Technicolored People

The invention of the animated movie is now over one hundred years old. During this century of its existence, the world has changed at a rate previously unseen, and the invention of the motion picture was, due to its uniqueness, an excellent tool for portraying those changes. Not only the documentaries or the movie chronicles have reflected the social and political changes that occurred in the twentieth century. The art imitates life, and in the movies portraying the everyday life often we may see more true images of the reality than in the documentaries. Caricature can be an excellent tool for fighting the stereotypes and for confirming them, so it’s no wonder the use of animation in propaganda was widespread.

One particularly interesting aspect of reality that has radically changed in the past century is the problem of racial persecution. The portrayal of people of races other than Caucasian used to be (and, regrettably, still is) as very stereotypical and negative in the mainstream American cinema as well as in the animation. The cartooning, which was often mainstream, and affecting the susceptible minds of children, was often used as a tool in the keeping the black people down.

While it could be argued that the movies were the product of the times, the overall situation of African-Americans (as the most prevalent of the racial minorities in the US) was shaped by unfair and biased Jim Crow laws, and though the concept of racial segregation was often portrayed as a promise of stability, it instead provided inferior accommodation and services for “Negroes”.

The African-Americans did have their own cinemas, and even before WWI there existed a significant number of ‘race movies’, produced by black studios like Lincoln Motion Picture Company. Before the fad of the “blaxploitation” in the late sixties and seventies, the black movies were mostly addressed to the African-American audience, and often were a form of defense against the biased and unfair movies portraying blacks in the offensive way. However, animation required specialized equipment, and therefore black children before their own movies watched Felix the Cat. While a lot of animated productions were addressed to children, they were created by the white artists and writers which were products of their times. They were prone to stereotypes and actual violent act between races.

Blackface, an old tradition deriving from old minstrel shows was one of the most pronounced ways to perpetuate the stereotype of a uneducated, lazy, good-for-nothing Negro. The comedies confirmed that stereotype. Such caricature of the black was also introduced in the animation, like Mickey’s Mellerdrammer by Disney, or Coal Black, and the sebben Dwarfs by Warner Brothers. Though they were intended to be kind-hearted, nevertheless by today’s standards they are terribly offensive. A couple years later, this tendency was exhibited in a Disney animated feature film, namely The Song of the South (1946).