Educação e cinema: crítica à domesticação da memória em filmes de animação dos estúdios Disney

Abstract

The scope of this thesis is to highlight the pillars of the cultural industry that support the production of the narrative and the type of memory conveyed by the animation films of Disney studios. In addition, it is based on the critical theory of society, mainly on the concept of cultural industry, coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2006) in dialogue with Walter Benjamin's concept of memory. Supported by the hermeneutics of film narratives and allied to Walter Benjamin's dialectical philosophy, this research analyzes the three animations of Disney Company's greatest: The Lion King (1994), Frozen (2013) and Zootopia (2016). To this end, three explanatory hypotheses are developed. The first considers that Disney Company is a “dominant voice”, whose discourse, supposedly universal, tends to produce in the viewer an uncritical and alienated memory of social reality. The second hypothesis highlights the ideological (naturalizing) aspects of Disney studios' animated films. Linked to the bourgeois ideology, they convey a concept of totalizing memory that rejects particularities, constructs the universal from the fetish of happiness (bought) artificially produced and sustained in the appearance of social phenomena. The latter hypothesis states that the Disney business conglomerate contributes to the reproduction of the dissolution of the memory of local the culture. In this perspective, this thesis that happiness, sold by Disney, sells the viewers' senses, as it makes it difficult for the public to realize that its cultural policy prescribes what must be remembered and forgotten is supported. Hence, mediated by its animated films, it perpetuates the naturalization of the social and historical asymmetries empirically visible in social inequality. Once consumed and assimilated, through the aesthetic narrative of the animations, an uncritical memory has been reproduced. Thus, under the mask of happiness, these films suggest what the contours of life in society should be like. They implement a kind of a “memory domestication”, which tends to inhibit and repress the process capable of breaking with the continuum of history and with the “progress” of capitalism, which does not cease to accumulate destruction. Finally, although Disney presents itself as a business conglomerate in the globalized entertainment market, this fact does not exempt it neither from social responsibilities, nor does it reduce the chances of inquiring about its filmography, given its presence in formal and non-formal educational spaces