Myths have been considered universal and timeless narratives describing human existence, or geographically determined stories reflecting essential features of a specific culture; vehicles of absolute truths or ideologically unsound delusions. Probably in the West today the word is principally used to describe a story, character or object which is entirely fictional and which should be revealed as such.

And yet mythology, the body of inherited myths in any culture, is at the core of narrative processes and any new text recasts one or more fundamental myths for the society that develops it, renewing its validity for the society itself. It seems to be impossible for human beings to organize their experiences into narratives without recurring to the same patterns.
The presence of narrative paradigms is often particularly visible in media products aimed at children, and refashioning myths for the new generations is also an ideological enterprise: shaping the minds of the young has always been one of the principal ways of creating a cohesive society.
This course will be looking into how myth, defined by Eric Csapo as "socially important narrative [that] is told in such a way as to allow the entire social collective to share a sense of this importance," is recast in contemporary media products, by using the animated feature films produced by Disney and other Studios as case studies.