My Disney Love/Hate has nothing to do with consumerism, exploitation or body image. I guess I'm weird.
When I was in my teens i dug into folk history and tradition. I took the time at about 15 to read the Iliad and the Odyssey (Abridged/english) and I dug into Aesop and Grimm. And I was shocked. There were people killing kids all over the place. Princesses cutting off each others' feet. Grannies eaten by wolves and so on and so on. All the versions of these things I had seen were nothing like the original texts - and the deeper I dug, the more inconsistent the cartoons and stories I had seen were.
Then I realized - most of the folk history I had been referred to in my nursery years had been vetted through Disney. This was the three little pigs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kT2Kt8TVPU I had it in a read-along-record book (You'll know its time to turn the page when tinkerbell rings her bells, like this <CHIME>) that we played on a mickey mouse record player. I had never picked up on the postwar nuances (note the pigs uniforms and the machine gun actions). In fact, the Disney version was the only version I knew of so many stories. Cinderella, Snow white, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and so on.
As I read, I learned that Disney had tweaked nearly every story to sell better or be more palatable to the parents they were marketing to. And I hated them for the inaccuracies. I mean if hundreds of years ago kids could hear about other kids being carried away by faerie folk, chopped up, eaten by bears and wolves, beating each other, etc. then surely we could handle it in the '70s. (I love what the Waterboys did with Yeats' Stolen child for instance - this is how a great children's tale ought to be told, although its hardly marketable to 5 yr olds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg-oJKYIinQ)
But now I sortof like them for the marketing. I mean, yeah, they've corrupted nearly every story line they've touched (including historical stories like Pocahontas) but they have also managed to salvage an entire history of folk stories - or enough of the meat of those stories that we can go search for the rest of the story if we want to. The question is, how many people actually want to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when Disney has made it into an exciting film? or Winnie the Pooh (a treasure of a book that they absolutely saved while absolutely destroying) etc. etc. In my head when someone says they love a classic story and immediately quote Disney, it says, I liked this movie, but I know nothing of the story, and can't be bothered to learn. (A great example here is The Hunchback of Notre Dame - its so much work to read that book, and the movie is soooo easy!!!)
So I hate Disney. I hate them because they take fantastic children's lit, cheapen it down to the crappiest most saleable junk they can mass produce, and then spew it out for the masses. But while I hate them I love them. I love them because 5% of the millions of people who go to watch 'Song of the South' will take the time to look up the stories by Uncle Remus, and maybe visit his cottage in Atlanta. And that will spur them on to ask questions about why the slaves needed those stories and what they were really about, and then maybe they'll realize that that bear was really a characterization of a group of people, and that a briar patch wasn't just a bramble. And then maybe they'll learn a little more about their own history. At least I hope so.