A Mickey Mouse kind of Europe: representations of Europe at Walt Disney World

Abstract:

While Disney is often characterized as the embodiment of American culture, other narratives intersect and thrive within the Disney universe.

This is particularly true when it comes to Europe, a place from which many of the Disney legends were originally derived. This work explores the physical interactions between Disney and Europe to be found at Orlando’s Walt Disney World. I propose that Disney challenges our idea of Europe by extracting traditional European tropes and resituating them in highly unorthodox contexts.

Simultaneously, Disney has embedded itself within European space in a way that brings into question numerous facets of Europe’s authenticity via both pathways, the verisimilitude between the real and imagined Europe bears the potential of fundamentally altering our understanding of Europe itself. This work seeks to problematize Disney/Europe and interrogate how perceptions of Europe from beyond its borders inform Europe’s identity and might even have a bearing on its cultural evolution in our era of globalization.