You, The Musical Animal: Humanity According to Disney

In Disney’s educational short film You, The Human Animal (1955), Jiminy Cricket teaches children that humans are, in fact, animals. However, as he sings in the opening song, humans are “a very special breed” because they are “the only animal who can think, who can reason, who can read.” His song sets the stage for an eight-minute manifesto on human exceptionalism. Jiminy Cricket rhetorically asks whether his young viewers know that they are animals, just like giraffes, hippos, and tigers, before quickly adding that humans are a “special kind” of animal. Some animals may see or hear better, and some are stronger, but humans are “different” because they can “think.” Thanks to our “natural intelligence,” we can even “train and make use of animals for [our] own benefit.” Unlike other animals, which are driven by natural instinct, humans uniquely possess rationality, enabling them to build dams, skyscrapers, and spaceships – in effect, to dominate the world.

In addition to rationality and language, Jiminy Cricket identifies a third defining trait that separates us from other animals: music. While acknowledging that “a bird may sing better than a man,” he asserts that such a feathered singer “lacks the intelligence to read music or form words” [from 2:05]. When he is interrupted by a parrot saying “Polly wants a cracker,”, Jiminy notes that Polly can merely “imitate sounds.” Music, by contrast, is creative rather than imitative, and thus sets the human animal apart from other species.

The idea that music belongs exclusively to humans is rarely articulated explicitly. Instead, it tends to be taken for granted. This assumption is implicit, for instance, in the disciplinary structures that place musicology within the humanities – fields that, as the name suggests, study human culture rather than animal nature. By explicitly linking music to humanity – and, moreover, by asserting that music is one of the defining features of the human, in contrast to the animal – You, The Human Animal foregrounds the question of human exceptionalism in musical terms. Are humans truly the only animals that make music? Is the human animal somehow “different” precisely because of this musical ability? And does this musical distinction, alongside language and rationality, make the very term “human animal” seem like an oxymoron?

By simultaneously breaking down the human-animal boundary and asserting that, at least musically speaking, the human animal is nevertheless “different,” You, The Human Animal inadvertently demonstrates that the human-animal distinction is not a biological fact but a cultural construct. More specifically, the film exemplifies how this distinction is constructed through popular culture, entertainment, and education (or through what A. Bowdoin Van Riper calls Disney’s “edutainment” [2] ). In this article, I explore the role of music in this conceptual construct of the human-animal divide, arguing that the film’s rhetoric is grounded in Eurocentric conceptions of both music and humanity. In addition, I juxtapose Jiminy Cricket’s argument about the human-music nexus with the often unacknowledged and questionable assumption in academia that only humans possess music.

I should note that in this article, I do not attempt to define music – or humanity, for that matter – nor do I claim that nonhuman animals perform music in the same way that humans do. Instead, I argue that the idea that music belongs only to humans is a relatively recent, culturally situated idea perpetuated by both Disney and academia. I should also note that, in analyzing the musical human-animal divide, I am not concerned with the intentions of Walt Disney, film directors, voice actors, or soundtrack composers. While Disney’s filmmakers may have been aware of the ambivalent and at times highly problematic ways in which they constructed human-animal distinctions, I focus primarily on how the didactic rhetoric of their work relies on and simultaneously questions implicit assumptions of human exceptionalism. Therefore, throughout this article, I refer to ‘Disney’ as the studio that produced the films, rather than to Walt Disney the individual, except where he is mentioned by his full name.

In the first section, I situate the rhetoric of You, The Human Animal within broader claims of human exceptionalism and Disney’s ambivalent stance on this matter. In the second section, I analyze the musical distinctions through which You, The Human Animal normatively defines the human in terms of white men, and I argue that similar racialized musical distinctions recur in films such as The Jungle Book (1967) and The Little Mermaid (1989). In the third section, I position Disney’s connection between music and humanity historically, arguing that it is rooted in a nineteenth-century Eurocentric ideology that, although discredited by recent scholarship, remains pervasive in the humanities. In the fourth and final section, I compare Disney’s human-animal distinctions with the culture-nature binary that underlies the disciplinary structure of the humanities as opposed to the natural sciences. In conclusion, I propose that, in light of the environmental crisis, the humanities need to continue shifting their focus from celebrating human artistic exceptionalism to critically examining how the arts are used to distinguish humanity from animals and nature.

