Esmeralda isnât on here, either, but thatâs possibly the only thing I see in favor of this ice-cold âdebunkingâ take.
1) Jasmine is wildly whitewashed in the image you chose, and sheâs really not very good representation of âa person of colorâ as per Disney. If I didnât know she was supposed to be Arabic I wouldnât know.
2) Kida is great, donât get me wrong, but sheâs ambiguously brown. Sheâs Atlantean (and not very brown in this art, is she). Audrey and Joshua would have been better choices for repâbut theyâre not leads at all.
3) If you know anything about Pocahontas, you know this movie is like the most despised thing in media existence for Natives. Sure, Pocahontas is Nativeâbut sheâs exoticized and othered Native. Ooooh, look at her with her hummingbird âspirit animalâ and her raccoon and her âgrandmother willow,â none of which are put into a proper context with Native lore! On top of which, âPocahontasâ wasnât actually her nameâher name was Mataoka. I would not pick this to show Disney doing any kind of good job of representing POC. And also once again in this image sheâs been lightened from the movie.
4) LILO IS ALSO WILDLY DESATURATED AND WHITENED IN THIS IMAGE. ARE WE SEEING A PATTERN HERE YET. You cannot talk about Disney media without talking about both the movies and the art AND DISNEY HAS A VERY BAD HABIT OF WHITE-IFYING CHARACTERS ONCE THEY HIT PROMO ART.
5) Adam is a white person appearing in an all-white cast, whose movie came out at a point when there were zero (0) Disney movies with good, solid leads of color. ZERO. Aladdin didnât come out til the following year. Up to that point there were only two Disney movies with a lead of color, and one of the movies itself is so notoriously racist itâs buried forever in the Disney vault:
And as for other characters of color:
⌠. Oh. Oh dear. Yes, that is a monkey, who sings a song that says âI want to be a man ⌠just like the other menâ and âan ape like me can learn to be human too,â whoâs voiced by Louis Armstrongâwhose voice would have been instantly recognizable when the movie came out. This is a Black man cast as a monkey.
Whatâs that you say? A group of lazy crows, led by Jim Crow, all voiced by âjive-talkinââ white men? HMMM.
Letâs play Count The Really Awful Negative Stereotypes, kids. (Keep in mind, as a bonus, that while Peter might have been awarded a feather for saving Tiger Lilyâand thatâs a big, BIG mightâthereâs no way in hell heâd have a full war bonnet.) I guess at least Tiger Lily got to be fully clothed.
⌠. just. Donât make me explain why this is wrong. Please. If he was playing actually-Chopsticks it might be slightly less bad, but the actual lyrics hereânot set to that tuneâare âShanghai, Hong Kong, egg foo young, fortune cookie always wrong,â with his âchopstick playingâ mimicking stereotypical âAsianâ musical chords.
Thatâs where we stood in 1991 for characters of color (and nonwhite-coded animal characters).
Meanwhile, at that same point, we hadâcount âemâthree white princes named âPrince Charmingâ alone. There was also Eric and Arthur Pendragon (if you get to bring out Atlantis I get to bring out The Sword in the Stone), and in the non-princely section we have Peter Pan and Pinocchioâand if weâre accepting nominations from the Disney Dark Ages, we also have Taran (The Black Cauldron) and Pete (Peteâs Dragon). For the girls, we had Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Ariel, and for non-princesses we had Wendy, Alice (in Wonderland), Jessica Rabbit, andâagain a note from the Dark AgesâEilonwy.
Trying to claim Adam being the Beast is equivalent to Tiana being a frog is just. Itâs disingenuous at best and deliberately malicious at worst. Itâs clear this is NOT a level playing field, and you donât even have to delve into lesser-known films to prove it.
6) Name a Disney movie that isnât Princess and the Frog that has a Black lead.
