Phoebe Hemenway Legere
Female Binaries:
the Domestic Imperative and Tonal Constructs
in the Music of Walt Disney's Cinderella .
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excerpt:
Walt Disney was a politically conservative capitalist patriarch. Ronald Reagan was one of his best friends, he was anti-Union, he testified in front of the House of Unamerican Activities, and he industrialized creativity. At the same time, this "ordinary man who did extraordinary things" was a genius. Disney restored to splendor the crippled pantheism of a pre-literate age. The spectator of Cinderella enjoys vicarious pre-industrial fun: fireside tales, chants, magic animals, shamanism and shared song. Disney restored the vanished pleasures of collectivity to a myth-starved, war shattered American bourgeoisie.
The songs are hackneyed, formulaic, harmonically shallow and melodically anemic. They flunk the test of time. But the animators and film score composers, working in a familial and collegial atmosphere, triumphed over bad songs, 50's ideology and the hegemony of the Symbolic Order. Perhaps in spite of themselves, the all male team that created Cinderella conjured an animated, meta-patriarchal diegesis that re-invigorates the timeless power of the Great Mother in a Matrixial dreamland:
Download the complete article from NYU Feminist Film Music Theory and Aesthetics Library