Cultural Diplomacy and Disney's Appeal Abroad

I am still a little confused about the driving force behind cultural diplomacy and whether it is a coordinated effort by the government or simply a consequence of one country’s culture interacting with another. For example, there has been discussion in class about the ‘Korean wave’ and how the Korean government has sought to expand the demand of its cultural industries abroad. Although done for economic reasons, this cultural expansion abroad has led to increasingly favorable views about Korea in surrounding countries. This stands in stark contrast to American pop culture, which is primarily promoted by large, American multinational media conglomerates that produce cultural products in the U.S. with the express intent of selling the same content abroad. Thus, these media conglomerates facilitate cultural diplomacy by distributing American cultural products all around the world. Whether this has led to favorable views of the U.S. or not is debatable, but what is important is that the U.S. government has been largely hands-off when it comes to promoting American culture abroad.

Putting this issue aside for the moment, I would like to comment on one of the articles we had to read for last week. I thought the article pertaining to the movie, Mulan, was particularly interesting because it shows how multinational media conglomerates like Disney repackage other’s cultures for American (and others) consumption. In the case of Mulan, Disney took a Chinese myth, applied some Disneyfication, and produced a brand new story that blended several facets of American and Chinese culture. And, while the article focused on this blending of two different cultures to produce an entirely new cultural product, I found Disney’s Mulan movie an example of the company’s earlier attempts to produce a cultural product that could appeal to universal values.

I think it is interesting to note how the most famous Disney movies today are produced by Pixar, which, with the exception of The Incredibles, uses characters that are not human. By removing people from the equation entirely, I see Disney taking its original goal of trying to make a universally loved product to a whole new level. Sure many of the locales and stories have an American flavor (the movie Cars comes to mind), but the fact that they utilize non-human characters makes them just that much easier to love by a diverse group of people. This is relevant to the debate that came up at the beginning of the class which talked about values as being relative or universal. Given Disney’s success and its use of non-human characters, then, I would argue that Disney has found certain universal values that it can market to throughout the world.