Wax is not alone in his discomfort with this film. In a recent academic article about the tensions between evolutionary theory and orthodox Christianity, Joshua M. Sears recalls that when watching You, The Human Animal as a child, his parents would quickly turn off the TV because “we believe in Adam and Eve.” [4] Judging by the experiences of Wax and Sears, Jiminy Cricket seems to have made a highly provocative statement in 1955 that some viewers are still grappling with more than half a century later.

These statements by orthodox religious scholars may seem highly reactionary by academic standards, but they actually represent just the tip of the iceberg of a widespread reluctance to accept our animal nature. As Melanie Challenger observes in How to Be Animal (2021), “it’s blindingly obvious that we’re animals and yet some part of us doesn’t believe it.” [5] Indeed, while our biological kinship with other species is usually acknowledged in scientific contexts, in everyday language we nevertheless continue to speak of ‘animals’ as if they are, by definition, nonhuman. Even if we know that, physically and cognitively, Homo sapiens is much closer to a chimpanzee than a chimpanzee is to a cricket, we still lump all nonhuman species into a single term that sets them apart from us. It is precisely this ‘animal’ concept to which the philosopher Jacques Derrida so firmly objects in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), where he argues that using the term animal to refer to the immense variety of nonhuman beings is a form of rhetorical violence that problematically justifies the routine, industrialized killing of other species. [6]

The idea that all nonhuman beings, from a butterfly to a brachiosaurus, can be subsumed into the singular concept of the animal is a culturally situated product of modernity. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “animal hardly appears in English before the end of the sixteenth century.” [7] Professor of English literature Laurie Shannon observes that in Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre, despite its menagerie of nonhuman beings, the word animal appears a mere eight times; and when it does, it usually refers to human anomalies rather than to the miscellaneous collective of other species. In Shakespeare’s time, authors would instead use more specific categories, such as birds, fish, and beasts (livestock), rather than assuming that they all belonged to a single realm that is distinct from humanity. In the following decades, the human-animal divide emanated from Descartes’s famous “I think, therefore I am” thesis. As Shannon argues, this maxim separated humans – “who alone were equipped with a rational soul” – from all the other creatures. Accordingly, “before the cogito, there was no such thing as ‘the animal’.” [8]

Generally speaking, Disney’s animated films adhere to the Cartesian human-animal distinction. However, Disney’s message about this distinction is highly ambiguous, as exemplified by You, The Human Animal. This ambiguity partly derives from the studio’s use of anthropomorphism. As Nicholas Sammond notes in his book on the early pedagogical philosophy of the company, Walt Disney had outspoken views on how to convincingly anthropomorphize animated animals. He did not want the animal characters “to ape human beings in an illogical way,” but rather “to caricature humans in a way that is natural for them to act.” [9] As Sammond argues: “Paradoxically, then, Disney’s creatures were to be anthropomorphic, but in a way that would not violate their essential animal nature.” [10] The anthropomorphized cricket in You, The Human Animal clearly illustrates this paradox. At one point, he explains that humans’ ability to speak relates to their unique possession of a chin, before stroking his lower jaw and noticing that he lacks a chin, because he is “just a cricket.” Nevertheless, he is able to speak. Thus, while self-consciously recognizing a crucial difference between humans and crickets, specifically with respect to their linguistic ability, he paradoxically requires that very same ability to articulate this difference.

