They're Gonna Sing the Songs Anyway: Thinking and Teaching With Theory and Disney Music for Social Studies

In the Disney classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney et al., 1937) the princess sings: “Some day my prince will come/Some day we’ll meet again/And away to his castle we’ll go/To be happy forever I know.” Princes, princesses, and happily ever after form the foundations for many animated films in the Disney pantheon. In this study we investigate the ways in which the characters in four feature animated films both challenge and perpetuate heteronormative, colonial, and racist conceptions through song. The four films featured in this study—Princess and the Frog (Del Vecho, Musker, & Clements, 2009), Tangled (Conil, Howard, & Greno, 2010), Brave (Sarafian, Andrews, Chapman, & Purcell, 2012), and Frozen (Del Vecho, Lee, & Buck, 2013)—were all lauded at the time of their release as films that challenged the “traditional” narrative featured in many Disney films. That is, each film received notable attention from mainstream media outletsarguing they thwarted traditional princess tropes ever-present in early Disney films (Asher-Perrin, 2015; Barnes, 2009; Hains, 2012; Konnikova, 2014). However, with closer examination we find these films and songs are still vehicles of the heteronormative, racist and colonial messages we have become accustomed to in feature-length animated films. In what follows, we provide a reflection on how we arrived at this topic, a brief review of relevant literature related to teaching with film in social studies, Disney, and an overview of our theoretical and methodological journey. Then, we provide several suggestions for lacing social studies content with critical media literacy skills in K–12 social studies classrooms.