“Public Enemy Number One!” Music and Mosquito Sound in Disney’s The Winged Scourge (1943)
摘要
This chapter examines the sonic representation of mosquitoes in Disney’s short education film The Winged Scourge, created for U.S. and Latin-American audiences. It argues that the ‘mickey-mousing’ of the mosquito during the film’s first act is used to evidence the insect’s apparent ‘eradicability’ in the fight against malaria. However, in the film’s second act, diegetic noise replaces music’s denotation of the mosquito; here, the separation of mosquito sound from music neutralises the insect’s previous musical domestication, reminding the film’s audience that, despite the mosquito’s eradicability, proper action is yet to have been taken against it in the realisation of utopia. The chapter ends by considering the significance of the Othered mosquito in the context of the U.S. Good Neighbor Policy and asks how we might begin to account for alternative hearings of The Winged Scourge’s mosquito that may have resisted the asymmetrical relations of power the film seeks to inscribe.