More inclusive stories mean better stories at Disneyland
One of the humbling things about writing for a living is discovering that people don’t always understand your words in the way you intended them. Ultimately, stories come alive not on a page, a stage or a screen, but in a consumer’s imagination.
That’s why thoughtful creators — whether filmmakers, authors, theme park attraction designers and even newspaper columnists — try to imagine their audience’s reaction when they work. To do that, though, you have to make some assumptions about who the audience for your work is. Not only that, if you want your work to endure for generations, you must anticipate who your audience one day will be.
Many years ago, Imagineers at Disney — like many other creative professionals in the entertainment industry — made a bad assumption about their future audiences. And that’s why Disney is working now to rewrite two classic Disneyland attractions.
But Disneyland’s decision to revamp Splash Mountain and the Jungle Cruise isn’t just about marketing to an audience that has grown more diverse over the years. It’s a recognition that storytelling is evolving as the world grows smaller, and that tropes and shortcuts that previous generations of storytellers employed can evoke very different reactions from modern audiences.
The first assumption that creators make about their audience is that people’s time and attention are limited. Anything you can do to keep a story moving helps keep your audience’s attention. One primitive way of doing that is to use stereotyping when establishing characters.
Creators might get away with that when the audience does not include or know anyone in the communities being stereotyped. But as soon as someone who knows better feels empowered and enabled to call out that stereotype, its use no longer speeds along the creator’s story but stops it in its tracks. People’s attention moves from the story to the shortcut.
That’s what happened with Jungle Cruise and Splash Mountain, where racist depictions and a connection with the sordid history of minstrelsy distracted many fans from the stories that a previous generation of Imagineers had wished to tell. But eliminating stereotypes is just the first step toward more inclusive — and effective — storytelling.
I suspect that a lot of storytellers who employed stereotypes in generations past thought they were being inclusive. After all, they were including representatives of another community in their work.
But representation is not inclusion when it offers nothing more than an outsider’s view of another’s community. True inclusion represents and respects voices from within those communities.
True inclusion gives us more and better storytelling, at no more cost than setting aside the lazy and primitive storytelling shortcuts of the past. As a fan, I can’t wait to see, hear and experience more inclusive stories. I hope other Disneyland fans feel the same.