[Henry A. Giroux]The Mouse that Roared : Disney and the End of Innocence(pdf){Zzzzz}

How are children - and their parents - affected by the world's most influential corporation? Henry A. Giroux explores the surprisingly diverse ways in which Disney, while hiding behind a cloak of innocence and entertainment, strives to dominate global media and shape the desires, needs, and futures of today's children. Giroux takes the reader inside the company's vision of the full range of its media - its films, television, famous characters, and spin-off products, as well as its special school, Celebration. He reveals how Disney idealizes and implements its goal of building a world culture - based on innocence and morals, but insidious in its consumerist exploits.

Product Description
From Booklist
The average fan of Mickey and Donald or Simba and Nala won't notice, but readers awed by the broad power of the Disney Company should read this critical examination by an education professor at Pennsylvania State University. The basic complaint about Disney has always been just what makes Wall Street love it: Disney's "imagineers" are so very good at convincing customers they need to see, visit, and own as much Disney product as possible. But Giroux goes beyond this concern (that the entertainment Disney cloaks in innocence and good fun is a constant sales pitch) to examine the varied messages of Disney's films for children and adults; for example, the racial coding in Aladdin and The Lion King and the positions, roles, and values of specific characters in Good Morning, Vietnam and Pretty Woman. Although Giroux charges no conspiracy, he maintains that "challenging the ideological underpinnings of Disney's construction of common sense" is a vital step in understanding corporate infotainment media and in empowering citizens to demand something better and more democratic. Mary Carroll
Review
Henry Giroux has led the way in contemporary cultural studies in insisting on the need to address the critical question of the effects on children of cultural production and representation. Giroux links the cultural messages promoted by Disney Inc. to the corporate economy, exploitative, and exclusionary practices it at once represents and pushes. In doing so, he faces squarely and analyzes uncompromisingly the implication for democratic politics of culture and desire, education and entertainment, representation and responsibility that most critics fail to register, let alone face.--David Theo Goldberg, Director, Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (22 April 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0847691098
ISBN-13: 978-0847691098

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Academic, but spectacular in that regard. 4 January 2005
By Matt McDowall - Published on Amazon.com
The negative reviews of this book here have been fairly typical: It's apparently enough to call Giroux "leftist" and to point out his concern with class, race, and gender inequality. That alone completely impugns his work for many people. If you are one of those people, don't pick up this book. But if you're not, you've got to read this. The book is academic, and is written that way: Giroux packs the ideas in, especially in the beginning. But it is also the best piece of cultural criticism I've yet read.

Contrary to what people have been saying here, Giroux does not simply scream "race class gender inequality" over and over again. In fact I was impressed by how seldom he did make direct appeal to those issues. Instead, he focuses largely on the "public pedagogy" (I love that phrase) at work behind a company like Disney (if in fact there is any other company like Disney). Giroux's central idea is that we need an intelligent, critical populace in order to have a true democracy, and his central claim is that Disney actively works against both intelligence and critical thinking in the populace at large. His claim is well argued, and well substantiated. The consistent move towards "security" in our society is a troubling symptom of the kind of worldview that Giroux ascribes to Disney. And if he's right, it is imperative that we all start to think a lot more critically about Disney and other, similar societal influences.