Let it go?: Towards a “Plasmatic” Perspective on Digital Disney

The received narrative commonly shared among – and fostered by – critical and popular accounts of Walt Disney’s feature-length animated canon frequently returns to a particularly durable “tale as old as time” seemingly hard-wired into the historical legacy of the studio. Whether Marxist polemic or pragmatic social critique, and wedged between both populist accounts celebrating Disney as children’s entertainment and politically-radical criticism that partakes in “the fashionable sport of Disney bashing”, the ongoing theoretical engagement with the Disney universe has afforded sustained prominence to the Disney formula.¹ In its role as a structuring principle that carefully controls Disney animation’s formal and ideological