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The topic that I want to look at is Walt Disney's Cinderella's influence on children's perceptions about love and romance.
Junn, Ellen N. “Media Portrayals of Love, Marriage & Sexuality for Child Audiences: A Select Content Analysis of Walt Disney Animated Family Films.” Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. Washington, D.C. 4 April 1997.
This paper presents a content analysis that looks at the portrayals of love, sex, and marriage in several romantic and nonromantic Disney animated films, including both older and newer romantic films. Results found that male and female characters engage in “typical” gender roles – that is, male characters engage in more active love-related roles, while female characters are more passive when it comes to love. Over time, references to marriage and weddings in the films have remained relatively stable, though they slightly decrease in more recent films. Females were not featured as much in the films as were males, except in romantic stories. Both male and female characters engage in stereotypical conduct – females exhibit passive behaviors such as giggling and coy posing in order to attract male attention, while males exhibit more outward behavior, such as kissing the hand of a lady, fighting for the love interest, and other assorted chivalrous actions.
This analysis is useful for examining the topic that children may be influenced a great deal by the film Cinderella in terms of ideas about love and marriage. In fact, one of the older romantic films analyzed is Cinderella. Though this does not measure children’s responses to these images and themes, it is useful to think about the sorts of messages about love and marriage that children are receiving in Disney films such as Cinderella. Through these movies, children may have the capacity to learn about various social behaviors, including engaging in romantic relationships, since as the study points out, parents often do not discuss love and romantic related issues with their children until adolescence. As a result, it is very possible that they learn about love and relationships via the media, and as the study points out, Disney films are so ubiquitous that they may have a great effect on children’s perceived notions about love and romance. Thus, this study points out the many types of romance-related behaviors that a child may pick up from watching a Disney film, including Cinderella.