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Page 181 more “credit” and power and, I would argue, a privileged position in the social sphere. As Bourdieu suggests, gaining this special place gives aesthetic products a veil of “objectivity.” From its animated fairy tales, set in vague historical settings so that they will not become dated, to movies such as Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and The Jungle Book, Disney has always used ‘‘high art” for feature-length animation. High art provides a kind of cultural capital that distinguishes Disney products in two ways. In combination with animation, this art enables the corporation to please both educated and uneducated audiences. Walt Disney’s appropriation of “timeless” sources also masked his very specific conservative politics. Even when Walt himself was involved in small-time surveillance activities (Smoodin 1993:140–68), his films seemed to occupy an apolitical sphere because he adapted “timeless” classics that themselves appeared to transcend immediate concerns. Since the late 1980s, Disney has quietly absorbed Shakespeare into its family. Following the involvement of Michael Eisner, Chief Executive Officer, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, Chairman of Disney Studios until 1994, its animated films have been sprinkled with references to Shakespeare’s plays. Disney’s Miramax division has distributed Shakespeare in Love, a prelude to its upcoming distribution of three astutely targeted films from Kenneth Branagh’s “Shakespeare Film Company”: a musical Love’s Labour’s Lost with Alicia Silverstone; a Macbeth played on Wall Street; and an As You Like It set in Kyoto. Among the films created in house, The Lion King and The Little Mermaid, in particular, not only make isolated allusions to Shakespeare, but also involve plot structures and characters that consistently borrow from his works. Although names change or get reassigned, characters owe their dramatic and ideological functions within their plots to specific Shakespearean predecessors. As journalistic critics have noted, The Lion King takes its plot and characters from Hamlet (Klass 1994). Less noted is the fact that its prince also follows the prodigal son story from 1 Henry IV and that The Little Mermaid rewrites Hans Christian Andersen by using The Tempest. The Lion King follows Prince Simba from his anxious, conflicted childhood through an irresponsible adolescence to his triumphant reclamation of his kingdom. Simba’s uncle Scar, who has a pack of sinister hyenas secretly in his service, causes a massive stampede in the pridelands in order to assault the realm of King Mufasa, Simba’s wise and heroic father. When Mufasa is wounded rescuing |
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