Snowfall, Nostalgia, and the Moment Disney Stopped Feeling Safe

On a cold Saturday afternoon, as snow fell in that quiet, persistent way that makes the world feel suspended, I did what so many of us do when winter presses in: I reached for comfort. Not the kind that demands effort or attention, but the kind that comes prepackaged and familiar. Something animated. Musical. Something that promised warmth without asking much in return.

I opened Disney, or rather, what Disney has come to represent in our collective imagination: innocence, nostalgia, safety. A place where stories are supposed to be harmless, where the moral universe is clean, and where whatever tension exists will be neatly resolved before the credits roll. I wasn’t looking to be challenged. I wanted to disappear for ninety minutes and come back unchanged.

I chose Rio.

The film begins brightly, loudly, joyfully. Colour spills across the screen. Music pulses. Brazil is rendered as movement and rhythm, a place defined by spectacle and sound. But almost immediately, beneath the celebration, there is an act of violence so normalized it barely registers as such. A baby blue macaw is abducted. Crated. Removed from his homeland. Separated from his ecosystem, his community, his purpose. He is meant to be sold, trafficked, reduced to an object.

The story does not pause here. It cannot afford to. That violence exists only to propel the narrative toward something it deems better. Trauma becomes backstory. Harm becomes necessary setup.

Blu’s life changes when an American woman from the intervenes. The film frames this moment as salvation. He is rescued, taken home, cared for. The camera softens. The tone warms. Safety has arrived.

But what kind of safety requires the loss of agency?

Blu is renamed. Confined. Domesticated. He grows up warm and fed, but profoundly disconnected from who he is. Most strikingly, he cannot fly. Birds fly. This is not symbolic or optional; it is essential. Flight is autonomy. It is survival. It is identity. Yet the film treats this loss as a harmless quirk, even a virtue. Blu is nervous, cautious, polite, obedient. These traits are framed as endearing, relatable, good.

From a critical lens, it is impossible not to notice what is happening here. Blu is rewarded for assimilation. He is praised for being manageable, for not resisting, for learning to exist comfortably within the confines set for him. His fear is not treated as the result of trauma, but as his personality. The cage disappears, but the conditioning remains.

Blu exhibits all the signs of learned helplessness, a trauma response that emerges when autonomy is repeatedly denied. Over time, fear becomes internalized. Independence feels dangerous. Dependence feels safe. The film never names this. Instead, it asks Blu to overcome it as though it were an internal flaw rather than an imposed condition.

His bond with his caretaker is framed as love. Loyalty. Gratitude. But the power dynamics are never interrogated. Blu’s survival depends entirely on her. His world is shaped by her choices. His fear of independence is read as affection rather than a symptom of prolonged dependency. The story never asks whether Blu had the freedom to want something else. Care is allowed to eclipse control. Kindness absolves harm.

When Blu eventually returns to Rio, the film frames the experience as cultural whiplash. He is too restrained now. Too fearful. Too American. Brazil is vibrant but chaotic, emotional but dangerous, beautiful but unruly. It exists as spectacle rather than as a lived-in society. Poverty becomes aesthetic. Danger becomes playful. Structural inequality dissolves into colour and rhythm.

Blu’s eventual ability to fly is presented as a triumph, but it is deeply individualized. Freedom becomes a personal breakthrough rather than a reclamation of what was taken from him. The system that displaced him remains untouched. No accountability is demanded. No harm is repaired. The message is subtle but clear: liberation is something you earn by adapting, not something you are owed.

Through a DEI lens, Rio becomes a story about immigration and belonging told entirely from the perspective of Western comfort. Assimilation is framed as safety. Displacement is reframed as opportunity. Gratitude is elevated over autonomy. The white saviour narrative is quiet but effective, precisely because it is never named. The caretaker is kind. Her intentions are good. Her authority is unquestioned. The story never imagines a version of rescue that includes restoration rather than control.

By the time the credits rolled, the snow was still falling outside, but the comfort I had been seeking was gone.

What stayed with me wasn’t outrage so much as awareness. A recognition of how easily stories teach us what to accept, what to overlook, and what to normalize, especially when they arrive wrapped in colour, music, and nostalgia. Rio didn’t feel dangerous because it was overtly harmful. It felt dangerous because it was persuasive. Because it trained empathy in one direction and silence in another. Because it asked us to root for safety without asking who defined it, or what it cost.

That’s when it became clear that this wasn’t really about one movie, or even one studio. It was about storytelling itself.

Storytelling is not neutral. It never has been. Stories shape how we understand belonging, rescue, freedom, and worth. They decide whose pain is named and whose is edited out. They teach us who gets to be the hero, who must be grateful, and who is expected to adapt quietly to survive. And perhaps most importantly, they teach us whose perspective feels “universal” and whose is treated as decorative, optional, or expendable.

Who tells a story is critically important. So is who gets to finish it.

When the same voices dominate our cultural narratives, harm doesn’t need to be explicit to be effective. It only needs to be familiar. Comfortable. Repeated often enough that we stop noticing the gaps, the missing accountability, the erased agency, the unspoken violence reframed as love or care.

That realization lingered long after the screen went dark. It’s the reason I didn’t simply turn the app off, but stepped away from it entirely. Because once you start seeing how stories work on you—how they train your empathy, your assumptions, your sense of what is “normal”, it becomes impossible to consume them passively.

This is exactly why we believe storytelling is a skill, a responsibility, and a site of power.

In our storytelling workshop, we don’t just talk about craft. We interrogate perspective. We ask whose voices are centered, whose are missing, and what assumptions are baked into the stories we tell for comfort, entertainment, or branding. We explore how narrative can either reinforce harm or create space for agency, complexity, and truth. We work with artists, educators, leaders, and community members who want to tell stories that don’t just sound good—but do good.

Because the stories we tell shape the world we accept.

And if storytelling has the power to cage, it also has the power to liberate, when it’s held with intention, accountability, and care.

If this reflection resonated with you, if it unsettled you in a way that feels familiar, or if you’ve ever sensed there was more happening beneath the surface of the stories you consume, I invite you to join us. Learn how to tell stories that restore agency rather than erase it. Stories that ask better questions. Stories that leave room for flight.

Sign up for our storytelling workshop, and let’s change who gets to tell the story, together.