Conference Agenda

How many times have you heard “Let it Go” from Frozen (2013)? From their animations to their songs, Disney Princesses have become enshrined in American culture through rewatched movies, kids’ sing-alongs, and the toddler tendency to press the “repeat” button on their favorite track for hours on end. More specifically, catchy tunes like “Let it Go” and “When Will My Life Begin?” (Tangled, 2010) introduce us to each princess: who is she, and what does she want? Ideally, these princesses must be “strong female role model[s] for modern girls” (Leader 2018). But what portrait of femininity is really painted in these princess songs?

In this paper, I analyze vocal timbre, lyrics, and images in Mandy Moore’s performance of Rapunzel in Tangled, arguing that Moore “actively shaped” (Eidsheim 2009) her voice into a modern version of Disney damselhood. Her portrayal is hyper-feminine and submissive— rebellious and independent—all at the same time, juxtaposing feminist and antifeminist ideas of selfhood. Furthermore, Disney’s portrayal of femininity in Tangled reveals contradictory expectations for women in film and in real life, recently epitomized by America Ferrera in Barbie (2023): “You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean… you’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not [too] pretty.”

In discussing voice and gender, I synthesize existing scholarship from feminist, music, and media studies. My work is situated in the vocal persona, the sonic embodiment of a singer within a song, and I consider how lyrics, timbre, and social constructs interact with each other in Moore’s vocal performance (Malawey 2020, Nobile 2022). Ultimately, Moore’s Rapunzel represents the “double entanglement” (McRobbie 2004, Gill 2007) of postfeminist girlhood in the early 2000s.

I conclude that Disney perpetuates outdated, misogynistic “myths” of gender (Smelik 2007) through Rapunzel’s characterization in Tangled. Listening with such a critical lens exposes the internalized misogyny that still underlies popular media today. Despite her rebellious, adventure-seeking attitude, Rapunzel cannot truly be a strong female role model until she is disentangled from postfeminist gender expectations.

This paper challenges the visual emphasis on anime characters as the structural foundation of Japanese anime analysis, moving attention from visuality to voice in suggesting that fans' aural imagination is central to synthesizing anime’s transmedial elements. Scholars of anime studies widely identify the images of characters as the connective tissue of the international, collaborative, and multimedia production of anime goods since the 1990s. With characters’ visuality as the basis for contemporary anime production, Japanese cultural critic Azuma Hiroki (2002) proposes “database consumption,” an influential theory that analyzes the structure of Japanese popular media. He argues that characters and their goods are generated by combining and reproducing a database of moe (or cute) elements, such as big eyes and maid costumes. While this framework recognizes some fundamental elements circulating in anime production, Azuma’s visual-centered analysis considers anime fans’ affective experience of moe as a passive reaction to static and separate visual stimuli.

In integrating my ethnographic fieldwork in Japan and North America with multilingual virtual ethnography, I propose voice as an analytical center that emphasizes the agency of fans in connecting and shaping anime’s transmedial elements in their affective experiences. This paper focuses on the affect of “kyun” – the momentary feeling of your heart skipping a beat – and how fans pursue it through listening to anime voices. While the visual presentation of moe is overstudied by anime scholars and primarily serves a male audience, kyun is an understudied affective expression popular among a female audience, often provoked only by anime voices. The anime voices provided by seiyuu (voice actors/actresses), who rose as celebrities in the 1990s, are often detached from characters and disseminated through music albums, radio, drama CDs, etc. As fans listen to these anime voices across multimedia platforms, they imagine and connect various visual, sonic, and narrative elements in anime as well as those from their own lives to complete their ideal romantic or kyun encounter. This case study of listening to kyun explores fans’ aural imaginary worlds, contributing to discussions in sound studies and voice studies about the intersections of affect, desire, and fantasy through listening.

In the 1962 television feature Disneyland After Dark, Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory and other veteran New Orleans musicians reunite to play some “good old good ones” aboard the Mark Twain riverboat. As dancing waiters distribute (non-alcoholic) mint julep to a large, multi-generational audience, we witness what Down Beat called “the improbable spectacle of Walt Disney [acting] as a godfather to traditional jazz”. Since its opening in 1955, Disneyland had featured New Orleans jazz, beginning with a house band of Disney animators, the Firehouse Five Plus Two. From 1961, banjoist Johnny St Cyr, famed for his 1920’s recordings with Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, led a band of fellow old-time musicians, the Young Men from New Orleans, in nightly performances. Meanwhile, an annual Dixieland at Disneyland festival attracted bands, young and old, from across the country, including mixed-race groups from New Orleans, unable to perform together at home.

This paper explores the mutual attraction of Disneyland and Dixieland, from 1955 to 1970, in the context of a revival of traditional jazz that was especially strong on the West coast. Ever since Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz Band first imitated King Oliver records in pre-WW2 San Francisco, New Orleans musicians found a home from home in California (Levin 2000). As the revival helped to secure a place for them and their city in jazz historiography (Stearns 1956), a burgeoning tourist industry endeavored to construct “New Orleans jazz” not as a time that was past but as a place one could visit. If Preservation Hall’s establishment in 1961 is one sign of that movement (Teal 2021), Disneyland’s first major extension, in 1966, was more prominent: a large-scale replica of New Orleans’ French Quarter, complete with iron-lace balconies, Creole restaurants and evocative jazz venues (Souther 2006).

Drawing on oral history, reception texts and assorted media, I examine the tension between the preservation of tradition and the evolution of musical practice in the heightened environment of a theme park. Disneyland, I argue, at once helped to cement New Orleans jazz’s place in American history, and moved it to the register of myth—if not fantasy.