As much as we all hate paying $14 for a Mickey-shaped pretzel at Walt Disney World, it’s incredibly hard to dislike any one of Disney’s most iconic films. Shaping our collective childhoods in more ways than one, Disney’s movies remain some of the most imaginative films in all of pop culture, whether discussing a film as groundbreaking as Snow White or Fantasia as relatively modern as Frozen or Moana.
Given its near century-long existence, however, it’s safe to assume that even a company as world-renowned as Disney has seen its fair share of controversies over the years, especially when it comes to some of the studio’s more … let us say “dated” films. From early animated epics to mostly forgotten live-action films from the 1960s, here are several Disney movies that have aged horrendously in the decades since their release.
A film Disney has long hoped might be forgotten by the public, there’s a reason Song of the South isn’t streaming on Disney+, nor has it ever been released on home media. Offering up a stereotypical view of plantation life in the late 19th century American South, critics fervently called out Song of the South’s racist undertones almost immediately after its 1946 release. Since then, the movie has only continued to earn the ire of fans across the globe, with Disney quietly distancing itself from the film over the past seven decades.
A cherished classic in Disney’s canon, it’s impossible to measure the popularity of 1953’s animated film, Peter Pan. As universally beloved today as it was over 70 years ago, diehard Disney fans continue to hold Peter Pan in extraordinarily high esteem, often citing it as one of the studio’s very best films. However, it’s hard to ignore the movie’s cliched depiction of Indigenous Americans – something made all the more offensive by the movie’s musical number, “What Made the Red Man Red?” A thoroughly racist song through and through, every scene featuring Native Americans in Peter Pan is enough to make audiences wince and shake their heads in disgust.
A foundational film from Disney’s early history, there’s no denying Dumbo’s iconic place in the company’s expansive filmography. Yet, like the aforementioned Peter Pan, many contemporary fans take issue with the movie’s more disquieting depictions of racial stereotypes. Most obviously, Dumbo introduces a band of jovial crows that draws on numerous cliches around Black individuals – including a character named Jim Crow, a ghoulish allusion to the U.S.’s infamous segregation laws commonly found throughout the Southern U.S. Needless to say, when it came to Tim Burton’s 2019 live-action remake, the crow characters were removed from the film altogether.
In the years after Walt Disney’s death in 1966, the company struggled to produce animated films of the same high caliber as Snow White, Pinocchio, or Cinderella before it. Nestled among the studio’s ‘70s-era films, most people seldom mention The Aristocats in the same breath as Disney’s earliest films or their later Renaissance projects. As with several Disney movies of its era, The Aristocats also remains steeped in controversy for its insensitive depiction of Asian characters, as personified by the character of Shun Gon. Speaking in an exaggerated accent and using chopsticks to play the piano, literally everything about Shun Gon is offensive by today’s standards.
Another coveted Disney classic with underlying racist elements, Lady and the Tramp’s most troublesome characteristic can be found with the presence of Si and Am, the meddling twin cats who terrorize Lady halfway through the film. As with The Aristocats’ Shun Gon, Si and Am draw on numerous Asian stereotypes when it comes to their presence in Lady and the Tramp, whether looking at their exaggerated facial features or their outrageously thick accents. When it came time for Lady and the Tramp’s live-action remake, Disney wisely chose to replace the characters and their related musical number (“The Siamese Cat Song”) with a swinging jazz number sung by two Devon Rex cats instead.
Nowadays, most people probably remember Swiss Family Robinson more for providing the inspiration to the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse in Magic Kingdom than they do for its achievements as a film. Having mostly been forgotten by viewers in the six decades since its release, Swiss Family Robinson remains an enjoyable enough adaptation of Johann David Wyss’s classic adventure novel. However, it’s also difficult to look past the stereotypical portrayal of the film’s Asian pirates who appear near the very end of the film. Like many of Disney’s more problematic movies, Disney+ has since outfitted Swiss Family Robinson with an advisory notice warning viewers about the movie’s negative depiction of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, which is as offensive now as it was in 1960.
