Tangentially related: --they wouldn’t do that, unless they were extras in a company of The Sound of Music. --FAKE NEWS!…
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Great article, that – I read it the other day.
If it’s open links – I’ve recently been reading http://learnalilgivinanlovin.blogspot.com , which has some great posts on race (specifically Asianness) and gender, with a little art, psych and religion dotted about too.
Jenn’s first reaction when I pointed out this post: “Nine? Really? Only nine?”
Hey, does anyone else have tons of trouble reading Feministe these days? Seems like I always get a server error, and I don’t know if it’s me or them.
I think, to be fair, that such racist imagery is pretty ubiquitous in all forms of media once you go back far enough in time.
The real shame is how Disney tries to conceal it. If they’d suck it up and say “yeah, that wasn’t cool, so we took it out” then that’d be something. But instead they try to pretend it all never happened, which eliminates any possibility of apology or discussion.
The real shame is how Disney tries to conceal it. If they’d suck it up and say “yeah, that wasn’t cool, so we took it out” then that’d be something. But instead they try to pretend it all never happened, which eliminates any possibility of apology or discussion.
Are you actually accusing the Disney corporation of sanitizing images of America’s past? Shame on you! Where could they even find the expertise for that?
But seriously,
I had never before noticed the racism with regard to King Louie or Sebastian. Pointed out, I can see it with King Louie, and I can also see that my obliviousness was a result of white privilege and growing up in late 20th century suburbia – it is the kind of thing I could be shielded from.
That could also be the case with Sebastian, but I am still not convinced. Stereotypes can be complex, and if you give any character an accent, some aspect of the character’s personality is likely to have some similarity to stereotypes about those with the accent. Not having accents makes all of the animal characters seem “white”, and you have no diversity. And despite the lyrics of the song “Under the Sea”, sung to convince Ariel not to leave the ocean, Sebastian was not portrayed as lazy. Quite the opposite, he was the only major character in the movie who actually had a JOB.
Despite not noticing the racism of the character of King Louie, I have long thought he was the most facinating villain in a Disney movie, for reasons that are related to the racism pointed out in that blog article. He is the only Disney villain whose goals, if not his methods, I sympathized with. He is the leader of monkeys in a world run by humans. He knows his “people” can be just as great as the humans, but the humans unfairly keep the upper position in the world by not sharing the secret of their power with his kind. If I were in his position, I might not be kidnapping children, but I would be plotting like him to steal fire from the greedy, speciist humans.
The comments at the linked site were unbelievable. I had to stop reading after only about a dozen or so. Every single commenter either denied or defended racism.
I have to agree with Decnavda about King Louie being a in a kind of odd place in the Disney pantheon, because when I was a boy, I never really saw him as a *villain* in the Jungle Book. Obviously, he was an adversary and a kidnapper, but not a villain.
Disney Villains are clearly marked – they have upper-class British accents, long faces, long eyebrows, and (where possible) purple/black clothes. They’re generally no fun. King Louie has none of those things – he’s just another wacky denizen of the jungle. His desire to kidnap/exploit the hero is just a big misunderstanding.
Obviously, hindsight changes that perspective. But that’s how I saw it as a kid.
Funny how rare a morally-ambiguous character like that is in children’s movies.
I had never heard of the ‘Boy Thursday’ before reading that article–and when I saw the picture, Thursday didn’t look like a human character to me, he looked like a chimp. After having already seen King Louie’s listing, my thought was: “Wow, Disney sure liked portraying Africans as apes, eh?” That he was actually supposed to be human makes it even weirder–they don’t see Africans as apes, they see them as humans who look more ape-like than human-like.
And the Jungle Book, Fantasia, and Peter Pan were three of my favourite movies as a kid–and now it’s really weird to think that for the countless times I watched Peter Pan I NEVER got how blatantly racist and sexist their portrayal of the native Americans was. King Louie’s a bit more ambiguous…slightly harder to notice…and I didn’t even remember Sunflower. Maybe the fact that all the centuars were multicoloured distracted me from the fact that the centuar servant girl was clearly African.
Also–I can think of one notable omission–in The Aristocats, during the ‘Everybody Wants to Be a Cat’ scene, there’s a bit where a (very racially caricatured) Siamese cat is playing the piano and says some unintelligible thing in what is supposed to be Chinese (it ends with the words ‘egg foo young’) and then rhymes it with “fortune cookie always wrong.” He then starts laughing maniacally. He may have been playing the piano with chopsticks, I can’t remember. Very minor character, sure, but very racist.
A bit late, but animation historian Jerry Beck posted the link to that Cracked article on Cartoon Brew, one of the biggest animation websites around:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/9-most-racist-disney-characters