Professors claim Disney's 'Lion King' and other animated films promote White privilege in new analysis
Three professors argue that animated Hollywood films promote White privilege and "racist cultural narratives," according to their new academic analysis.
Natalie Khazaal, director of the Middle Eastern and North African studies programs and associate professor of Arabic at Georgia Tech, Ellen Gorsevski, associate professor at Bowling Green, and Tobias Linné, head of the communication department at Lund University in Sweden, recently co-authored a paper lamenting racism and White privilege in Hollywood animated films.
The analysis, published Jan. 6, is titled "Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism (MARS) test finds Oscars so AnthropoScenic in contemporary animated films," and looks at racism and speciesism in Oscar-nominated films from 2016-2024.
In it, the professors wrote, "Hollywood’s cartoons and animated films have forged a checkered path in harnessing white privilege and recycling racist cultural narratives."
"For example, while Lion King invites audiences to perceive Black people as inferior to Whites, A Goofy Movie elevates Blackness to a cultural icon. Overall, though, animation has struggled to eliminate negative stereotypes and the unfair treatment of racial minorities," they wrote.
The academics said they used the Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism Test, which they call "a practical tool accessible to scholars, creators, and general viewers for analyzing character portrayals and interactions, helping identify and challenge normalized racist and speciesist storylines," to review movies like "Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse."
While "Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse" did win an Oscar, the professors wrote that they think elements of the film are racist.
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"But why was the first Black Spider-Man (Miles Morales, voiced by Shameik Moore) introduced together with the character of Spider-Ham, who is ridiculed for being a pig," they asked. "To what extent did having a Black main character nudge the movie over the edge to win the Oscar?"
The professors said they developed a series of questions for creators, researchers and audiences to determine whether a film passes or fails.
The questions include, "Do the racialized characters fulfill harmful, simplistic, or racist stereotypes?" "Do the nonhuman characters fulfill speciesist stereotypes as pests, threats, game, or cute animals/charismatic megafauna?" "Does the movie ignore or downplay the shared roots of racial and species-based oppression?" and "Does the movie imply that the struggles against racial oppression and those against species-based oppression are incompatible or in competition with one another?"
The analysis also discusses themes of immigration enforcement, capitalism, climate, and incarceration.
In the analysis, they highlighted the 2021 animated film, "Luca," set on the Italian Riviera about a young boy who is a sea monster but is able to take human form while on land.
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"Luca’s protagonists’ integration is rather simple—they take humanness and whiteness to be the superior, desirable forms of being and are thus finally accepted by the human society," the scholars wrote.
"As they let go of the primacy of their fish-like form and embrace human society, the boys’ newfound loyalty helps accelerate the depletion of sea life as they guide human fishermen away from overfished dead zones to new abundant spots," the analysis reads. "The cost, however, is steep — White cannibalizes racialized, human eats nonhuman species."
Fox News Digital reached out to Khazaal, Gorsevski, and Linné for comment.