![]() ![]() When I hear the word ghetto the first thing that comes to mind is a poorly lit street, with one light flickering on and off on a dirty block of close quartered dilapidated townhouses. Now it might seem counterintuitive, but I am going to suggest that the open ocean is representative of the ghetto in a city. Hold on to the snapping teeth, we will come back to it. ![]() He approaches from the ocean with a growling noise and a sharp set of teeth that snap in Marlin’s face, before he kills Coral and all but one of Marlin’s children, Nemo. He is menacing, much bigger and much darker than the bright clown fish. The first fish we see that is not from the coral reef is a barracuda. That’s a fair point until you look at how other fish are portrayed. Now some of you I’m sure are thinking, Hell no, you can’t assume that he is white. The thing is, Marlin is the white middle class American, and that is the audience that Disney has created, regardless of who is literally watching the movie. If you still don’t get it, watch the movie, or at least the opening scene) From this opening scene we know, and any child watching would know, that Marlin is the “good guy”, the fish whose eyes we will watch the movie through, and whose emotions we will side with. Not convinced? Well Coral then points out how nice the neighborhood is, as we see adolescent fish swimming around playing joyfully together. In the opening scene, Marlin is enamored by the beautiful middle class country style home, or rather anemone, he has obtained for his wife Coral, so much so that he exclaims “a fish can breathe out here.” By exclaiming “breathe” Disney does two things: first it asserts small coral fish as humans, and second, it names Marlin’s family as a middle class suburban family living a comfortable lifestyle. Not to spoil the movie, but Marlin with some help from his new amnesic friend, Dory, ends up Finding Nemo. ![]() Finding Nemo for those who are not familiar follows Marlin, a clownfish, on his quest across the ocean to find his son Nemo. The first question that we must answer in order to understand the Disney Ideology is who is the audience in Finding Nemo? Now this may seem like an easy question to answer, that it is simply whomever is watching the movie, and that is true, in the sense of the physical person sitting on the other side of the screen, but the audience is actually created by Disney. All this is to say that, Disney has created an ideology that we all follow, and that ideology screams throughout Finding Nemo. Disney simply gave us as children more examples of how people interact in the world than we could have ever received from sitting in school reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and the stories that we saw from Disney were far more memorable than those from school. I understand that this time is not all spent watching Disney movies, but they still are a big part of a child’s experience. School is usually seven hours a day, five days a week, so from a purely mathematical perspective children really do spend more time on screens. What I can say is that in all the time you spent in school, were you ever exposed to as many stories, with as many conflicts and as many solutions as you were with Disney? In an article released in 2015 from BBC it was found that children spend on average six and a half hours in front of a screen every day. One might say, yes we did watch those movies as children, but we also went to school and spent time with our parents, and I can’t refute that. It is the model that has shaped an entire generation almost every day of our lives through movies like Finding Nemo. But how does that relate to Finding nemo? It does in one very important way: Disney is the model that children grow up seeing. In other words children are shaped by seeing other individuals act and react with the world. In a study done in 1962 by Albert Bandura, it was found that a child is significantly more likely to change their moral judgment if presented with a model that displayed a different moral judgment from their own. To answer that question we must look at what actually shapes a child. So my question is, what shaped me more? What has molded my generation into who we are today? From those movies I could quote countless lines, sing songs by heart, and reenact many scenes without a second thought, but if you told me to quote To Kill a Mockingbird I would be at a loss for words. When I was a kid Finding Nemo was the first movie that I saw in theaters, and after that I watched countless Disney movies from Lelo and Stitch, to Ratatouille, to The Jungle Book. Have you ever seen Finding Nemo? Were you ecstatic to hear that Finding Dory was hitting theaters? Do you have more lines memorized from The Emperor’s New Groove than you do of To kill a Mockingbird? So does our entire generation. ![]()
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