They’re popular across the political spectrum so they get caught in a tug of war between the ideologies. Both sides want to claim them. They want to please both sides.
In the end, they’re mostly about money so I have no sympathy for them.
In the end, their attempts to appease both sides pisses off both sides
Everyone wants to present themselves as the underdog and Disney is the biggest media company in the world
And they saturate the media environment, particularly in children’s entertainment. If you have a political agenda, you’d be crazy to ignore the channel that is synonymous with child advertisement. The morals and attitudes espoused by Disney characters regularly shape perceptions of their viewers into adulthood.
So the goal of Disney Executives is to keep things bland and superficial and inoffensive as possible, to the point where critics (particularly conspiracy-minded ones) really need to wade into deep water to find anything resembling offensive content. You can watch Pocahontas and never really develop an opinion on colonialism. You can watch Robin Hood and Lion King without shaking your views on Monarchy one way or another. You can enjoy Frozen or Moana without challenging yourself on feminism.
It’s all just a beautiful magical carnival of adventures. Empty head put happy story in, slide over perfectly smooth brain, come out as laughter.
Truly, the modern Opiate of the Masses.
Dont hate them for the politics. Hate them for throwing lemmings off a cliff into a river.
I’ve noticed the movie where they did that is the only one in its series (the “True Life Adventure” series) not available on Disney+
They got a few gems in that vault of theirs
Didn’t Disney publish The Owl House? I mean, I know they didn’t really have much creative influence, but they did publish it, and that show is pretty woke.
They did indeed, but they also canceled it and made the creators rush the final season. So them airing it contributes to their reputation for being woke, but canceling it contributes to their reputation for pulling the plug on anything progressive. I don’t know why they canceled it but many people interpret it to be because they were anti-woke.
The BBC is the same
As a company, they’ve always been incredibly conservative, so for maybe the last decade or so, they’ve tried to fix it by creating characters that are an absurd progressive stereotype as a stupid by product of a committee with no connection to what they wanted to stand for, so they didn’t lose their reputation as conservatives among progressives, they pissed off conservatives by adapting to the woke agenda and along the way making some absolutely infamous products, yes Star Wars I’m looking at you
I would put Disney’s “progressive” characters as also being portrayed conservatively.
Disney has been making Sidney Poitier like characters because they were doing their toes into making more progressive characters while other media companies have been doing deeper dives for years.
Of course, conservatives & bigots complained because if Disney is willing to do this, then it means near universal acceptance.
