ABSTRACT
Several animated feature films that have recently come out of Hollywood employ linear notions of progress as primary motivators for their stories. These films tend to present circumstances, events, and desires as simply “human,” “ahistorical,” and “universal,” instead of particularizing them as “white,” “contextual,” and “Western” (or “American”), thereby neglecting o consider who or what must be left behind in the movement of progress. They also advance ideological assumptions concerning what it means to move forward at all. Whereas “progress,” as we shall argue later, is itself a racially fraught notion, within the ideologies supporting animated stories using this idea we also find elisions of race. That is, the very notion of race is rendered invisible or folded into these stories so that this notion becomes irrelevant to the stories being told. Thus, the idea of progress advanced by these films effectively neglects matters of race and historical inequalities by proceeding as if these problems never happened or by veiling them in ways that obscure their meaning.
