Cultural Otherness and Global Communication in Walt Disney Films at the Turn of the Century

Abstract This paper describes the main strategies by which cultures which are distant in time and space are depicted in a selection of Disney animated films produced in the 1990’s. Specifically, the language component of such films as ‘Aladdin’ (1992) and ‘Hercules’ (1997) is used to observe the representations of cultural otherness, together with the projection of western stereotypes and American values depicted in them. This descriptive study draws upon the semiotics of cinema and intercultural studies to analyze the three main strategies used in the original versions and in their subsequent Italian translations. The author shows that, in the case at hand, the main difficulty lies in translating the “narrating” (i.e. American) rather than the “narrated”, remote, culture.