In addition to Disney’s animated anthropomorphism, the narratives of the studio’s films also frequently question, but ultimately maintain, the human-animal distinction. Starting with Snow White (1937), Disney has often romanticized a harmonious coexistence between humans and other animals, as David Whitley points out in The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (2008). Many Disney films suggest a seemingly natural kinship, proximity, or blending between humans and other species, especially in stories set in exoticized contexts, such as The Jungle Book (1967), The Little Mermaid (1989), Pocahontas (1995), and Tarzan (1999). Yet even in these settings, humans ultimately appear fundamentally ‘different.’ In The Jungle Book, for instance, Mowgli is successfully raised by wolves in the jungles of India. Growing up, he wishes to stay with the other species and detests the thought of ever living with humans. To prove that he can assimilate with the jungle animals, he constantly mimics their behavior, trying to climb a tree like a panther, roar like a bear, and fly like a vulture. However, he never fully succeeds in becoming animal-like. As Whitley argues, Mowgli’s animal imitations represent a “desire for closeness” while simultaneously emphasizing “the critical importance of differences between the various species.” [11] Indeed, despite Mowgli’s initial objections, the film’s final scene shows him moving to a human village, because – as the panther Bagheera underscores – that is “where he belongs.” The end of the film suggests that, although at times we may wish to be animal-like, ultimately our kinship with other species is nothing more than a childhood fantasy.

While the visual and narrative dimensions of Disney’s ambivalent human-animal distinctions have received critical attention in academic debates, the musical articulation of these distinctions has been largely overlooked. In the next section, I analyze how Disney’s human-animal divide is manifested through musical means. ut also through music. This article examines how music relates to ideas of human exceptionalism.

A playful paradox in You, The Human Animal that is difficult to ignore is that, while the film asserts that only humans can perform music, its opening song is sung by a cricket. Apparently, Disney cannot live up to its own ideals of human distinction. Indeed, Disney’s films exhibits an extraordinary diversity of species with musical capabilities, from the multi-instrumentalist mouse in Steamboat Willie (1928) to singing mushrooms in Wish (2023). In what sense, then, does You, The Human Animal claim that music is exclusive to humans?

Another question lingering behind the previous one is: what does Disney mean by “music”? How is it defined? Why would birdsong, produced by a creature that “may sing better than a man,” not constitute music? Jiminy Cricket offers a brief but clear answer to these questions. According to him, a beautifully singing bird lacks musical competence because it cannot “read music.” This argument is visually supported by a songbird staring confusedly at a classical score [2:10]. Through this emphasis on reading as a defining feature of musical competence, the scene reduces music to the European classical tradition of predominantly written rather than oral transmission. And, Disney suggests, specifically that music sets us apart from other species.

Jiminy’s musical Eurocentrism corresponds to the film’s visual representation of humanity. When he sings in the opening song that “the only thinking animal is you, you, you,” each you is synchronously represented as a white child [from 0:40]. The images simultaneously reveal the intended audience of this film as well as what Disney understands to be fully human. Indeed, besides these three children, every human character in You, The Human Animal is also normatively drawn as white, except for a caveman with a slightly darker complexion [from 3:15]. The image of this caveman serves to illustrate human development, from primitivity to civilization. However, in this argument, the film conflates humanity’s historical and evolutionary development with a question of cultural difference. In contrast to the white and seemingly European and American characters in this film, the brown caveman lives in a desert-like environment rather than, say, in the colder climate of the Ice Age (which would explain why he encounters a mammoth). Consequently, the scene frames the difference between the primitive caveman and ‘modern man’ chiefly in geographical, cultural, and ethnic terms, rather than historically. The background music of the scene reinforces this visual suggestion. Whereas the image of the caveman is musically supported by an ‘oriental’ flute melody, the white men are symbolized by an active march-like tune and hunting horns. [12]

By confusing humanity’s historical development with cultural or ethnic distinctions, Disney adheres to the idea of unilineal evolution, the nineteenth-century Eurocentric belief that different cultures represent distinct stages of progress, from savagery to civilization. In the musical contexts of the 1950s, this idea appears clearly in the authoritative ten-volume The New Oxford History of Music (1957), of which the first volume is notably subtitled Ancient and Oriental Music. [13] By explicitly associating “oriental” music with “ancient” times, this volume conflates historical and cultural differences. As Edward Said argues in Orientalism (1978), European colonial powers rhetorically used stereotypes of the Orient as “fixed in time” to claim that the modern, white, middle-class Westerner, “unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.” [14] You, The Human Animal appropriates this Orientalist stereotype in its narrative about different degrees of humanity. The film implies that the ancient-exotic caveman stood somewhere between human and animal, and that he was still dominated by (other) animals – he is chased by a mammoth – whereas modern white men can rule over physically stronger species thanks to their superior intelligence [from 4:15]. To be fully human, Disney suggests, our racially coded animality must be overcome.

