Unnecessary Analysis

      One thing that I have learned from the articles that we have read this semester is that Disney critics tend to overanalyze these movies. Some of the minor details that these critics choose to bring up suggest that they are watching these children's movies looking for something to condemn. This tendency was most apparent in Ajay Gehlawat's article "The Strange Case of The Princess and the Frog: Passing and the Elision of Race." In his article, Gehlawat points out trivial details, such as the name of the restaurant where Tiana works (Duke's Café), and leaps to strong conclusions about Disney's apparent racism, such as the fact that the one of the former Grand Wizards of the KKK was named David Duke (421). As another member of my class aptly pointed out, Disney could just as easily have been referring to Duke University, whose diverse student body supports Disney's liberal perspective. The connection between Duke's Café and the KKK was, more likely than not, purely coincidental.     
      Another point in Gehlawat's essay that I found difficult to agree with was when he stated that Disney's placement of President Woodrow Wilson on the front page of a newspaper was reinforcing racist ideas due to "Wilson's noted personal racism and the policies of racial segregation he enacted during his tenure in office" (420). I feel as though this was not Disney making a statement but rather the animators were attempting to place the movie within a specific timeframe so that the audience realized that the setting of the film was New Orleans during the Jazz Age. 
     These exaggerations and sweeping conclusions make it difficult for me to agree with Gehlawat's overall argument. Like words such as "obviously" and "clearly," excessive analysis can alienate an author's audience rather than lead them to the same conclusion. I believe that Gehlawat's essay could have been much stronger had he replaced some of this conjecture with deeper analysis or explanation of some of his more factual points. For instance, he brings up an intriguing idea about Tiana and Naveen's relationship that had never occurred to me before: if the film does take place in 1920s New Orleans (where segregation was rampant), how will society take this interracial marriage? In his essay, Gehlawat merely introduces this idea before moving on to describe the couple's screen time as frogs as "greenface," likening this fairy tale adaptation to the outdated and discriminatory tradition of "blackface" (425). In many ways this argument is more offensive than many of the supposedly racist moments in Disney's film. 
     In their quest to prove that Disney films are not the innocent, child-friendly movies that they superficially seem to be, many of Disney's critics end up isolating themselves from their audiences by making accusations about minuscule details that were most likely unintentionally offensive. Essays such Gehlawat's would be much stronger if authors stuck to more factual analyses of the films rather than overanalyzing coincidences.