Without any prior announcement, Disney+ removed Peter Pan, Dumbo and other movies from Kids profiles over their racially insensitive content. While there has always been discussion about the offensive stereotypes found in some of Disney's animated classics, the issue was spotlighted when the Black Lives Matter protests in Spring of last year forced the entertainment industry to reckon with the troubled history of on-screen representation. Notably, many networks, studios, and streaming services took steps to make any content featuring blackface unavailable, resulting in the removal of episodes from TV shows like Community, The Office, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Disney responded with the "Stories Matter" campaign, a company-wide effort to not only pursue diversity in future projects, but confront its decidedly checkered past. Rather than remove content outright, some Disney+ movies were given a content advisory warning for "negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures" that acknowledges their "harmful impact" while keeping them accessible to "spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together." The dedicated Stories Matter site highlights a few of these movies and explains why they received the warning, as well as confirming that experts will continue to comb through its extensive library and add additional warnings as necessary.
In what appears to be the latest step in that process, Polygon reports that some of the titles that carry this warning can no longer be accessed from Disney+ Kids profiles, which already limit the library to G-rated content. So far, this includes animated classics like Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Dumbo, The Jungle Book, and The Aristocats, as well as the live-action Swiss Family Robinson. While the changes came unannounced earlier this week, these movies remain available in their flagged forms on regular Disney+ accounts.
The problematic nature of the offending scenes in these movies is fairly undeniable. Peter Pan memorably includes cringeworthy Native American caricatures, while Lady in the Tramp, The Jungle Book, and The Aristocats have characters that stereotype East Asian peoples (remember the Siamese cats?) and reinforce what the Stories Matter team calls the "perpetual foreigner" stereotype. Dumbo's Crows embody African American stereotypes typical of minstrel shows, and the question of whether to cut them out of the Disney+ version of the movie generated a lot of chatter back in 2019. While they were ultimately kept in, it appears Disney has decided that they shouldn't be seen by children without the proper context.
While some might instinctively feel a tug of dismay at seeing a childhood favorite listed above, and others might prefer they be removed from Disney+ entirely, many are likely to embrace this decision as a step forward for a company that has previously struggled to come to terms with its own past. Treating racial stereotyping as worthy of a stricter MPAA rating, regardless of how the rest of the movie is graded, might even offer a way to approach such children's content moving forward. One thing this shows for certain is that Disney feels comfortable making such changes quietly, and their next move could be right on the horizon.
Source: Polygon