Neoliberal Exclusion and the Fantasy of Competition: What are Children Learning fromMonsters University?

Echoes of Our Favourite Childhood Figures

“…As our results confirmed, in today's booming entertainment industry, what we choose to do in our free time beyond fun has a decisive role in the light of every situation, presenting a different experience and opportunity to learn and deepen one's character (Crossan et al, 2016). Following Greeley (2018), Utami et al (2020), Indriati et al (2021), we proved that these tales could serve an important educational role, especially during the early 'golden years'. These early experiences and images from Disney might fade with time but will hardly be forgotten.…”

“…All this aligns with the conclusions of Bryman (1999), Giroux and Pollock (2010), and Wasko (2020) regarding the way big multinational companies like Disney, with carefully planned (marketing) strategies, are slowly taking control over increasingly larger slices of our lives, 'Disneyfying our society'. Compared with the few research studies in this field (Greeley, 2018;Indriati et al, 2021;Utami et al, 2020), the novelty of our research is that we examined a series of Disney films (both classics and remakes) while using implicit and explicit methods combined. These explicit and implicit measures also shed light on Disney's educational potential (dreams, values, decisions, and consequences).…”

“…Consequently, Disney's potential role in our character education is not a brand-new discovery. Previously researchers found several fundamental values and norms in the case of cartoons like 'Monsters University' (Greeley, 2018), 'Finding Dory' (Utami et al, 2020), and 'The Good Dinosaur' (Indriati et al, 2021), which, through repetition, can be transferable to the target audience. However, it must be mentioned that these studies focused on a single Disney story using qualitative content or textual analysis methods.…”

“…Nowadays, popular fiction, especially Disney, stands as a vital machine in creating, reflecting, and reinforcing social values and norms as fictionalised and dramatised portrayals regularly displayed on the screen can easily form the base of our perceptions. In addition, nearly all forms of media have the power to write -rewrite (and deliver) different cultural messages (Greeley, 2018). Correspondingly, Disney being one of the primary sources of ideological and cultural knowledge, could result in a malformed, misshapen worldview, especially among the young ones affected at a critical age.…”

Best friends forever – really? The group of friends as the ideal model of sociability in children’s animations

“…Moreover, this article suggests that the intensifying friendship ideal seen in children's animations reflects the contemporary adult-world fear of exclusion rooted in neoliberal economic insecurities (cf. Greeley, 2018).…”