The D-Files Part 3: Disney the Killer of Dreams

Like every member of the Disneyana family, Walt Disney has always been a part of our lives. The first movie I ever saw was Mary Poppins. There was nothing more exciting than our annual trip to Disneyland. I watched anything and everything Disney. I’m old enough to have watched re-runs of The Wonderful World of Disney, hosted by the man himself, Walt Disney. Hell, I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on the company. You’re welcome.

For me and many others, working for Disney and being a part of Walt’s grand legacy was the dream. My first post-college interview was with Disney Studios (didn’t get it). Living in Orange County, I know more people who worked for Disney than those who didn’t. What was a dream decades ago has now become a nightmare. Though the change in the wrong direction happened long before Bob Iger fired John Lasseter, it was at that moment the corporate and office culture at Disney made a turn for the worse and became a toxic environment where the inmates ran the asylum.

Killer of Dreams

In the last D-Files, I showed how outside sinister forces got their foot in the door at Walt Disney Animation, beginning with Raya and the Last Dragon and under the banner of #MeToo and gender equity. Rather than naturally developing female and minority talent, Disney, under the leadership of Jennifer Lee, chose to force 50/50 equity at the studio, like Mickey Mouse cleaning up the Yensid’s laboratory in Fantasia.

“The result of this ‘wish’ may have destroyed the animation industry in America in one fell swoop.”

The result of Lee’s “wish” may have destroyed the animation industry in America in one fell swoop. The unintended (or some would say intended) consequences of her actions were the creation of a toxic work environment where everyone is walking on eggshells and intent on shoving out veteran talent and ushering in an army of activists dead set on transforming the company in a way that Walt Disney himself would not recognize.

New Tainted Blood

Previously, I touched on the nature of the new blood brought into Disney Animation, like Maleficent’s Goons. Since that article, new information has come to light that will illuminate who these new artists are and where they came from. I referenced The Female Lead’s filmmaker panel from Raya and the Last Dragon, particularly a statement from Head of Story Fawn Veerasunthorn regarding the hiring pool.

When she addresses how she got her job at Disney, she states, “I didn’t grow up in the big city, and I think with the change of internet and social medias [sic], I think the youngest generation will benefit from being able to see the work that millennials, like me, put out there on social media platforms and for us to be able to see a variety of talents [sic] who’s putting their work out there. That kind of changed the landscape of the hiring pool.”

Instead of hiring formally trained artists from traditional institutions like Cal-Arts, Disney (with the help of Women in Animation) explicitly recruited from social media sites, including Tumblr and Reddit—a fact confirmed by numerous sources.

To be clear, Tumblr was not inherently problematic. Most of my contacts used Tumblr to host their portfolios and included links to the site on their CV. What mattered was that your social media profile checked the right boxes (i.e., “female” and “not White”). Today, that box has revised to “female-presenting.”

One source said as long as gender quotients in hiring were being met, “it didn’t matter what your experience was, as long as your ‘stuff looked good’ you can work for Disney Animation…and any animation studios—Paramount, Dreamworks, Netflix, Warner Bros, etc.”