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The startling success of Disney animation prompts the perspective for this essay, which explores both a political-economic and cultural studies approach. Understanding Disney animation helps clarify the intimate relationship between ideology and socio-economic practice, (Rickel, 1996;Wasko, 2001). Investigating the construction, content, and persuasive efficacy of animated Disney fihnsreveals that Disney consistently and intentionally selects themes in its commodities-asanimated features that promote an ideology useful to Disney and capitalist society, but at odds with democratic, creative communities. Of course, valid arguments may be made that audiences construct their own varied meanings, often in contradiction to those intended by the producer, but this essay is concerned primarily with the content of the messages constructed and distributed from the entertainment producer, because of Disney's standing in popular culture. Moreover, because social groups use "mass-mediated 'words and images" to create and sustain social relations" (Ricker, 1996, p. 42), in a society ostensibly committed to democracy, it is particularly unsettling to find that Disney's animated features simultaneously soften and distribute messages of class hierarchy and anti-social hyper-individualism.

A complete international political economy connects transnational media structures with programming content demonstrating themes and ideologies that promote transnational capitalist social relations, including consumerism, individualism, deference to authority, and a dampening of citizenship. Series melodramas, known internationally as telenovelas, does not appear as a cultural or media response by Latin American cultures resisting American imperialism, but as a hybrid genre articulating popular consent for transnational capitalist hegemony.