Nah.

I'll preface by admitting I'm a WASP. And a male to boot. So I sit squarely in a sector of society that has done its fair share of throwing stones and probably has received far too few stones thrown in return. That said, I have some grievances with Ms. Christensen's article.

First, I believe she needs to carefully consider the audience whom she is claiming to represent. A good portion of the cartoons she considers in her article are not only outdated, they are virtual millennia apart from contemporary children watching cartoons -- even at the time of her work's publication. Popeye? Looney Tunes? For crying out loud. In between the time of these cartoons' original screenings and a contemporary audience have come six major U.S. wars, the Civil Rights Movement, and the onset of political correctness. Of course there are stereotypes in these cartoons. Of course they should be glaringly obvious to high school seniors and college students and hopefully even young children. But stereotypes weren't the exclusive domain of Popeye and Looney Tunes and Song of the South -- what about Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's? How about my grandfather who called the Asians he fought in WW2 Japs until the day he died? Cartoons were reflections of a culture, good or bad, but to say that cartoons had an unusually negative influence or that these particular cartoons are still having a substantial influence on contemporary children is preposterous.

Using such cartoons in studies such as this one leads me to my second beef: that Ms. Christensen is baiting her audience. It is easy to pluck cartoons and scenes to support the notion of gender and race stereotypes -- and I am not saying they don't exist. But cartoon storytellers must at least be given the benefit of the doubt in that a character's entire story arc must be considered. Yanking the market scene from Aladdin shows a girl in need of rescue. But considering Jasmine's entire character, she is a more complex character than that brief moment allows. Each cartoon examined by Ms. Christensen is ripe for the picking. To validate her claims concerning the genre, I wish she would have chosen some cartoons/movies that were a little more difficult to decipher.

Ultimately, Ms. Christensen is creating students that are as one-dimensional as the cartoons she lampoons. As one of her proteges proclaims: "I will never be reduced to a carbon copy of some fictional being." This type of thinking is as cliche as any Disney princess -- in fact, it is the tagline of many Disney princesses of the past twenty years (e.g. Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, etc). So much so in fact that Disney willingly divorced characters from their original contexts so they could embrace the same sensibilities as Ms. Christensen's student. Frankly, that's what concerns me more: we are so afraid of stereotypes that we are willing to redact and revise stories from their original culture and forms and ignore the historical truth that we do make generalizations about people. Disney is certainly not the first to do so and will not be the last.