If you go and see the new Pixar animation The Good Dinosaur that’s in cinemas right now, you’ll also see the short cartoon that precedes it, Sanjay’s Super Team. Like all Pixar films, Sanjay’s Super Team is funny and inventive—a small kid keeps getting dragged away from the TV by his dad to pray, and ends up imagining Hindu gods as superheroes. And as you can probably tell from the title and that description, it features an Indian protagonist. It’s a semi-autobiographical tale, based on director Sanjay Patel’s own childhood (Patel also worked on Ratatouille and Monsters Inc). Sanjay is the first Asian lead character in a Pixar film. Their first non-white protagonist at all, actually. Which leads us to the question: Where the hell are all the non-white faces in animated films?
If you go and see the new Pixar animation The Good Dinosaur that’s in cinemas right now, you’ll also see the short cartoon that precedes it, Sanjay’s Super Team. Like all Pixar films, Sanjay’s Super Team is funny and inventive—a small kid keeps getting dragged away from the TV by his dad to pray, and ends up imagining Hindu gods as superheroes. And as you can probably tell from the title and that description, it features an Indian protagonist. It’s a semi-autobiographical tale, based on director Sanjay Patel’s own childhood (Patel also worked on Ratatouille and Monsters Inc). Sanjay is the first Asian lead character in a Pixar film. Their first non-white protagonist at all, actually. Which leads us to the question: Where the hell are all the non-white faces in animated films?
Slowly and surely, things like the Bechdel Test and Every Single Word Spoken have been highlighting the lack of diversity in mainstream Hollywood cinema, and things are gradually improving. But that attention doesn’t seem to have been put on animated films for some reason. If you look at the list of the top 50 highest grossing animated films of all time, only two of them—Aladdin and last year’s Big Hero 6—have a non-white lead character. And even then Aladdin is voiced by a white dude. Yeah, Samuel L Jackson is great in The Incredibles, but that film isn’t called ‘Frozone’. He’s still the sidekick.
Animation, of course, is different to live action. A lot of the films in that list don’t feature humans—they are about monsters, or minions, or shreks, or kung-fu pandas. But even then, that opens up a whole other load of issues. Will Smith headlines A Shark Tale, but he doesn’t play black guy. He plays a fish. A kinda creepy fish with ears that looks a bit like Will Smith, but still a fish. Does that count as representation? In Shrek and Madagascar, Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock respectively have had their biggest mainstream success, but notably as talking donkeys and zebras, not black guys. And then look at Kung-Fu Panda: that’s a rare Hollywood movie with a South-East Asian lead, but he’s played by Jack Black.
Of course, none of these individual films are racist, at all. But animation’s handling of race is tricky. When I say The Incredibles are white and Frozone is black, that isn’t actually true. The truth is, they are just drawings. Computer generated images. Pictures have no ethnicity, only cultural signifiers we attach meaning to. But because of decades and centuries of cultural imperialism, a white cartoon character is our default. And the strange thing is that it’s actually got worse in recent years. Disney traditionally based their films on classic literature, legends and folk tales—which tend to be from all over the world. There have been (justified) criticisms of the likes of Aladdin, Mulan and Pocahontas, but how many other mainstream Hollywood hits can you name that have had Arab, Asian or Native American leads? Not many. And all the way back in the 60s, they even had an Indian protagonist in The Jungle Book. There’s a lot of regrettable racial depiction in old cartoons, but looking at it from this angle, a handful of them can actually be seen as pretty progressive.
But that seems to have all gone away now. In the post-Shrek world, we’re going for zappy, post-modern original stories. And of course, if Hollywood is writing an original story, and the race of the lead character isn’t important, that lead character will inevitably be Caucasian. The outliers are very few and far between. Apart from the aforementioned Big Hero 6, the only other mainstream American family animation to focus around people of colour are Lilo & Stitch and The Princess and The Frog. Both of which are great, incidentally, but they’ve hardly entered the mainstream like Frozen or something.
Representation is important. Patel told Buzzfeed that when he was growing up, he "never saw any depictions of characters like [him], not just at Pixar but the American animation industry in general. I never saw somebody of color reach this opportunity to even tell a story that had a minority represented. I just felt like I got this subtle message that because you don’t see yourself reflected in media, you don’t matter. Your stories don’t matter. I think it’s just a subconscious message that you get from pop culture at large.” Would it hurt to make Andy’s family in Toy Story to be something other than white? Or the kids in Despicable Me, or Elsa, or the old guy in Up?
When I saw Sanjay’s Super Team, the kids in the cinema didn’t care about his race—they just enjoyed the short because it was fun and exciting. In a world increasingly fraught with racial divide and scaremongering about different cultures, let’s use Pixar and Dreamworks to teach the next generation that it doesn’t really matter if the kid who befriends that talking animal is white or black or Chinese—we’re all the same underneath.