While You, The Human Animal relies on racialized stereotypes when musicalizing the human-animal boundary, similar representations recur throughout Disney’s films. For instance, in The Jungle Book (1967), the ape King Louie proclaims in “I Wanna Be Like You” that he wants to “be like” a human. To this end, he performs a song that imitates Black American popular music, with a swing rhythm, syncopation, prominent brass, trumpet solos, blue notes, scatting, and call-and-response interactions. The musical style of this ‘animal’ song contrasts sharply with the classically oriented ‘human’ music of the film, most notably the song “My Own Home,” performed by a young girl with whom Mowgli falls in love. Similarly, in The Little Mermaid (1989), Sebastian the crab famously sings “Under the Sea” to define the animal world sonically in terms of Caribbean calypso, a style historically associated with the Black working class of Trinidad. By contrast, the white mermaid Ariel, who wants to become human, sings “Part of Your World” in a Broadway musical style with symphonic accompaniment to indicate that she does not belong to the animal world. As Megan Condis argues in an article on the racialized representations of Disney’s princesses, in musical terms, “the world that Ariel longs to leave is not just the undersea world or the animal world. It is the non-white world.” [15] A third example of Disney’s sonically racialized human-animal distinctions is offered by Mulan (1998), in which the sole speaking animal (the dragon Mushu) is the only character voiced by a Black American actor, Eddie Murphy. Mushu was originally supposed to perform the only song in the film inspired by Black popular music, the jazz number “Keep ‘Em Guessing,” but this was omitted because Murphy refused to sing. [16]

In its recent slew of live-action remakes, Disney has substantially revised the narratives and music of its animated films to address critiques of its stereotypical representations of race and gender. Thus, the 2016 remake of The Jungle Book recomposed “I Wanna Be Like You” to remove its problematic imitations of African American music. In the 2023 remake of The Little Mermaid, the lyrics of “Kiss the Girl” were altered to emphasize that Prince Eric requires Ariel’s consent before kissing her. At the same time, the original film’s racialized musical contrast between human and animal remains intact, again suggesting that the Caribbean-inspired music belongs to the natural world. In addition, three new songs in the remake strengthen the association between animals and historically Black genres: while a seabird raps a hip-hop track, Ariel and Eric perform two new human songs in mainstream Broadway style. Although the remake has been praised for its racially sensitive casting, [17] Disney still delineates its racialized human-animal distinction musically.

Consequently, from Pythagoras until well into the eighteenth century, the academic study of music did not belong to what we now anthropocentrically call the ‘humanities.’ Instead, it belonged to the quadrivium of the liberal arts, alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy – which we would now describe as exact or natural sciences. [23] These fields of study were distinguished from the trivium, which consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, focusing on linguistic and cognitive features that were recognized as belonging exclusively to humans. The study of music did not enter the human-centered domain of academia until the end of the nineteenth century, when musical works – or rather, a select group of works composed by white European men – were understood as products of genius minds (Geist in German, geest in Dutch) that could be historically and hermeneutically studied. [24]

Paradoxically, the disciplinary attribution of music to humanity roughly coincided with Darwin’s theory of evolution, which challenged the human-animal distinction – even if, according to Darwin, musicality should be viewed as a characteristic of all the species. [25] Arguably, precisely because of Darwin’s theory, which suggested that we were animals ourselves, it became necessary to find new ways to articulate humanity’s distinction from the animal world, and music – specifically in its Eurocentric definition – provided one of the academic means to do so. [26] But if we acknowledge that humans evolved through the same evolutionary principles as other animals, what grounds do we have to assume that only we possess the capabilities necessary for making and enjoying music? Without invoking a divine creator, why would music be a trait unique to just one among the millions of species on Earth? Wouldn’t it be more plausible to assume that at least some other animals also perform music, even if we are unable to comprehend their forms of creative cultural expression? [27] Of course, if human music is taken as the normative standard for music in general, other animals inevitably fall short in their degree of artistic competence – we don’t expect a snail to convincingly play the piano – but such rhetorical gestures merely reinforce tautological definitions of both music and humanity, rather than enhancing our understanding of either. Fortunately, recent scholarship has refuted the musically constructed human-animal binary by demonstrating the cultural and creative capabilities of other species, especially whales and birds. [28] So, can we now perhaps again emancipate music studies from the humanities? Shall we follow Darwin or Jiminy Cricket?

