In late 2017, I was invited to design and teach a third-year undergraduate course on animation history and theory at King’s College London, exploring the definition and scope of animation as a broad and inclusive medium that traverses a multiplicity of forms, modes, practices, image-making materials, and technologies. The module—titled “From Innovation to Illusion: Topics in Animation”—provides students with the tools to critically examine the distinctive formal language of animation, and to understand its identity as an interdisciplinary art and craft. The course is also framed from the outset as an “opportunity” in two interconnected senses. First, it was intended to fit under the banner of the university’s growing suite of “Opportunity modules,” a set of interdisciplinary courses open not just to those with an intellectual background in Film and Media Studies, but to students studying a range of subjects housed within the faculties of Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences. Second, the module represented a chance for me as an educator to undertake research-led teaching and, for the students, to delve into animation as a subject often perceived as at the margins of critical inquiry, particularly where “practice-as-research” approaches to the medium by artists and scholars—if not the centrality of practice-based courses more broadly—have supported the methodological challenge of how to align the thinking of practice with the practice of thinking.[1] As Michael Smith argues, the emphasis on praxis within the context of animation education is closely tied to processes of “industrialisation,” whereby the remit of such programs is to “produce highly skilled, technically proficient graduates who are ‘ready for industry.’”[2]

Framed by the challenges of teaching animation to an interdisciplinary and typically non-specialist audience, the decision to include the animated works of the Disney studio as a “way in” to the material covered in my own animation syllabus offers its own challenges that are tricky to negotiate. Within animation studies as a discipline, Disney certainly represents a popular if curious intellectual object, remaining the target of hostile responses to everything from their identity politics to their “hyper-realist” codification of animation as a graphic art. Michael Barrier’s history of Hollywood cartoons argues that Disney’s fixing of verisimilitude as animation’s default language during the Golden Age of the American cartoon, for example, positions the studio’s visual style as a form of “parasitic animation, separated from live action only by the leavening of caricature.”[3] Disney’s dominance over the U.S. animation industry, the studio’s links to the commercialization of the art, and their troublesome images of conservative sentimentality has often fed into Disney’s ambivalent place within the academy, including a number of educators who have reflected on how they are met with reluctance and opposition when they raise the topic of Disney despite the company’s international influence and repute. In his article “How (Not) to Teach Disney,” Jason Sperb reflects on both the challenges and opportunities when teaching the studio as a multimedia conglomerate within a Higher Education setting, noting that “students are, of course, excited about the topic, [and] they provide no shortage of engaged discussion on the subject.”[4] Yet he admits they can often become defensive in resisting the over-interpretation of Disney despite their global dominance, a move that positions “Disney” as a surrogate for similar struggles felt by animation and its possibilities and potentials for meaning. For Sperb, “Disney teachers must apologize for discussing something intended to be beyond critique,” and work even harder to mitigate the students’ engagement with Disney as a subject “somehow not eligible for the same level of reasonable and legitimate critique one would expect on any other subject in a media studies classroom.”[5] Such responses indicate that the inclusion and incorporation of a “complicated subject such as Disney” as part of animation module design involves a multifaceted negotiation between what it means to teach both with and about Disney within the context of animation education.[6]

To teach with Disney is to embrace the value of popular and visual cultures as sites and spaces of learning, and the lure of the “Disney oligopoly” that includes Disney animation as a global mass cultural form. Indeed, “Teaching with Disney” is the very title of Julie C. Garlen and Jennifer A. Sandlin’s book that explores Disney animation in relation to cultural pedagogy and classroom praxis.[7] Taking their cue from Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock’s framing of Disney’s animated features as “teaching machines,” Garlen and Sandlin argue that Disney as a media conglomerate functions as a “pedagogical force,” which “shapes everyday life practices and identity formations through its representations of family values, gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, “Americanness,” childhood, pleasure, entertainment, education, and community.”[8] Animation studies has been overwhelmingly focused on Disney’s global hegemony within children’s media culture, which has in turn yielded deconstructive readings of the studio’s features and shorts that confront the image animation holds as “good, clean fun.”[9] It is important to introduce students to these defining critical trends in my own teaching, allowing them to reflect on how Disney animation “appeals to many of us through a complex affective process where we negotiate our beliefs, values, desires, and expectations in the realm of pleasure and meaning.”[10] However, the issue of whether to teach about Disney at all, notwithstanding their contribution to aesthetic and technological innovation and the evolution of the medium as a graphic art, offers additional possibilities to interrogate “pleasure and meaning” through the lens of visibility. To ask the question of why/why not Disney when designing modules that embrace the peaks and troughs of the animated form is to engage the more urgent concern of core-periphery models of knowledge production to which recent trends towards decolonization and anti-racism (within animation studies and beyond) are typically allied.

Renewed investment in meaningful decolonizing projects and institutional initiatives across Higher Education have sought to tackle racial discrimination, systemic inequalities, and unconscious bias through processes of decentering the supremacy of Western thought and epistemology, and to call into question the production of knowledge as it has been historically understood within the “post-Enlightenment, liberal, rational, humanist universalism of Western culture.”[11] The growing strength of understanding in the geographies, communities, and voices at the heart of the decolonization mission since the end of the Second World War—though ongoing, “in play” and still held in tension, of course—has ultimately served to place Disney at the crosshairs of how university environments traditionally privilege “Eurocentric ‘objective’ and ‘apolitical’ knowledge.”[12] In her discussion of the absence of sub-Saharan African animation from animation syllabi, Paula Callus argues that “Judgments of taste and quality are made against a yardstick which the West holds up to the rest.”[13] Most pointedly, Callus identifies “the countless mainstream publications on the history of Disney” emerging from animation studies as evidence that a predominantly Western view of the field has dictated taste cultures around animation’s production, circulation, and reception.[14] Disney’s animated works and the scholarly critiques of them are therefore implicated in the need to ask what visual culture and media scholars and historians can and should “do” with Disney, and how animation studies might make meaningful interventions into unsettling and unlearning their global dominance.

