Moments after Red Riding Hood enters the house, she screams. In it, Red Riding Hood travels to deliver sweets to her grandmother along the way, she meets a grinning man in a fancy automobile, who then speeds ahead, lecherous smile unswerving from his face, to her destination. Disney’s Little Red-Riding Hood, for instance, transformed the fairy tale into an analogue of sexual predation.
BETTY BOOP CLOTHING SERIES
Six years before Mickey’s debut on the screen, Disney was producing a series of grainily animated retellings of classic folktales with Laugh-o-Gram Films between 19, some of which featured more pronounced harassment. In such small ways, Hollywood’s earliest cartoons reflected the commonplace nature of the harassment that would soon come to define the industry. The cartoon depicts its womanizer as a buffoon who, after Minnie’s rejection, comically crashes his eponymous plane, yet the casualness with which Mickey decides to force romance upon a female character is disconcerting. In Mickey Mouse’s first cartoon, “Plane Crazy” (previewed in 1928, the same year as “Steamboat Willie,” the more successful cartoon that cemented the mouse’s popularity), Disney’s anthropomorphic icon acts quite differently from how he does today: while taking Minnie on a ride in a makeshift airplane, Mickey gestures to Minnie to kiss him multiple times, and, after she rebuffs him, he simply grabs her and forces her into a kiss, a common trope of harassment in cartoons. Nowadays, Walt Disney’s best-known animated features often serve as stereotypical icons of “family-friendly” entertainment, but some of Disney’s older projects depart from that image.
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