An original film from the Walt Disney Animation Studios, “Raya and The Last Dragon,” is a bit better in this regard: it encourages modern audiences to project their own dreams onto a new set of old folktales. But its impact is blunted by the fact that it, like so many others today, is both in theaters and on Disney+.On the other hand, it’s easy to see why Disney might feel the need to play it safe right now. Over the past few years, the company has faced multiple instances of cultural backlash, usually from the left this time: concern over the portrayal of minority characters in “Aladdin,” the canceling of the Chinese launch event of “Mulan” after the lead actress voiced her support for the police in Hong Kong, pushback against another significant character’s revelation as gay. As Disney has become larger and more corporate, something pivotal about the stories it tells has gotten lost. To put it in the language of folklore, its magic is going. So we get more of the same, re-offered with the corporate equivalent of a mic drop. It’s hard to watch, at times, the company that once shaped a universal language speak a different one — one that isn’t necessarily new or inclusive or specific to this moment in time. The Disney of today, with its world-devouring appetite for acquisition and media, doesn’t look like the one that Eisenhower admired or the one that I pined away to buy VHS tapes of in the early 1990s. That Disney was shelves upon shelves of stories, fresh for the telling, brimming with potential.
The empire of stories left by Walt Disney certainly interacts with the mythologies of these past few years, but in the end, it may be that we need new mythologies themselves. America’s part of this grand folklore — ugly and beautiful, divided and striving — needs stories that respond to our current reality, and that encourage us all to reach a brighter today. It may be that the Disney we know, that our parents loved and that made so many childhoods better, is aging. But the folklore wasn’t about him. It was nearly always about us. And we might have to become our own heroes in order to write our own future.