Page 14 - The Disneyization of Society

DISNEYIZATION

stereotyped illustration: eating in a standard McDonald’s or Burger King may have
the advantage of filling a basic need (hunger) cheaply and in a predictable
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environment, but Disneyized restaurants are likely to provide an experience that 5
gives the impression of being different and even a sense of the dramatic while
being in a location that perhaps increases the likelihood that the consumer will
engage in other types of consumption, such as pur- chasing merchandise or
participating in other activities in a hybrid consumption setting. Hybrid cons-
umption environments themselves frequently take on the characteristics of the
spectacular because of the sheer variety of consumption opportunities they offer
and especially when accompanied by theming. To a significant extent, then,
Disneyization connects with a post-Fordist world of variety and choice in which
consumers reign supreme.

Disneyization not Disneyfication

The term ‘Disneyization’ is a slightly clumsy one and is also somewhat unusual
given the preference of many writers and commentators to prefer the more
commonly used ‘Disneyfication’. My reason for preferring the alternative term is
that Disneyfication is typically associated with a statement about the cultural
products of the Disney company. To Disneyfy means to translate or transform
an object into something superficial and even simplistic. Schickel’s portrayal of
Disneyfication is one of the most comprehensive, as well as being representative
of the kinds of meaning typically attributed to it:

…that shameless process by which everything the Studio later touched, no matter how unique the
vision of the original from which the Studio worked, was reduced to the limited terms Disney and
his people could understand. Magic, mystery, individuality … were consistently destroyed when a
literary work passed through this machine that had been taught there was only one correct way to
draw. 7
Walz draws attention to similar components in his rendition of Disneyfication:
‘Often used pejoratively, [Disneyfication] denotes the company’s bowdlerization
of literature, myth, and/or history in a simplified, sentimentalized, program-
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matic way.’ Similarly, Ross writes about Disneyfication in terms of ‘a process
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of sanitizing culture or history’, while Wasko associates it with sanitization and
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Americanization.
For writers like these, the process of Disneyfication is one of rendering the
material being worked upon (a fairy tale, a novel, a historical event) into a stan-
dardized format that is almost instantly recognizable as being from the Disney
stable. In actual fact, this is not strictly true. So successful is the Disney company
at what it does, namely applying a distinctive template to stories and legends, par-
ticularly when making cartoon feature films that will then be marketed along