Final Reflective Post

Taking this class has ultimately been a phenomenal learning experience for me. I’ve always wanted to approach movies with a more critical eye (for a long time I have said that if I could have a dream job it would be as a writer for Entertainment Weekly reviewing tv shows/films), and I feel like not only did this class serve as a better training ground for me to do that, but also helped me translate those criticisms to paper. 

In some ways, the fact that I took this class drives me crazy. I literally cannot watch anything Disney or children related at all anymore without paying attention to/groaning about the standard tropes and stereotypes that we see with regards to villiany, gender, race, etc...

That being said, I think this class was an excellent writing course for me to take. I definitely feel as if I have improved my writing skills overall. I also think the subject matter of Decoding Disney allowed me to maintain more of my own "voice" than other courses would have. I believe I am a relatively colloquial writer, as I love writing blog-foramted pieces, so our exploration of both popular and scholarly sources allowed me to push my limits without undermining a form of writing that I think is extremely valid and rapidly growing in our world. 

I loved getting to watch the Disney movies again and feel very nostalgic over the ones I watched as a child, or explore others that I had never seen before. I also feel so much more "cultured" in the fact that I am up-to-date on every Disney movie. Any reference, I have!

My favorite research that I did in class was what I felt emerged to be a pattern with regards to mothers and their depictions in film. I found their "erasure" across Disney movies to be fascinating, especially as I am in a Women in the Bible class currently, and so the connections in both classes on female depictions throughout history has made me much more astutely aware of this particular pattern. As a child growing up, I always would get so deeply emotional if a father figure in a movie passed away. Still to this day, I will likely bawl if something happens to the male guardian, but feel much less emotional (if at all), by something happening to the matriarch. I now believe that because of the gender stereotypes/expectations in our culture, and how we relay them onto film as a result, I have been conditioned to care about fathers more than mothers in movies. I think this is one of the greatest examples I can point to in saying that watching patterns across movies, even something as seemingly innocent as a Disney movie, can actually condition a person and create lasting effects.

I still love Disney and I still think some people can be hyper critical of it as a company. With that said, I am happy that I got this writing class because approaching things with a more critical eye, though maybe not as fun as any other innocent audience members, allows me to recognize patterns I wouldn't have before and discuss how we can improve upon them.