Cultural Representation in Disney's Cinderella and Its Live-Action Adaptation

Azra Alagic, Roselinde Supheert

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

In recent years Disney’s animated classics have become even more popular as modern television shows and live-action adaptations such as Once Upon a Time (2011), Maleficent (2014), and Cinderella (2015) have re-introduced Disney characters that many viewers came to love while growing up. The hype continued with live-action movies Beauty and the Beast and Mulan, released in 2017/2018. Yet over the past few decades several Disney animated films have come in for criticism for their stereotypical representation of gender and ethnicity (cf. Booker 2009). Although accents and national culture in animated Disney classics have received a generous amount of attention (e.g., Lippi-Green 1998), relatively little research has been conducted on the representation of national cultures in Disney’s newer live-action adaptations of these classics. The present paper assesses how national cultures are represented in the original Disney classic Cinderella (1950) and to what extent this has changed in the live-action Cinderella adaptations from 1997 and 2015, respectively. It emerges that, although stereotypes may vary, the use of stereotypes is remarkably stable with the 1997 version representing a short-lived break.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Riches of Intercultural Communication
Subtitle of host publicationInteractive, Contrastive, and Cultural Representational Approaches
EditorsRoselinde Supheert, Gandolfo Cascio, Jan ten Thije
Place of PublicationLeiden, Boston
PublisherBrill
Chapter8
Pages155-168
Number of pages14
Volume1
ISBN (Print)978-90-04-52249-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Nov 2022

Publication series

NameUtrecht Studies in Language & Communication
PublisherBrill
Volume37
ISSN (Print)0927-7706

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