On April 6, 2022, I fulfilled a childhood dream of touring Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank during a press event for the Sketchbook documentary series on Disney+. I’m not a Disney fanatic, but I have long respected their animation, and like most Americans, many of their films have been touchstones of my youth.
Unbeknownst to me, protesters gathered later that afternoon in Burbank to denounce Disney’s supposed embrace of a “gay agenda” and what they framed as a destructive approach to representation in media. At the time, the juxtaposition felt odd but almost incidental; two unrelated realities brushing past each other just as I trekked through. Looking back, I see how these dueling events epitomized the even more incongruous cultural battles to come.
Sketchbook is a misleadingly simple series. Each episode highlights an individual animator, some of them young and up-and-coming within the company, and has them tell their story alongside demonstrations of their craft. What I enjoyed was not just the technical skill on display, but Disney’s willingness to place its newer artists front and center and allow them to speak plainly about who they are and how that informs their work. There was no grand thesis delivered across the 6 episodes; just people explaining how their lived experiences shape the art they make. I don’t know how well the program was received (there has only been one season released to date), but it felt human and celebratory of the creators responsible for Disney’s iconic characters.
That humanity resonated in my household. My daughters, now eleven and nine, live with a foot in two cultural realms. They are fluent in the shared language of classic pop culture reflected by classic Disney films, but they are also beginning to interrogate who they are, how they fit into the world, and what it means to feel seen and part of our society.
Watching Sketchbook with them, they were first interested in using the program as a drawing tutorial, but were eventually drawn to the artists themselves. They loved learning that real people, many not much older than they could imagine themselves becoming, were responsible for the films that had shaped their early childhood. It made creativity feel accessible rather than ordained, and identity something to be explored rather than hidden. On screen, they could see someone and say, “That too could be me.”
I remain skeptical of corporate virtue and wary of how easily values can be reduced to branding. Disney has, at times, communicated its commitments with a candor that invites backlash and fatigue, even among those inclined to agree with the underlying sentiment. This is a giant corporation after all, and one does not have to look hard to find multiple examples of the company treating its creative class with disregard.
Representation alone is not a moral cure-all, and no child requires a perfect mirror to sympathize with others. Yet, dismissing the importance of visibility, especially for young people navigating our shared cultural landscape, feels willfully blind. In some pop-culture circles, creators speaking openly about their backgrounds are treated as a cover for weaker work. But celebrating the diversity of the creative pool does not foreclose imagination; it expands it for those still wondering whether there is room at the table.
Looking back, the protest outside Disney Animation that afternoon feels less like an odd footnote and more like an early marker of where we were headed as a culture. What felt at the time like a small argument over media and messaging has since grown into something much larger, a cultural fault line where art, identity, and politics rarely get the benefit of nuance. I think about that day often. About the optimism inside the studio and the anger just beyond its walls, and how quickly the distance between those two worlds has grown. It’s easy to dismiss cultural conflicts over cartoons and comics as insignificant. Yet they can linger, shaping the air our children grow up breathing, whether we intend them to or not.
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