What Kids Learn When All Cartoon Bad Guys Have a Foreign Accent
Last year, after a lot of confusion on the Internet, it was confirmed that Scar and Mufasa from The Lion King are indeed brothers . I’m glad this is resolved. Now the only headache left is: Why the hell does Scar have a British accent when no other lion has one? Was he educated at any British boarding school for lions? Do you watch a lot of British feline movies? Most likely, the reason is this: filmmakers often use foreign accents and non-standard dialects to voice “bad” characters.
Isabelle Fattal explores this phenomenon for The Atlantic with an analytical article, “Why Do Cartoon Villains Speak with a Foreign Accent?” Scar, Dr. Heinz Dofenschmirtz in Phineas and Ferb, Jafar in Aladdin , the evil king in Disney’s Robin Hood are just a few examples of the “bad guys” she talks about. This is one of those things that I have always paid attention to, but never paid much attention to them. Fattal argues that parents should do this. Whether we know it or not, with every decision to make a film, cultural biases can arise. And the children catch them.
Sociolinguist Calvin Gidney, who studied language models in animated children’s entertainment with Tufts professor Julie Dobro, explained to The Atlantic that while foreign accents in films vary, the common denominator is “the binary distinction between” like us “and” not like us. ” … … “Gidney told Fattal that in The Lion King, ” I thought it really bothers you to ‘take the jungle’ away from the British-sounding evil lion and the African-American and Hispanic-voiced hyenas. “
Fattal writes:
Research has shown that from Scar to Jafar Aladdin, the British accent is the foreign accent most commonly used for villains. German and Slavic accents are also typical for the voices of the villains. The villains’ henchmen or assistants often spoke dialects associated with low socioeconomic status, including Eastern European working class dialects or regional American dialects such as “Italian-American gangster” (for example, when Claude in Captain Planet says “tuh-raining” instead of “Learning.”) None of the villains in the sample studied appeared to speak Standard American English; when they did speak with an American accent, it was always in regional dialects associated with low socioeconomic status.
Fattal explains that since “television is an important source of cultural messages for children” (ie many people watch an absurd amount of it), the ratio of foreign accents to villains “can have profound implications for how children are taught to interact with diversity. In the United States. ”Gidney and Dobro are doing further research to figure out exactly how.
In the meantime, parents can know that these models exist and tell their children about them. Watch the show together and ask questions. Here are some ways to make screen time informative for kids and empower them to explore what they see and hear.
Why do cartoon villains speak with a foreign accent? | Atlantic Ocean