The Disney brand has long been known as the animated version of white colonialism. This was made predominantly clear when the first feature-length Disney movie was released, entitled Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As if the main character’s name didn’t make it obvious enough, rumors that Walt Disney was a Nazi have been abound on the Internet ever since the rise of Starbucks and the invention of the MacBook Pro, and have plagued his legacy. Perhaps labeling him a National Socialist without physical proof at the whims of woke hipster sociology students is a bit of a stretch, but there were undeniably characteristics of Nazism in Disney’s politics, which are noticeably woven into his animated works.
Yes, OK, Disney Studios DID produce a searingly satirical anti-Hitler short entitled ‘Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi’ in 1943, but that was because the company was facing bankruptcy at the time and needed the money. At best, Disney could be seen as a Nazi-sympathizer and personally that’s how I have chosen to view him, so let that be an end to the ignorant bigots who claim otherwise with their tyrannical demands for ‘concrete evidence’. In my educated opinion (using Tumblr blogs as reference material is a perfectly acceptable form of academic research), Walt Disney was on a mission Hitler himself would have approved of. Mercilessly plundering his way through the traditional native cultures of our world, ruthlessly Westernizing everything in his path.
The recent furore surrounding the live-action Aladdin movie has brought Disney’s thirst for white nationalism to light more than ever before. For the first time ever, the movie cast an actual PoC in the main role. Something which has never been done before and sadly, due to the backlash, will probably never be seen again in my lifetime. Evidently, including real life PoCs as main characters took its toll on the Studio because they then went on to literally spend millions of dollars turning Will Smith’s skin blue via CGI in post-production (turning his skin white would have been too obvious so they were clearly attempting to ‘play it safe’ with this decision). It also made me wonder whether The Smurfs were originally intended to be BAME, but that’s another discussion for another time.
Mena Massoud, the Egyptian-born Canadian who played Aladdin, spoke recently in an interview about the lack of roles offered to him: ‘I haven’t had a single audition since Aladdin came out,’ Massoud opined. Massoud’s lack of work has absolutely nothing to do with many reviews containing opinions such as: ‘It’s ironic that the animated version of Aladdin’s persona was far more believable as a real person than Mena Massoud’s generic and two-dimensional performance,’ and ‘Mena Massoud is just a pretty boy with the acting range of a TV remote.’ No, the reason for this is racism. Plain and simple. I wouldn’t be surprised if Will Smith never gets offered another audition after this and to be honest, I’m amazed his career has lasted this long.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, to pour salt into the wound, this week Disney hired Jordan Dunn and Michael Kvamme to pen a script for an Aladdin spin-off series centered around the character of Prince Anders, a so-called ‘scene-stealing character’ played by Billy Magnussen, who is (surprise surprise – NOT) white.
Many people took to Twitter to express their fury:
By scene stealing do you mean his character stole a role that could have been written for a MENA actor? https://t.co/B93avRHjjx
— Hanna Ines Flint – Free 🇵🇸 (@HannaFlint) December 7, 2019
So let's talk about how they picked the only non-brown face in the cast from the live-action "Aladdin" to make a spin-off series for Disney+ pic.twitter.com/nOZ8XFbz16
— Dino-Ray (@DinoRay) December 6, 2019
Obviously this was Disney’s plan all along. To spend $183 million on a lavish live-action musical remake of Aladdin featuring PoC actors, purely so they could then go on to create a spinoff series starring a white cast. These white supremacists certainly like to play the long game.
Naomi Scott, the British actress of Indian descent who played Princess Jasmine, has somehow managed to fluke the system, as she is starring alongside Kirsten Stewart in Charlie’s Angels, a reboot of the 2000 reboot of the Seventies TV show. Not sure how that has happened. Perhaps she was made to white up during the audition?