Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 29

Racism in Disney's

condescend to sing and dance to their music, and have a "swingin'"
fist-fighting "party" with them (reminiscent, perhaps, of the white
man's traditional forays into Harlem). But Baloo will not at all
recognize kinship with them in the way he does with, say,
Bagheera, whom he engages in good-natured repartee throughout
much of the film and finally embraces in fraternal camaraderie.
Indeed, although Bagheera asserts that "Birds of a feather should
flock together," both he and Baloo seem to draw the line much more
rigidly with regard to King Louie and the monkeys. It is, for
example, much less clear that bears must remain absolutely separate
from panthers. When Bagheera rhetorically asks, "Would you ever
marry a panther?" Baloo in a lighthearted and tolerant vein
responds, "No panther ever asked me," implying that the proposition
would be neither distasteful nor offensive. It is not, therefore, the
idea of marrying outside his species that Baloo finds repugnant per
se. However, one cannot imagine Baloo ever considering interspecies
marriage with a monkey, whom he regards in general as "flat-nosed,
flaky creepis]" (a flat nose is yet another stereotyped feature of
African-Americans). For Bagheera, too. King Louie is utterly a
"scoundrel," and the monkeys are simply "undesirable." Bagheera
grimly ponders, "I hate to think what will happen when he [Mowgli]
meets that king of theirs." In effect, the monkeys are pariahs.
Disney further denigrates King Louie and the monkeys
cinematically by exploiting the subtleties of movement in The jungle
Book. For example, the first time Disney presents the monkeys,
several of them are in a tree above Mowgli and Baloo, who are
playfully floating down the river toward the right of the frame. The
camera cuts to the monkeys watching them above, and as it does, it
slowly pans to the right, giving the impression that the monkeys are
moving to the left. This is significant in identifying them visually as
antagonists, for, as Louis Giannetti argues, "Frequently the
protagonists of a movie travel toward the right of the screen, while
the villains move toward the left" (79). Indeed, although Baloo and
Mowgli have been peacefully headed to the right and toward the
safety of the man-village, or civilization, the monkeys violently
interrupt their progress and dominate the ensuing scenes with
connotatively negative leftward movement. For example, when
Baloo sees Mowgli hanging precariously by the foot at the mercy of
one of the monkeys, Baloo moves to the left to rescue him. Then