In November 2022, a performance of Verdi’s Requiem in Amsterdam was briefly interrupted by a climate activist who drew attention to the environmental crisis. Addressing the audience directly, the activist compared them to the first-class passengers on the Titanic, where “the orchestra calmly played on” as disaster unfolded. [29] The reference to the Titanic’s string ensemble, which famously continued playing as the ship sank, serves as a poignant metaphor for the environmental indifference that predominates in elite Western culture. At the same time, the incident provokes an uncomfortable yet urgent question: how does music relate to the environmental crisis?

At first glance, a human art form like classical music might appear entirely unrelated to environmental concerns, yet this perceived disconnect is precisely the problem. In an article provocatively titled “Did Music Cause the End of the World?” (2020), J. Martin Daughtry considers the relationship between music and environmental catastrophe. He argues that music, by perpetuating notions of exclusivity, reinforces the anthropocentric belief system “that places humans outside and above all that they are not, that conceives of humans as special, and ‘nature’ as separate from them.” [30] This human-nature dualism not only constitutes an ontological fallacy that contradicts evolutionary theory, but it also contributes to “the quintessential problem of our time” by justifying “resource extraction, greenhouse gas emission, monocultural food production, [and] environmental toxification.” [31] Although Daughtry does not address the role of popular culture in shaping ideas of human exceptionalism, films such as You, The Human Animal exemplify how music is used to assert humanity’s separation from nature.

Like music, the academic study of the arts that are considered uniquely human – the humanities – does not occupy a detached position from sociopolitical and environmental concerns. For instance, as Said argues in Orientalism (1978), historians and anthropologists actively contributed to colonialism by portraying the East as less developed than the West, thereby authoritatively claiming a cultural superiority that legitimized foreign domination and exploitation. I propose extending Said’s critique to another form of ‘othering’ that is foundational to the humanities: the assumption of human superiority over animals. As noted by Brett Mills, by producing authoritative knowledge about music and other arts, “the history of the humanities can be seen as an ongoing project attempting to evidence the superiority of the human.” [32] To put it crudely, the humanities are to adults what You, The Human Animal is to schoolchildren: a cultural playground for exploring who ‘we’ are, what makes the creative human so exceptional, and what distinguishes ‘us’ from the uncreative ‘them.’ After Darwin displaced God by demonstrating that humans are, in fact, animals, the humanities provided a new toolbox to justify humans’ exploitation of others. And today, in the midst of an environmental crisis, the humanities continue, in Disney’s spirit, to analyze humanity’s distinction from nature, without recognizing that this very distinction has caused that crisis.

So, should we quit? Should we abandon the humanities in favor of occupations that directly contribute to sustainable technologies and biodiversity? Perhaps we should, just as the musicians on the Titanic would have been more helpful if they had used their wooden instruments as life buoys – they could have saved lives. However, if we recognize the role of the humanities in shaping our perceptions of human-nature relations, it should also be possible to mobilize that capacity for more constructive ends. Scholars in the humanities are not trained to develop new technologies or preserve biodiversity, just as classical musicians are not typically equipped to serve as lifeguards. But we are trained to analyze the impact of human cultural products on how we see the world and ourselves; that is, to analyze how our culturally constructed worldview, created by figures like Descartes and Jiminy Cricket, deceptively sets us apart from nature. Indeed, as the musicologist Aaron S. Allen convincingly argues, the environmental crisis is not the result of bad science and bitter politics; “the environmental crisis is a failure of culture.” [33] If the human-nature distinction is not a divine or biological fact but a creation of our arts, media, and education, then scholars in the humanities are uniquely equipped to dismantle this belief system and offer historical and cultural alternatives. In this sense, the humanities are now more necessary than ever – if we set the right priorities.