This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company, a milestone that has been marked by a touring exhibition, a coffee-table book, and a brand-new animated short broadcast on the company’s network, ABC, all celebrating a formidable (and sanitized) vision of its corporate history. As early as 1954, the Disneyland series worked to promote a self-aggrandizing narrative of the company’s history, distracting from its business practices by promoting a folksy celebration of creative genius and ingenuity.[1] Storytelling, as they would have it, has kept the company thriving all these years, rather than an aggressive pursuit of technological advancement, exclusive contracts, copyright protections, land development, international trade, market dominance, labor exploitation, strategic acquisitions, branding, glocalization, and governmental lobbying. Although a small independent producer during the heyday of classical Hollywood cinema, Disney persisted while media conglomerates dissembled or acquired its counterparts in Hollywood by becoming a major media conglomerate in its own right. In fact, Disney’s 1996 acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC effectively “established the blueprint for most media conglomerates that were formed in its wake.”[2] Alternately following industrial trends and forging innovative new paths in the media industries, it stands today as one of the most profitable, influential, and revered companies in the world.

The centennial of the Walt Disney Company provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on the role of Disney products and their industrialized manufacturing on society and media culture, both in the US and around the world. Even before film and media studies formally coalesced into major fields of study within the academy, scholars had turned their attention to Disney culture. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse inspired cultural commentary and critical theory by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Sergei Eisenstein, among others. Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version (1968), Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck, 1971), and Umberto Eco’s Il costume di casa (Faith in Fakes, 1973) offered robust critiques that challenged corporate-sanctioned narratives and identified foundational questions that Disney scholars continue to debate to this day. Whether a scholar is considering aesthetics, narrative, identity, representation, ideology, industry, or technology, the Walt Disney Company remains an invaluable prism for examining the historical and contemporary concerns of film and media scholars, both in their research and their pedagogy.

This is not to say that the Walt Disney Company deserves close critical attention over other global media conglomerates. Instead, many of the ideas offered here may serve as a template and a framework for examining its peers, including Amazon, Comcast, Paramount Global, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Shifting our attention to companies rather than artists or texts reminds us of the essential tension between art and commerce in mass media culture. This critical focus on business practices, cultural production, and industrial structures, in particular, complicates film and media studies’ traditional investments in authorship and textuality by underscoring the importance of modes of production, creative networks, production cultures, development slates, and media franchising. As much as the Walt Disney Company works to promote its commitments to creativity and storytelling, it obviously remains a corporate enterprise.[3] The creative decisions its storytellers make may be understood as business decisions, just as its business decisions shape its creative output.[4] More recent attempts to improve its representation of communities of color, for instance, reveal developments not only in storytelling, but in production practices and corporate strategy.[5] Centering this reality in our analyses helps to ground and focus the analysis of media culture’s impact on culture more broadly as well as society itself.

The scholars contributing to this dossier are accomplished scholars of the Walt Disney Company who approach it from a variety of critical perspectives. In their essays, readers will see them explore a range of pedagogical approaches, research methods, theoretical questions, and historical concerns. Taken together, we hope it can provide tools for encouraging our students to look closer at something many of them still hold dear—Disney culture—to uncover the rich rewards of media analysis.

Christopher Holliday opens the dossier with an account of teaching animation studies in an undergraduate module in the UK. Disney, of course, is central to many histories of film animation for its profound effect on style, storytelling, production practice, and technology. Yet we still might examine the effect of reinforcing this hegemony through our classrooms. Holliday’s valuable reflection asks us to consider what we are teaching when we teach Disney.

Sabrina Mittermeier builds upon her historical research on Disney theme parks to offer us a discussion of how one teaches theme parks in the classroom. Obviously, not all instructors can take their students to a theme park, yet a wide range of media texts, from brochures to YouTube videos, allow alternative means of access. The theme parks remain central to the company’s operation, and a close study with students speaks to their essential role in Disney’s longevity as well as their contemporary significance for the company’s investment in transmedia storytelling.

Michelle Anya Anjirbag takes up Disney’s use of the fairy tale across its media. Rather than focusing on how Disney has corrupted or maligned said tales, she positions them as a living genre, open to retelling and finding new life in each adaptation. As such, Disney fairy tales reflect valuable cultural insights as they are adapted for new audiences and contexts under the aegis of a major media conglomerate. Disney’s profit motive, therefore, requires attention to the fairy tales’ treatment of identity, culture, and difference, as well as the US centrism of its corporate producer.

Susan Ohmer pursues similar questions in her contribution. Here she recounts teaching a course on Disney that examines adaptation as a cultural and industrial practice. Through units on Disney princesses, 101 Dalmatians, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ohmer underscores how adapting its stories to a changing media and industrial landscape has been key to Disney’s ongoing influence and success.

In her contribution, Jennifer Gillan develops an idea of “textural poaching,” which builds upon Henry Jenkins’ theorization of “textual poaching” to emphasize the material and symbolic meanings to be found in media franchises. With close attention to Loki on Disney+, Gillan demonstrates how variants circulate across the streaming platform and into fan spaces as well to create complex narrative universes. Such resonances are important fan engagement, branding, and promotion in an age of on-demand viewing and digital media convergence.

Colleen Montgomery draws upon media industry studies, considering how the Walt Disney Company provides a valuable opportunity to discuss media labor with our students. Using the 1941 animators’ strike and the Disney Cultural Representative program as case studies, she points to powerful influence the company wields not only on US culture, but on federal law and public policy.

Drawing from her experience teaching courses in global media studies and Latinx media studies, Angharad Valdivia offers three important lessons that Disney teachers might keep in mind as they design and lead their own courses. Disney is a corporate enterprise and a US-based one at that, and this fact is evident in the cultural products that they sell both here and internationally. But we also can see evidence of change—at times, measured or misguided—that shows them responding to changes in the market as well as their desire to expand and maintain their global audiences.

While no dossier can be complete, it gestures toward the Walt Disney Company’s sheer breadth of investments and interests as well as its historical and enduring influence internationally. For many people within and outside of the US, Disney is America—a conclusion that the company has played a significant role in cultivating as it exports its cultural products and modifies them to resonate more meaningfully with local and regional populations. To analyze Walt Disney and his company’s creations, one has to understand that Walt himself was one of those creations, “a character the company took pains to paint as inherently middle-American.”[6] Teaching Disney, therefore, requires film and media scholars to scale their pedagogical approaches accordingly, navigating between the company and its individual products, production and consumption, and the global as well as the national, even local. In so doing, we hope students gain a deeper appreciation for the breadth and depth of film and media studies, including its utility and its urgency for navigating public discourse amidst social, political, cultural, and technological change.

1. Jason Sperb, “How (Not) to Teach Disney,” Journal of Film and Video 70, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 49–50, https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.70.1.0047. ↑

2. Jennifer Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980-1996 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 158. ↑

3. Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, 2^nd ed. (Malden, MA: Polity, 2020), 10. ↑

4. Peter C. Kunze, Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023), 168. ↑

5. Consult Michelle Anya Anjirbag, “Mulan and Moana: Embedded Coloniality and the Search for Authenticity in Disney Animated Film,” Social Sciences 7, no. 230 (2018): 13, doi:10.3390/socsci7110230, and Diana Leon-Boys, Elena, Princesa of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Girl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023). ↑

6. Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 13. ↑