Disney pluralism: beyond Disney-formalism [Keynote speaker]

‘Disney’, in its many forms, is a pervasive presence within popular culture – and has been so for several decades. In popular discourse, ‘Disney’ serves as a potent shorthand, conjuring thoughts of fantastical theme parks, (conservative, American) family values, and animated film. However, ‘Disney’ is much more than the sum of this reductive equation. Given the nebulousness of ‘Disney’ as an object of study, therefore, a frequent strategy in scholarly discourse – in an attempt to make this subject more manageable at shorter word lengths - is to prioritise one aspect of ‘Disney’. This is a strategy that I have employed on several occasions: in my journal articles ‘Disney-Formalism: Rethinking “Classic” Disney’ (2010), ‘Neo-Disney: Recent Developments in Disney Feature Animation’ (2010), in my book chapter ‘Developments in Peplum Filmmaking: Disney’s Hercules’ (2011) and in my book Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation (2011). Reflecting on this pan-and-scan, cropped, and zoomed approach to ‘Disney’ scholarship, which arguably does produce meaningful and useful results, I find myself wishing to redraw the boundaries: ‘but, there is more’. Starting with this proposition in mind, this chapter will consider the plurality of ‘Disney’, and, partly through an interrogation of my own earlier work, seek to present a model of ‘Disney’ analysis that confronts this unwieldy pluralism.