Disney

What is your relationship to Disney and animated children's culture?  What role did these texts play in your life as a child?  In that of the children/parent you care for?  How do your memories challenge or reflect Christensen's claims?
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    For the period of time my older cousin Heidi worked at CVS in the 90s, I would intermittently receive VHS Disney movies on gift-giving occasions.  This was a good arrangement; I liked Aladdin, The Lion King, Fantasia, and Lady and the Tramp as well as anybody.  I was happy to be part of the city choir that sang the theme to Beauty and the Beast at the spring showcase and have fond memories of learning to enunciate the hard T in Beauty.  My neighbor Normand was more familiar with what I now know are the older, non-animated films like Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, but I thought they were supremely corny and so was he for electing to stay in and watch them instead of coming out with me to play paper airplanes outside.  I can also remember being more than a little turned off by the idea of my classmates visiting the Disney theme park.
    During my prime viewing years, I was a passive receiver.  In fact, with the notable exception of the sad scene in the The Fox and the Hound, I have very little memory of Disney movie visuals.  I think I watched for the songs.  It was only after I had entered middle school and had pretty well stopped watching that I heard about any hidden messages in the movies.  At that, it was mostly Easter eggs and, although it piqued my curiosity to see a phallus in The Little Mermaid, Heidi had skipped that one and I had soccer practice to get to.  I did become aware of the Disney Princess ideal in school through listening to girls talk, and I thought it was an interesting thing to consider, but I certainly wasn't going back exegetically through the canon to confirm.  
     On the whole, my childhood media experience was colored much more heavily by world of Jim Henson than that of Walt Disney.  And looking back, Zoot, the saxophone player in the inimitable "Sax and Violence" spot is characterized just as stereotypically as any of the Disney mainstays Christensen implicates.  Because his zany, multicolored foam rubber cast never really bore much resemblance to humans, Mr. Henson took 99% of the opportunity to criticize away and probably escaped some of that which has dogged Disney for years.  Reading Ms. Christensen's piece, it's tough to disagree with any of what she is forwarding.  It causes me to wonder, though, how successful a person of her bent might be in conversing with a child about unjust representations of the female form or definitions of the good life.  It is absurd to think that it can be done.  But conversely, it is not absurd to think that the child absorbing the subtext at Disney's feet cannot also absorb a wholly different subtext from a different source, a less marketed one, perhaps.  
    By circumstance, children live in the state of "ignorant and happy" as Christensen's student Justine wishes to remain on page 198.  She will never be there again, and it is both the curse and blessing of maturity.  It is interesting to see how Christensen pushes her students (or, rather, their realization/frustration at the the damaging Disney subliminals push themselves) to create a product that will do the same for others.  The PTA pamphlet, for example, might have taken an unsuspecting parent off-guard, but with its grading system and more positive suggestions, the product fulfills her mandate: "Don't just rant in general...Use evidence to support your thesis" (198).  

This was also one of my animated touchstones.  Hellllloo President Bush!