Disney's animated films have long been a significant source of entertainment for children across the world, and the global reach of Disney has only increased since the company's extremely lucrative acquisition of Pixar, a merger that has produced some of the highest-grossing films of all time. However, while animated Disney films are renowned for their stimulating visual pleasures and nostalgia-inducing depictions of childhood innocence, the viewing public has become increasingly aware that "behind all those cute characters, that family fun, and that nearly impenetrable aura is another avaricious multinational corporation" (Budd & Kirsch, 2005, p. 3). While the Disney brand persists as a pervasive and ubiquitous force in children's visual cultures around the world as Pixar continues to break box-office records, critics and social theorists have recognized Disney films as racially problematic, working as visual texts that both mask and reinforce institutional racism through the commodification of white supremacy. Borrowing from Hurley's (2005) work on the importance of fairy tale images on the ways that children of color internalize white privilege, I examine some of Pixar's most recent films as visual texts that shape children's ideas about race. Through the normalization of White language, culture, and beauty standards, these films serve as racial pedagogies that both reinforce structural and institutional racism and maintain status quo ideologies. I explore what critical readings of these films as visual texts reveal about their power to 'teach' viewers about diverse racial identities and examine how viewers might employ racial counter-gazes to disrupt hegemonic readings of these films. As ideological and pedagogical texts, Disney films provide multiple entry points for critical discussions about how race is represented in the media. However, these discussions are often emotionally complicated by the realization that these films have been sources of knowledge construction, visual pleasure, and the ephemeral 'magic' of childhood nostalgia for even their harshest critics. As Budd and Kirsch (2005) note, "Disney critics implicitly had to try to understand why people, perhaps including at least part of themselves, actually liked, even needed Disney--without attacking, demonizing, or condescending to those people" (p. 12). Thus, participants in any critical discussion must acknowledge that the problematic racial politics of Disney films do not necessarily preclude these films' affective and emotional pleasures, or even the more positive and wholesome messages they may convey on other levels; indeed, the coexistence of all these elements reveal Disney films as complex discursive spaces with multiple possibilities for pedagogical engagement. However, while Disney's animated films have, as visual texts, served to mask the institutional entrenchments of racism while silently reinforcing them through a history of stereotyped and Othered representations of non-White identities, they are also complex discursive spaces providing openings for alternative and oppositional pedagogies due to their ability to be read through--and complicated by--multiple racial gazes.