Known for being one of Disney’s non-musical movies (Ebert), Atlantis is an action-adventure cartoon about a group of explorers uncovering the mythical continent of Atlantis that sunk beneath the sea thousands of years ago and the natives who have lost much of their culture and learning after “The Great Flood”. Milo Thatch, the hero of the movie, a linguist and cartographer, wants to carry on his grandfather Thaddeus’s expedition but cannot get the Board members of the Smithsonian Museum (where he works in the boiler room) to take him seriously. He is later summoned to the mansion of Preston Whitmore, a close friend of his late grandfather, who brings him together with an exploration crew consisting of engineers, geologists, and archaeologists who unlike Milo, are actually after money rather than genuine interest. Like many Disney movies, there are numerous references made throughout the movie that children are unlikely to understand, some to events that were happening during the time-period that the movie is supposed to represent (in this case, the year 1914, the height of the colonial empires and the beginning of World War I), and some that play on certain stereotypes of gender, ethnicity and social standing, and are shown through the characters and their interactions with one another. These stereotypes are not just made apparent through the characters’ dialogue; the way that they are drawn and even the way their movements are animated are part of these references.
The White Characters:
The first thing that can be noticed is that all the white characters have the leading roles. By leading, I mean that they are the ones with authority and power. Commander Lyle Rourke is the leader of the expedition, and is the picture of masculinity and virility, having a large squared jaw and imposing physique, though he is later exposed as the main villain of the movie, a mercenary after the big money he is sure many nations would pay for the large, somewhat “alive” crystal that seems to be Atlantis’s main source of energy. Although he knows that taking the crystal away from Atlantis will surely kill all the natives, he is indifferent to the genocide he would be committing. Rourke’s second-in-command is Lieutenant Helga Sinclair, who is first surprises Milo in his apartment to inform him of Preston Whitmore’s interest in helping him. She is tall and blond, and no matter what she is wearing, be it the slinky black dress she is first seen in, or her exploration clothes, she is always made to appear sexy and provocative. She is the only female ‘leader’ in the group, but is always under someone’s command, either as Whitmore’s employee or as Rourke’s Lieutenant. Although Milo is the real leader of the expedition, being the only one possessing the knowledge to find Atlantis, he is disregarded and somewhat patronized by the rest of the characters at first, because of his ‘nerdy’ appearance. He wears big round glasses, and is scrawny as compared to the rest of the characters. His movement is somewhat awkward and clumsy although he turns out to be the hero who returns the crystal to its proper place and helps the people of Atlantis regain their lost knowledge, having studied their language for years. This is an instance where the hero does not fit the typical ‘masculine’ definition (Welsh) and is actually more brainy than brawny. These ‘leading’ characters have the least inflections in their accents as the secondary characters all have much more pronounced accents and diverse backgrounds.
The “Foreign” Characters:
The first of these secondary characters that we meet is Gaetan “Mole” Molière, a French geologist with a heavy French accent and curlicue mustache. He in fact looks like a mole (he is drawn as short, fat and dirty) and is the most excited when there is anything to do with dirt of digging. The stereotype of the “dirty French” is subtly introduced when Moliere hisses and backs away from a bar of soap that is brandished at him by another character. Another subtle joke is made when Milo accidentally disturbs the samples of dirt from different countries that Moliere keeps, mixing the dirt samples of England with that of France, which causes Moliere to exclaim, “England must never merge with France!”. The character that brandishes the soap at Moliere is Joshua Sweet, the crew’s physician. He is the movie’s only black character and although he is clearly educated, he still speaks with grammatical errors and a deep voice (“Me? I hate fish; hate the taste, hate the smell, hate all them little bones”) and he first appears wearing only pants and suspenders, revealing him as extremely tall and muscular, not unlike the image of the Africans of the plantations during the period of slavery and segregation in America. Another minority is represented through Audrey Ramirez, the chief mechanic. Though she is young and short, she is very tough and tomboyish, with a Spanish accent and a very blue-collar background. She tells Milo about her father who wanted boys, but instead got her and her sister. Despite this, she and her sister took on very male roles, with Audrey being a mechanic who helps her dad with his shop, and her sister being a boxing champion. She gets excited when she sees the natives of Atlantis have tattoos, which are adopted by many Latin gang members. There is also the character of Vincenzo “Vinnie” Santorini, the demolitions expert, who is an Italian, also with a heavy accent (that is actually quite difficult to understand at times) who speaks with a lot of gesture and movement, as most Italians actually do. At the beginning of the film, Whitmore says that he “busted him out of a Turkish prison”, which seems strange until you consider the tensions between countries that was going on at that time. Jebidiah “Cookie” Farnsworth is the crew’s chef who is portrayed as a typical redneck. He has an aversion to almost anything he considers outside the “four basic food groups”, which are beans, bacon, whiskey and lard. He has a scruffy beard, crooked teeth, wears a red checkered shirt and speaks with a very southern twang, and although he is the only one of the secondary characters who is American, he is very eccentric and peculiar. Although these characters are somewhat exaggerated, it should be kept in mind that this is a children’s cartoon, and cartoon characters are in fact meant to be exaggerated. It is also interesting to see this much diversity in a Disney cartoon, although the more foreign characters are portrayed as being very quirky, compared to the wealthier white characters such as Whitmore.
An incident worth mentioning, though it is simply one phrase, is one directed at the German government of the time, which was under the leadership of Kaiser Wilhelm, while Germany was part of the escalating tensions between the two main alliances of Europe. As the crystal is a very powerful energy source, Milo exclaims that Rourke is probably off to “sell the crystal to the Kaiser”, who was involved in an arms race against England at the time, and so can be viewed as slur against the Germans.
The Natives:
The natives of Atlantis are represented not unlike the American-Indians of Pocahontas. They seem to be their own ethnic group, all of them having dark skin and white hair, and are a somewhat primitive society whose tools still consist of spears and arrows, though before the flood that sank them beneath the sea they were supposed to have had advanced medicine and technology. Milo is actually the one who teaches them about their own culture and at one point during the movie, when he and the princess of Atlantis are rediscovering machines powered by the crystal, he says that he is “surprised [she] got this far” in a very condescending manner, asserting his sense of superiority. Although the natives of Atlantis speak many different languages, they cannot read their own and the princess looks to these white strangers as the salvation of her people, hoping they will be able to re-discover what the people of Atlantis cannot discover on their own. Although this particular detail is relevant to the plot, it still hints at the superiority of the exploration crew compared to the natives.
Conclusion:
Although the concept of Atlantis and its people is completely fictional, it does seem strange that the natives would be so reliant on the explorers for help. It could be seen that within the movie’s timeframe, the expedition crew are not unlike the European colonizers of the early 1900’s, but it should be kept in mind that Atlantis: The Lost Empire is fairly recent compared to older Disney movies where negative stereotypes are more obvious, such as the crows in Dumbo.
amychiniara 