In 2009, to the delight of millions of little Black girls across the world, Walt Disney Studios released The Princess and the Frog, giving birth to a generation of loyal Princess Tiana supporters. The first Black Disney princess was a hard-working woman, chasing dreams of owning a restaurant in the Crescent City, New Orleans, Louisiana, to honor the memory, legacy, and love for her father and their community. A fully developed character with a compelling story with a phenomenal cast from a powerhouse in the animation industry voiced by Hollywood darling Anika Noni Rose. It was a novel experience to see such lovely brown skin animated for a theatrical experience, and to have a Princess so specifically birthed from Black culture and history — or it would’ve been, until that beautiful Black woman was turned into a frog. In fact, for a film featuring the first Black princess, she spends roughly 58% of her time on screen as a frog, roughing her unfortunate circumstances in the Louisiana swamps. She is the only Disney Princess on the roster to be turned directly into an animal, but she’s not the first iteration of Blackness deprived of humanity on screen, especially in a medium like animation. The practice of representing cultural/ethnic groups through indirect depictions is achieved through the practice of “race coding” or applying widely identifiable traits and stereotypes onto characters to allude to a particular racial identity. Just like in live action media, Black people across the world have been pushing for genuine and authentic representation since the medium became a form of mainstream entertainment.
A major turning point in the fight to change the depiction of Black people in mainstream culture is the when the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) fought to take CBS’s wildly popular sitcom Amos n’ Andy off the air due to its negative representations of Black people. The show began as a radio drama in 1928 and once they began taping in 1951, it was the most expensive show produced for television. It had a fully Black cast of actors, but was written, directed and produced exclusively by white professionals for an almost exclusively white audience. Similar to voice actors in the present day working on the exact vocal qualities to give life to an animated character , actors like Lilian Rudolph (Queen Madam, Andy’s girlfriend) reportedly worked with a white dialect coach to adopt the “minstrel style black dialect” used in the radio show by white actors to maintain “authenticity” of her character. Spencer Williams, a Black independent filmmaker who portrayed the titular role of Andy is quoting as saying he “ought to know how Negroes talk, having been one all my life” in response to similar dialect coaching from the show’s white creator, Freeman Godsen. The NAACP took issue with the elements of minstrelsy used to depict Black Americans, and the social side-effects that the shows use of harmful stereotypes would have not only on the public perception of Black people, but also on the internal perception of Blackness within the culture and community holistically.
In 1951, the NAACP’s congress meeting occurred around the same time as the premier of the show. Following a screening, the delegates present compiled this list of objections to the show:
1. It tends to strengthen the conclusion among uniformed and prejudiced people that
2. Negroes are inferior, lazy, dumb and dishonest.
3. Every character in this show with an all-negro cast is either a clown or a crook.
4. Negro doctors are shown as quacks and thieves.
5. Negro lawyers are shown as slippery cowards, ignorant of their profession and without ethics.
6. Negro women are shown as cackling screaming shrews, in big-mouthed close-ups using street slang just short of vulgarity.
7. All Negroes are shown as dodging work of any kind.
8. Millions of white Americans see this Amos 'n' Andy picture and think the entire race is the same.
Though the group’s protests were labeled as an attempt at censorship, they found some success in their efforts to change how Black people are portrayed and therefore perceived. The representation of the culture has gone through a similar evolution within the mediums of visual arts and eventually animation. Throughout the Reconstruction Era, artistic representations of Black people relied heavily on the same stereotypes that would later be listed by the NAACP in opposition to Amos and Andy. Advertisements for cash crops like watermelon featured enslaved Black people with enlarged noses and lips, lazily lounging around munching on the fruit making them rich off the white man’s dollar. What that illustration doesn’t show was the backbreaking labor associated with sharecropping, the system following emancipation that maintained the skeleton of American Cattle Slavery to protect the southern economy from complete collapse following the adoption of the 13th Amendment. This artwork and images like it helped to reinforce the negative public perception of newly freed Black Americans.
The term “Jim Crow” can be linked back to these same seeds as minstrelsy. Thomas Rice created the caricature by amplifying the most harmful and widely known stereotypes, including performing his minstrel routines in Blackface (which he is credited with doing first). The term would later be used to describe the discriminatory legal practices the country put in place to continue the oppression and control of its formerly enslaved population. Dr. David Pilgram, a sociology professor from Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum said this about the impact of Rice and minstrelsy on both Black and white audiences, “Rice and his imitators, by their stereotypical depictions of black people, helped to popularize the belief that black people were lazy, stupid, inherently less human, and unworthy of integration. During the years that black people were being victimized by lynch mobs, they were also victimized by the racist caricatures propagated through novels, sheet music, theatrical plays, and minstrel shows... years later when black people replaced white minstrels, the black people also "blackened" their faces, thereby pretending to be white people pretending to be black people. They, too, performed the Coon Shows which dehumanized black people and helped establish the desirability of racial segregation.”
