Introduction

My name is Nicole Yuen and I was introduced to Disney as a young girl.  Yes, like many young girls, I went through that stage of wishing to be a princess – pretending to be Ariel in the swimming pool and dressing up as Mulan for Halloween.  Disney, for me, was a majority of my childhood – the music, movies, and princess dress-up clothes.  I can recall making my mom play multiple Disney soundtracks in the car and forcing her to sing the duets with me, where I always insisted on playing the role of the princess (“A Whole New World” quickly became a favorite of ours).  Even as I have gotten older, these innocent, sentimental songs are still the ones that I know the best.

Disclaimer: I’ve never been obsessed with Disney; I don’t know the up-to-date information on all things Disney related; and I only recently discovered that Pixar is a branch of Disney. 

However, I do love Disney – everyone loves Disney!  Well, at least that’s what I thought before I read the course description for this semester’s “Decoding Disney” class.  Reading through the description, I was astonished to see that questions for class discussions could include, “Why do people “hate” Disney? What is their antipathy towards Walt Disney?”  Immediately I thought to myself, “Wait, people hate Disney?”  So, intrigued by this idea that there exist people who hate Disney and of course, the excuse of watching Disney movies for homework, I became very interested in this class -  I even voluntarily enrolled in this 8:30 class to make it fit into my schedule (and trust me, I love my sleep).

Decoding Disney interested me way more than many of the other writing courses offered.  I saw Writing 101 courses like “What the New Deal Did,” “Garbage Politics,” “Law and Literature,” and wanted to fall asleep just thinking about taking those courses – I couldn’t bear to imagine being forced to write about them.  I’m sure these courses are interesting for many individuals, but I am definitely not one of them.  I was already forced to learn about the New Deal and politics in high school, and given the liberty to choose my own Writing 101 topic, I was not about to choose those subjects that I already knew I didn’t enjoy.  As you can tell, I'm not exactly a fan of the social sciences, and the only history course I actually enjoyed in high school was world history.  However, I should add that in this world history course, my teacher played Disney movies in class like Mulan and Aladdin.  She pointed out that these fairy tales were a very accurate depiction of life in those time periods/places - good job Disney!!  Therefore, Disney has the magical powers to entertain people of all ages (especially me) while also building a foundation for children's dream and accurate portrayals of the time period their stories take place in.  

As someone who yearned to be one of the princesses depicted in Disney’s films, I thought it would be so fascinating to investigate the villains of these “happily ever after” stories.  These villains contribute to the plot just as much as the protagonists, yet, I feel like they don’t get as much credit.  Whenever I played dress-up, I never wanted to be the evil characters, but recently Disney has given them more recognition with movies such as Maleficent.  Maybe newer generations will gain a greater understanding of the villains and begin loving them – I, however, will always favor the Cinderella’s, Mulan’s, and Wall-E’s of the Disney stories.