Technicolored People

The 1980s and 90s were the time of relative improvement in the racial equality, and it was sometimes visible in the animation. A significant number of the groups of superheroes or other toy-sellers included in their ethnic makeup a black member. Captain Planet, a well-known environmentalist superhero series featured Kwame, an African. Most G.I. Joe incarnations featured Roadblock, (a bastard son of Mr. T. and Hulk Hogan), and similar tokenism was widespread.

Similar tokenism was widespread. Despite the fact that the Americans claim their society to be racially diversified, there is very little probability that a group of friends would be consisting of a Chinese, a Lithuanian-Jewish, German/Norwegian to substitute for the white, a Mexican, a handicapped Irish-American, a black, and an Apache boy from an Indian reservation in Arizona, and obviously the cat and the dog. That could talk (puppet series The Puzzle Place).

Of course a mixed group of friends is not impossible, but it rarely takes the form of the model UN council. As I have mentioned before, seldom are such characters something more than jive-spouting claims of ethnic tolerance.

The nineties are hard to separate from the aughties (00s), as there was no significant breakthrough. One, in character terms, might be just behind the corner. After sixty years from Song of the South, a Disney movie is going to have an African-American protagonist. With the upcoming The Princess and the Frog, featuring first African-American „Disney princess” Tiana, and set in 1920s New Orleans, the studio is going to return to 2D traditional animation.

More and more TV series introduce an all-black cast, living in a black neighborhood. They are sometimes including a token white, but in a way they are at least more realistic about it. The Proud Family and Bill Cosby’s Fatherhood show us cartoonish sitcom family, and Static Shock – a black teenaged superhero. The Boondocks, on other hand, are very aggressive, sometimes comically so. It’s a social satire on race relations, with its main protagonist Huey Freeman, being a ten-year-old leftist Afrocentrist. His brother, Riley wants to be ‘gangsta’, and a lot of the other characters also represent some points of view in the African-American culture. Aaron McGruder, the author of the original comic strip says that it’s autobiographical. Also people curse a lot there.

The African-Americans were not the only ones that were insulted by, often derogatory, portrayal of their ethnic group. Many WWII propaganda animation works portray the Japanese as ’servile midgets’, deforming and caricaturing the traits of entire Asian race. There are very few believable characters belonging to a racial minority that are worth remembering. Today one of the best characterized Asians in animation, Futurama’s Amy Wong is a spoiled, airhead intern, and a likeable character on her own. Hispanics and Jews are likewise less represented, but other minorities (Arabs, Pakistanis, Hindu people) have to still be presented as something more than terrorists or storeowners. Luckily, the physical characterization is at least mostly thing of the past.

The racial stereotypes continue to this day, and the art of animation reflects it. Despite the progress made from the beginnings of the 20th century, in art as in politics, we still have a long way to go.

Bibliography:

Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge, London, 1997.

Sklar, Robert. Movie Made America: Documents in the Cultural History of Film in America. New York: Vintage, 1976.

„James Baskett” Wikipedia 02 Jan. 2008. Wikimedia foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baskett

On Floyd Norman – Jim Hill media 20 Feb. 2008: Interview , . Biography:

Interview with Dan Haskett: Seeing Black

On Boondocks: http://aalbc.com/authors/aaron.htm, and also Wikipedia