Once animation became a mainstream form of entertainment, the stereotypes and caricatures of Blackness found their way onto the drawing panels and storyboards of production companies like none other than the creators of the First Black Disney Princess, Walt Disney Studios. 1941’s Dumbo has one of the earliest examples of race coding I could identify growing up, with the representation of Black men being delivered, ironically, through the vessel of 5 rowdy and antagonistic black crows that sang jazz and wasted their time lounging in the trees. Certain character design choices really helped to signify the racial identity of the crows such as their speech patterns and vocal qualities across the board, to the hat worn by the ringleader of the group. In the present day, audiences may not make the connection between the stereotypes and the group being represented, but in the era following the release and success of Disney’s 1946 film Song of the South, in which a slow-talking, wide-smiling Black man named Uncle Remus tells folk tales to a young white boy that comes to his cabin, it was generally understood what group was the inspiration for the animated minstrel birds. The practice of simply suggesting orb alluding to an animated character’s Blackness continued throughout Disney’s animation catalog.
In 1989, audiences were introduced to Ariel’s vaguely Caribbean crustacean sidekick Sebastian in The Little Mermaid, voiced by Black American actor Samuel Ernest Wright. In 1998, Eddie Murphy gave a side-splitting performance as Mushu the Dragon, the fiery supporter and trainer to Mulan in the Disney animated movie-musical adaptation of the Chinese figure’s harrowing story. The aesthetics of 1994's The Lion King subverts this pattern slightly, but not completely, due to the film’s stylistic adoption of an African/African American cultural identity, making the elements of Blackness portrayed so iconically by James Earl Jones and company more immersed in and consequential to the story; similar to how the Black-coding of Tiana, Naveen, and other characters featured in the aforementioned 2009 film The Princess and the Frog.
The potency of a character’s racial coding can also be attributed to not only the by a character’s demeanor or how they speak, but by the lived experiences of their character and what that does to inform their motivations. Piccolo, a character from the anime series Dragon Ball Z, is a large green alien from the planet Namek. In an article written by Sara Hagi for Complex magazine, she recounts an understanding of Piccolo’s ethnicity characterized to her by comedian Jaboukie Young-White: “His homeland, Namek, was ravaged by colonizers, he always felt slightly out of place around his non-Namekian friends, single parent origin story. And he was always performing emotional labour for little reward.” To many Black viewers, Piccolo feels Black because so much of his backstory mirrors that of both Black history and the continued Black experience in America, one of having your homeland destroyed and then being stuck in a role limited to secondary considerations and (sometimes, but not always) playing second fiddle to the protagonist of the story.
Going back through Disney’s catalog, Mushu and Sebastian fit snugly into this characterization as their arcs are fully dependent upon what choices are made by the master they serve. In the case of Princess Tiana, while she does maintain the role of the protagonist, her conflict is intertwined with (and in some cases motivated by,) the desires of her rich, white best friend, Charlotte “Lottie” La Bouff in her pursuit of a marriage match to the handsome prince visiting the city. Disney did this again with their 2020 Pixar film Soul, in which Joe Gardner, a Black man, serves as the story’s protagonist but is then forced into a role of servitude after having his soul removed from his body, spending a less than 20 minutes of the films runtime as a human being, the rest he’s represented on the rest of the journey as a blue blob, still wearing Joe’s signature hat and glasses to signify that he’s still him, to an extent. In the Shrek series, produced by Dreamworks Animation, Eddie Murphy delivers yet another gut-busting performance as the eccentric and sometimes annoying sidekick, Donkey, who sings, jokes around, and is a general nuisance to Shrek throughout their journeys. As viewership got older, the correlation between Black people and the depiction of the culture through an obnoxious ass present exclusively to cause chaos and provide comic relief to make the gruff protagonist more likable became as glaring as light refracting off the token these characterizations represent.
There is a vast difference between the hyper-offensive and vehemently racist illustrations and early animated depictions of Blackness and what we see on TV and in films today. There’s an abundance of anthropomorphized characters and personifications in the expansive landscape of animation that the Black community have adopted because even though they aren’t a direct representation of the culture, their spirt mirrors that of the viewer, and so kinship is formed. We will always appreciate the insightful guidance and compassionate friendship Bloo and Mac receive from Wilt, a giant, red, lanky orphaned basketball phenom featured in Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (Cartoon Network, 2004), the vibrant expressions and endearing brotherhood Darwin shows to his siblings in The Amazing World of Gumball (Cartoon Network, 2011), and the stoic yet hilarious “radah radah” of Shnitzel from Chowder (2007). But as viewers, we still yearn for full and authentic representations of Blackness, and the human experiences that come with it, so that one day we might see the full potential of escapism that animation as a medium can provide to a truly diverse diaspora of people in bright, vibrant, living color as it ought to be illustrated.
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