Reviews
Abstract
Rethinking Disney: Private control, public dimensions Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch, Middletown, CO, Wesleyan University Press, 2005, 360 pp., $27.95 (paperback), ISBN 0-8195-6790-6, $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8195-6789-2 'What is more universally reviled among cultural critics today than Disney?', asks Stacy Warren in her contribution to this volume. 'From virtually every theoretical position - whether neo-Marxist, postmodern, deconstructionist, postcolonial - it is almost taken for granted that anything the company does will result in a blandly homogenized sugary-sweet fa ade masking the ruthless and fundamentally undemocratic corporate activities and policies that are its underpinning' (231). This collection of essays is no exception: it develops and extends the lines of that by now established branch of mass culture analysis called 'Disney Studies', which can be said to have its origins in Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique of the 'Culture Industry' (which includes a short paragraph on animation) and comprises works such as Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's How to Read Donald Duck , Alan Bryman's The Disneyzation of Society , Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells' (eds) From Mouse to Mermaid , and Susan Willis' Inside the Mouse . The development of mass culture and the enormous growth of