow Woke
As if these controversies weren’t enough, another major Disney project, the live-action remake of the classic “Snow White,” is also being pilloried for such woke absurdities as the company’s refusal to cast actors with dwarfism to play the coveted roles of the Seven Dwarfs (apparently out of politically correct concerns about avoiding insensitive stereotypes), rewriting the script so that Snow White doesn’t have to do any demeaning housework, and hiring a lead actor who has expressed contempt for the source material.
Rachel Zegler, who plays the title role of Snow White, drew criticism early on in the project for her comments suggesting that the original 1930s movie was “creepy,” and saying, “There’s a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird! Weird! So we didn’t do that this time.”
She emphasized that the new version of Snow White — which critics have denounced as “Snow Woke” — would not focus on the love story that was central to the original and instead would promote a feminist-friendly message of the archetypal strong woman “becoming the leader she knows she can be.” The Snow White character will certainly not be dreaming of “true love,” Zegler assures us, and the Prince — who has been replaced by a character named “Jonathan,” played by Andrew Burnap — might not appear in the film at all. “All of Andrew’s scenes could get cut, who knows,” she said. “It’s Hollywood, baby!”
Many Disney fans immediately took issue with Zegler’s comments, with one viral post on TikTok noting that “It is not anti-feminist to want to fall in love, to want to get married, to want to stay at home, to be soft, to want to be a homemaker.” The TikTok post, which received more than ten million views, further pointed out: “Not every woman is a leader. Not every woman wants to be a leader. Not every woman wants or craves power and that’s ok.”
The same could be said for men of course.
Race-Swapped Characters
Besides taking issue with Zegler’s provocative comments about women’s empowerment being the epitome of feminism and the “creepy” 1937 original being woefully out of date, other critics complained that she was cast in the role at all — pointing out that hiring a dark-skinned actor to play the role of Snow White takes the Hollywood “race-swapping” trend to a new level.
Disney had already come under fire for the 2023 live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid,” which gave the lead role of Ariel to an African American. Critics pointed out that in the original fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, the mermaid was described as having skin as “clear and delicate as a rose-leaf, and her eyes as blue as the deepest sea.”
Based on the source material and the fact that the author was Danish, there is good reason to believe that the character of Ariel was envisioned as white — as she was depicted in the beloved 1989 cartoon adaptation — but Disney disregarded these historical realities and decided to go with black actress Halle Bailey for the lead mermaid role. With a sizable number of white people feeling that they were being marginalized and even erased, the #NotMyAriel hashtag trended for weeks on Twitter, and the official trailer received more than two million dislikes on YouTube. The film, which cost some $266 million to produce, was widely considered a box office flop.
Yet, rather than learn lessons from that debacle and heed the criticisms it had earlier received over its clumsy attempts at race-swapping, Disney decided to double down in its “Snow White” remake, hiring Zegler who has a Colombian mother and identifies as Hispanic.
The race-swapping in “Snow White” is perhaps even more blatant because the very name of Snow White specifically alludes to the lead character’s light skin. In the fairy tale published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, the character is described as having “skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony.” While the 1937 Disney cartoon stuck closely to this description in its depiction of Snow White, the new live-action film has completely abandoned any pretense of staying true to the Brothers Grimm story.
In doing so, Disney might think that it is promoting diversity and making the story more relevant to modern audiences, but it could also be seen as inappropriately rewriting a traditional fairy tale and insensitively appropriating European culture. The “Disneyfication of fairy tales” has long been a source of criticism among traditionalists who have objected to how Andersen’s and the Grimms’ fairy tales had been largely coopted and whitewashed by Disney’s adaptations, but now they are not only sanitizing the themes in some of those classic fairy tales, but also suppressing their European origins.
One could only imagine the uproar if Disney had taken an African or Japanese fairy tale and recast the lead role as a white person.
Bigotry or Legitimate Complaints?
While it is easy to dismiss the complaints of white people about “race-swapping” in Disney movies as some kind of racial bigotry or the complaints about promoting the LGBTQIA+ agenda in Star Wars as latent homophobia, the specific motivations behind these controversies matter less than the fact that the controversies are happening at all.
