Mouse Morality: The Rhetoric Of Disney Animated Film

Ward, Annalee R. Mouse morality: The rhetoric of Disney animated film. University of Texas Press, 2002. JSTOR. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.
In the article, Annalee Ward’s criticizes the interpretive frames used in the Disney animated film the Hunchback of Notre Dame, which are a “tragic frame” inherited from the original novel and a “comic frame” used to convert the novel into a life-affirming film (58). Her main claim is that the movies conveys a confusing morality by overlaying tragic dimensions with comic dimensions. To prove that the morality created is confusing, she analyzes from the perspectives of the intended audience and the attitudes of this film. Ward’s first sub-claim is that the film has obscure audience. She addresses Mary Elson’s response

to the movie that “not only is the film more for adults than children but also that this movie may be inappropriate for all ages” (61).

The evidence is while children are not likely to be entertained by the adult theme contained in the film, most adults would not watch this film since it is “G”-rated. The combination of comic and tragic genres pleases neither children nor adults. Ward’s second sub-claim is that the films conveys a mixture of attitudes as each frame reflects a distinctive moral vision. The evidence is that at the end of the film, although the comic frame depicts Quasimodo as being accepted to create an upward direction, the tragic frame indicates that Quasimodo is still the “other” as he remains disfigured and doesn’t get the girl he loves. Ward reveals that the unclear attitudes contradict with the theme proposed by the screenwriter Irene Mecchi, which is “judge not the outcast, for he may possess the greatest worth,” since the movie actually argues on behalf of the outlook since Quasimodo is still a tragic figure who suffers from his

physical disability. Ward’s warrant is that a film has to have clear and well-organized dimensions to express morality to the audience.
The author of the article, Annalee Ward, is the director of the Wendt Center for Character Education at the University of Dubuque.

She mainly studies communication studies with a focus on media and ethics. The article is forwarded by Clifford Christians, who is one of the world’s leading scholars studying ethics in media and human dialogue. Having teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1974, he is also a visiting scholar at Princeton University and is a Pew Program Fellow at Oxford University. Christians has received more than 25 honors and awards for his research in the field of ethics. Since Ward and Christians are both honorable scholars of ethics and media, the article can be considered credible. Also, the book is published by University of Texas Press, a well-known press which publishes scholarly books in areas like anthropology, Native American studies, and film &media studies. Ward’s purpose of writing this article is to add the moral and cognitive domains into film studies and to criticize Disney films as a moral educator. The intended audiences are scholars in the field of ethics and film studies, parents, and educators who need to obtain critical understandings towards the content of Disney films. However, one bias is that the article was published in 2002, so their research of morality in Disney films is only limited and represented under the cultural and social context at that time. Since more than ten years has passed, the entertainments

for children tend to become more complex and more adult-like. The mixture of morality in both comic and tragic frames might be less unacceptable for children nowadays than for children in 2002.
The confused morality emphasized by Ward in this article provides me with a new perspective about the cruelty towards Quasimodo contained in the film. She focuses on the tragic and comic dimensions imposed on the figure of Quasimodo, which deepens my understanding to my topic. The disability-related stereotypes of Quasimodo is utilized in this film to convey morality to the audience, which means that it is the representation of disability not the character Quasimodo himself that matters. This article of Ward and the article of Martin Norden both criticizes on the contradiction of the Disney animated film the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Ward illustrates the conflict between the moral visions conveyed through the comic and tragic frames. Norden reveals the inconsistency between filmmakers’ discrimination towards disabled people and their purpose to decrease prejudicial attitudes through their creation of Quasimodo’s figure. Their claims complicate each other by increasing dimensions, since Ward discusses both tragic and comic dimensions contained in the content of the movie, and Norden expands the discussion to the producers outside the movie content. So I will combine these two articles to provide evidence for my claim.