In my own class, we acknowledge the stakes of what it means to consider Disney as a durable centerpoint of animation studies, which fosters opportunities for learners to engage in ongoing “metacognitive” processes as part of their education and to effectively “problem set” with Disney animation as an object of study.[15] As Sperb suggests, the shift in framing from critique to reflection “changes everything.”[16] A particularly useful text that I now use to address Disney as a complex and chaotic scholarly topic—and to identify what some of the connected challenges or conundrums that animation scholars face might be—is Rada Bieberstein and Erwin Feyersinger’s “The Ever-Expanding Scope of Animation Historiography: A Discussion of Interdisciplinary Approaches and Methods.”[17] Students close read short extracts from the article during the seminar to reflect on the “conceptual and theoretical opportunities” the authors propose in relation to the potential for a ‘new’ animation historiography. By confronting rather than sidestepping (or even assuming) Disney’s authority within animation studies, students are then asked to map what a “rhizome-like history of animation” might look like, one that “incorporates untold histories, and reveals overlooked links to other developments in, for example, arts, science and technology.”[18] When coupled with the conclusions drawn by Callus (who the students read the week prior), Bieberstein and Feyersinger’s (re)thinking of animation’s new critical geographies is highly generative for speaking to the cohort’s disciplinary backgrounds that traverse arts and social science subjects. But such an approach is equally valuable for identifying precisely why “doing” animation history can be an act of political recovery. This is because the discussion of animation’s global heterogeneity does not prohibit the very mention of Disney. Instead, it invites students to embark “on a journey between disciplines” to better comprehend the studio’s connections to the non-canonical, the marginal, and the normative, and to situate their orthodoxy of styles and representations in ways that invite students to be receptive to the complex polysemy and pervasiveness of the very word “animation.”[19]

It is certainly difficult to withdraw Disney from the animation classroom, to not teach with Disney’s influential animated works, and to use the studio as a vital connective between students with varied competencies in media and moving image cultures. The percentage of mid-term assignments and group projects that are annually devoted to exploring elements of Disney animation across numerous competing frameworks reveals the degree of familiarity they have with Disney old and new, and their eagerness to deconstruct its themes, characters, and representations. Yet decisions about Disney’s very inclusion at local module level provide opportunities for educators to think about their own positionality as much as how to support diverse learning communities as they move from and across disciplinary backgrounds. To teach about Disney is ultimately to engage learners through knowledge production and intellectual transfer that, in turn, thinks through the discipline of animation studies as a whole, allowing students to begin a journey of better understanding what it means to “trouble” Disney’s ongoing academic centrality.

1. J. A. Wilson, “Excavation and Re-animation: Figuring Process,” Studies in Theatre and Performance 39, no.1 (2019): 9, https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2017.1303283. ↑

2. Michael Smith, “Industrialisation of Animation Education,” in The Industrialisation of Arts Education, edited by Samantha Broadhead (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 83. ↑

3. Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in the Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4. ↑

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

5. Sperb, “How (Not) to Teach Disney,” 48–49. ↑

6. Sperb, “How (Not) to Teach Disney,” 48–49. ↑

7. Julie C. Garlen and Jennifer A. Sandlin, eds. Teaching with Disney (New York: Peter Lang, 2016). ↑

8. Garlen and Sandlin, “Introduction: Popular Culture and Disney Pedagogies,” in Teaching with Disney, 1–2. ↑

9. Kellie Bean, “Stripping Beauty: Disney’s ‘Feminist’ Seduction” in The Emperor’s Old Groove, ed. Brenda Ayres (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003). ↑

10. Kevin M. Tavin and David Anderson, “Teaching (Popular) Visual Culture: Deconstructing Disney in the Elementary Art Classroom,” Art Education 56, no. 3 (2003): 23, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2003.11653498. ↑

11. Stuart Hall, “The Multicultural Question,” in Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora, ed. David Morley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 115. ↑

12. Anne E. Wagner, “Unsettling the Academy: Working Through the Challenges of Anti‐racist Pedagogy,” Race Ethnicity and Education 8, no. 3 (2005): 261, https://doi.org/10.1080/13613320500174333. ↑

13. Paula Callus, “Reading Animation through the Eyes of Anthropology: A Case Study of Sub-Saharan African Animation,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 7, no. 2 (2012): 114, https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847712439281. ↑

14. Callus, “Reading Animation through the Eyes of Anthropology,” 114. ↑

15. Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1991): 21–69. ↑

16. Sperb, “How (Not) to Teach Disney,” 59. ↑

17. Rada Bieberstein and Erwin Feyersinger, “The Ever-Expanding Scope of Animation Historiography: A Discussion of Interdisciplinary Approaches and Methods,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 17, no. 1 (2022): 10–25, https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477221080108. ↑

18. Bieberstein and Feyersinger, “The Ever-Expanding Scope of Animation Historiography,” 13. ↑

19. Bieberstein and Feyersinger, “The Ever-Expanding Scope of Animation Historiography,” 15, 20. ↑