There seems to be a small trend growing on Youtube.com to make multilingual mosaic-like soundbytes in scenes from different popular movies. Last night, I stayed up til 1am watching song scenes from Disney films (particularly from Pocahontas and Mulan) in such 'multi-language' formats. "Colors of the Wind," rendered in Korean, Japanese, Thai, Cantonese and Mandarin for its 'Asiatic' rendition, for some reason or other moved me considerably. It's one of the few times I've tasted a small bit of the beauty in a diversity of spoken languages, even through such a simple form of media.
Yet I was also naturally inclined to later reflect on the significance of the ethics concerning such an international corporate business as products of Disney fall under. Movies and songs like these had a substantial influence on my moral upbringing when I was quite young. That such stories and imagery of popular American film industry are now passed on to the youth of a plurality of nations worldwide, in their own respective languages, bids one consider the content, the messages, imbedded in them. (The same bidding is made by any widely distributed media production generated within the scope of the world's nations' majoritarian perspectives.)
Etically (as opposed to emically) speaking, is it not possible that the world's young are all being raised under primarily Western (more specifically American) moral guidance in this way? Naturally, if you believe in the possibility that such media reflect overarching (or perhaps deeply underlying) universal emotions and portrayals of the human psyche, one must still ask why America is the number one selling producer of it. Is it just that Americans can afford to make so many? India makes hundreds (if not thousands?) more movies per year, but who is familiar with anything of theirs beyond their Bollywood productions (whose genre itself derives from the far more renowned American Hollywood)? How have such American film media grown so popular in the first place, such that merchandise of major corporations like Disney are now in place all over the world via everything from daily stationary to theme parks? Is it just because the stories' messages are universally good, as some would put it? Is it the quality of the production? Isn't it odd how despite more historical and even more artistically moving alternatives, it continues to be corporations like Disney that take most of the international spotlight?
(If nothing else, consider the biases in the storylines and plot changes in these movies. I was rather surprised, for example, to read that Mulan had been originally written as the tale of a Chinese girl whisked away from a life of oppression in her country by a British prince figure who introduces her to the Western world... Big red flag.)
By now, of course, we can no more say that such stories and forms of education media haven't become a part of these nations culturally speaking than that a Japanese seafood dish isn't a part of my anatomical person after having ingested it. It can't be argued that those in foreign countries watching these films are any less touched by some of the content than we Americans are. Regardless, however prone to swells of emotion we might be when listening to such 'childhood classics,' it would be a sign of ignorance not to regard such matters more steadfastly, wary of the possibility (what I'd argue an overwhelming probability) of a moral monopoly we're creating for our future global generations, extending far past even as huge an industry as Disney. After all, it is the world's children we're talking about here, not just yours and mine.