For better or worse, society looks to Hollywood — and particularly to the outsized and enduringly relevant force of Walt Disney — to provide not just entertainment, but also the mythology that underpins civilization. Throughout history, all cultures have relied on myths and legends to provide important cues for identity and meaning, and what Disney is doing should be seen in that context. The wokified versions of these stories are an attempt to forge a new version of that mythology.
Insofar as these efforts help to promote community and belonging, this could be a positive development, but it should also be appreciated that there is a fine line that Disney is treading — and in general it is doing so very carelessly.
When being inclusive is done at the expense of undermining existing mythology, it can have the effect of promoting cultural erasure, and this is what Disney is flirting with in its crude attempts at wokeness. It should not be forgotten, in particular, that stories such as “Snow White” and “The Little Mermaid” originate from Europe and therefore modern adaptations should show some sensitivity to staying true to the original source material and respecting the specific culture from which it emerged.
For centuries, these stories were celebrated by European peasants and aristocrats alike for their ability to convey difficult truths about life. They often portrayed hardships and tragedies, and did not shy away from dark themes. They certainly did not always end with the “happily ever after” trope that Disney has long embraced, instead offering stark lessons in life to children as they navigate the realities of living in a sometimes cruel and uncaring world.
But even the “Disneyfied” versions of stories such as “Frozen,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “Snow White” offered important lessons about love, trust, betrayal, and redemption. They have therefore retained an important role within Western culture and have given enduring relevance to fairy tales and myths hundreds of years old.
Star Wars Odyssey
Although a newer addition to the Western canon — arriving on the scene a half-century ago — Star Wars, too, has a deeply rooted cultural and literary relevance. Indeed, a number of scholars have even compared the Star Wars saga to such classics as Homer’s Odyssey.
“While some may see Luke Skywalker as an ordinary hero, it is not hard to see the similarities between him and the legendary Odysseus of Homeric epic,” writes Dilara Paksoy at Classics for All. “There are many similarities between the plot of Star Wars and Homer’s Odyssey,” Paksoy notes, including “the epic hero archetype and the theme of nostos or homecoming.”
Whether or not the average Star Wars viewer could make informed comparisons between Luke Skywalker and Odysseus — or indeed, whether or not the average Star Wars had ever even read Homer’s epic poem — is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that Star Wars mattered to people — just as Odyssey and classics such as “Snow White” and “The Little Mermaid” have mattered.
Generations have grown up watching these films, learning important life lessons and developing their identities based in part on these stories. Whether they realize it or not, they have internalized the myths and incorporated them into their worldviews, just as the broader civilization has embraced them as part of its canon.
Disney, in this sense, has an important responsibility that it is largely failing to meet. By taking cavalier actions such as rewriting stories, casting a person of color to play a woman with “skin white as snow,” refusing to cast dwarfs to play the Seven Dwarfs or prioritizing the LGBTQIA+ agenda over little things like plot and character development, Disney could be altering the culture in profound ways — signaling that what matters is not telling quality stories but redefining the ones that already exist in order to promote a specific political agenda.
This is why the backlash against the House of Mouse has been so severe, and why Disney executives should give it some thought before they continue to undermine such an important cultural institution. Instead of focusing on race-swapping and upending classic fairy tales, perhaps Disney should focus on creating new myths for a new generation.
Why not, for example, resurrect some African folk tales for a new Disney movie? There is no shortage of stories from Africa that would make perfect content for Disney, such as “Afiong the Proud Princess,” which tells the story of a young princess who almost lost everything because of her arrogance and pride.
But instead of broadening its horizons and finding new stories that would actually uplift underrepresented racial groups by sharing their ancestors’ folk tales, Disney, for some reason, insists on rehashing old stories, stripping them of their cultural identity, and using them to promote political correctness and wokism. This not only inspires animosity within certain segments of society but deprives modern culture of the quality mythology that it so desperately needs.
It also flies in the face of what Walt Disney believed about the importance of being original.
“By nature I’m an experimenter,” Disney once said. “To this day, I don’t believe in sequels. I can’t follow popular cycles. I have to move on to new things.”
So, maybe the Disney Company should heed the advice of its founder and drop the sequels, remakes and live-action adaptations. Maybe it’s time to move on to new things.
Nat Parry is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on X.