FRENCH 337L - Disney’s European Fairy Tales

3 Credit(s) | Lecture | Graded (includes P/F option)
Not repeatable for credit

Description:
It is difficult to think of any American who has had greater influence on narrative and visual culture around the world than Walt Disney. Yet the quality of Disney’s creations has given rise to much debate, famously leading one critic to ask: “It’s Disney, but is it art?” This course traces the first 65 years of the Walt Disney Animation Studios in an attempt to answer that question. A major focus will be the company’s heavy reliance in these years on ‘high art’ from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. From illuminated manuscripts to palatial architecture, European art “especially French, Italian, and German” is pervasive in Walt Disney Studios storytelling. Beyond questions of adaptation, class discussion will also center issues of social commentary, analyzing how gender, sexuality, race, class, and ability were presented onscreen, and how they were treated in Studio culture. Through formalist, narrative, and sociohistorical analysis, students will achieve a better understanding of how European art shaped Disney, and how that art has engaged (or failed to engage) with societal change.

Assignments are built around Disney’s feature films, to be supplemented by the premodern texts and visual arts that inspired them, as well as relevant critical studies. Course taught in English; readings available in English and in original languages, where relevant.

This course is cross-listed as CINE 337L and GERMAN 337L and ITAL 337L and MLLC 337L

Enrollment Requirements:
Prerequisite: ENGL 102

Semester(s) typically offered: Fall

042092:1