As part of their experimental film series Short Circuit, Disney released a short title "Reflect" about an overweight little girl named Bianca doing ballet. Bianca "battles her own reflection, overcoming doubt and fear by channeling her inner strength, grace and power."
The short was directed by Hillary Bradfield who also directed Frozen II and Encanto. In the intro to the short she says,
"Sometimes you go to the dark place to get to the good place. And that just makes the good place that much more beautiful."
The video is six-minutes long, but there is one minute of interviewing the director and three minutes of credits, so Bianca gets roughly two minutes of screentime while she dances and sees broken images of herself in shattered mirrors.
The most common response to the film is that this is Disney's new body-positive heroine, at least that's what all the headlines read in the media. While I think overcoming adversity, even of the self-inflicted sort, is admirable, I'm not sure it's heroic per se.
At this point, conservatives are supposed to talk about health issues with the body positive movement, which is certainly a concern, but I'm going to go a different route if you'll permit me.
The thing that bothers me about this short isn't that it is promoting self-confidence for overweight girls; it's what the director says at the beginning of the short.
Bradfield says,
"Setting the story from a dancer's perspective seemed just natural."
There are two things wrong with this statement:
First, the reason why there are not a lot of overweight dancers out there, has nothing to do with body positivity. A dancer that sticks with the art, like the one in the video, will naturally lose weight. Dancing burns a ton of calories.
Perhaps some overweight children are shamed out of ballet school because of their body type, but if they stick with it, their body type will change. Body type is not immutable like skin color.
Secondly, I find myself questioning why the director thought overweight ballerinas seemed natural: in other words, when thinking about overweight women, ballerinas popped to the forefront of her mind.
Could it be because Disney has been down this road before?
In one of the most iconic scenes of the movie Fantasia, ballerina hippos dance the "Dance of the Hours" with grace and confidence. The short is played as a comedic parody of ballet as a female hippo crushes her male crocodile counterpart when she jumps into his arms.
Maybe I'm just cynical at this point, and it was an unconscious choice on Bradfield's part, but it's such an iconic Disney scene, I have a hard time imagining there wasn't some allusion to it in the planning of this short and some intentional wrecking of Fantasia's juxtapositional humor.
Overall, "Reflect" is not a bad short. It's just unfortunate that there is so much intentional baggage in everything Disney produces these days. It is certainly admirable to overcome your own hang-ups about body image, but anything today's Disney touts as "heroic" makes me super suspicious about their ulterior motives.
