"Don't make eye contact, it'll just confuse the both of you."

For the two or three readers (out of my imagined seven or eight) who may not know by now, I manage a small video store in Seattle. Recently I recommended a new Disney release, "Secret of the Magic Gourd" to one of our regular customers. IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0496386/

When she brought it back I asked her what her kids thought; she said (more or less), "They didn't like it because all the people in it are Chinese".

Now, I'd like to give her younglings the benefit of the doubt and assume they just had trouble relating to an all-Chinese cast, or maybe that the movie didn't work for them on some level (for the record, I liked it, but I'm a 39 year old manchild with a penchant for pretty much all & any Oriental films).

But looking at the cover I realized Disney seems to have designed it to specifically hide the Asian aspect. Just a boy's mouth & nose on the front cover, and just his back on the, er, back (okay, to be fair, there is a picture of his face on the back cover, but it's printed so small it's not immediately obvious).

I could just be reading too much into this, but I've seen enough DVD covers to notice this clunky nonstandard framing. Plus, it's not as if Disney can claim a completely guilt-free corporate conscience.

I'm sure there's no way to ever get any confirmation from Disney, but let's just assume it was an intentional obfuscation. That means this DVD cover speaks volumes about racial issues, and perceived racial issues, and corporate 'morality', and our consumption-based society, and the psychology of advertising to that consumption-based society, and so on, and so on....