7) Name a Disney movie that isnât Emperorâs New Groove that has a Mexican-Indigenous lead. Or any Mexican lead, actually. (Elena of Avalor is as close as you get, and sheâs not even allowed to be from actually-Mexico. Or have a movie.)
8) Name a Disney movie that isnât Brother Bear that has an Inuk/Pacific Northwest Indigenous lead. (Pocahontas and Lilo and Stitch do not count. They represent very different societies in very different circumstances. I said Inuk, not Hawaiian.)
9) Sure, Disney started introducing POC leads in the 1990s and early 2000sâalbeit rather badly. (Look, I love the Renaissance films, but Jasmine and Esmeralda were very badly stereotyped, and Pocahontas ⌠just, to the Native community in general and the Powhatan Confederacy tribes in particular, Iâm so sorry. I canât even say âbadly-executedâ because that implies they tried even a little bit.) But during that same period we got Hercules and Megara, Belle, Milo (Treasure Planet), Tarzan and Jane, and this fantastic bit of whitewashing:
You will not meet anyone who loves this movie as much as I do. The art is stunning and the music is transcendent, and as a disabled person Quasiâs story is deeply important to me. But here we see a blue-eyed, red-headed, pale-skinned man whose mom and dad were, um âŚ
NOT ANY OF THOSE THINGS. (Yes, I understand they only appear in the dark, but you can see Quasimodoâs hand in this shot. Look at the color difference.) He was literally whitewashed so Esmeralda and the Rroma (who are referred to throughout by a slur) could be further othered. And while weâre on the subject, his mom is murdered two minutes into the film. And while weâre further on the subject, in the sequel he forgets all about Esmeralda, marries some white chick, and fights a bunch of âevil circus g*****s!â Yeah! Gotta love that representation! (And this is why Hunchback II is in the same pile as the ATLA movie. Or: what movie?)
So while we were getting these POC characters, we were also going almost one-for-one with more white characters, and at the same time we got the Pirates of the Caribbean live-action franchise. While the movies got slightly better in terms of diversityâif worse in terms of stereotyping and exoticizingâthe first movie is bizarrely white for a piece set in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy (and, incidentally, also the slave trade).
10) I feel obligated to mention that part of Wreck-It Ralph II: Ralph Breaks The Internet had to be reanimated after initial stills of the princessesâ group scene came out, and Tiana had been severely lightened, with her nose changed to the same model as the white characters. Production staff tried to tell voice actress Anika Noni Rose that the changes were all due to âlighting.â She demanded the scene be reanimated, pointing out that noses do not change from Black-featured to white-featured due to âlighting.â Unfortunately, nobody was there to advocate for Pocahontas, who remains light-skinned.
11) You know that thing I said about looking at both the movies and the media?
This was the official order of the Disney Princess lineup in the early 2010s. ⌠after it was pointed out that the nonwhite princesses were always shoved to the back and sometimes not even present. (In fact, Pocahontas usually wasnât present before this 2013 art, and Tiana was a 50-50 shot.) Their âsolutionâ to this was to move Snow White to the back rather than just ⌠shake them all up. Since then, theyâve gotten slightly better about randomizing the princessesâ order and giving each one her turn to shine, but itâs pretty telling, isnât it, that the only art I can find online with Tiana and Pocahontas near the front is fanart, and that Mulan is never further forward than Cinderella is in this image?
12) Funny that you should bring up forgetting Kida. Atlantis, Brother Bear, and Princess and the Frog were all horribly under-marketed and under-merchandised, resulting in low sales (for Disney, that is) and their characters basically being dumped on the trash heap. Princess and the Frog more or less got rescued by princess fans who loved Tiana, and hooray for that, but itâs sad that it took a concerted effort by fans to keep her from being just another forgotten reject when animation fans tend to consider her the start of the Second Renaissance. Now certainly these arenât the only Disney films to suffer this particular fateâI again would like to mention Treasure Planet, and mourn its unrecognized brillianceâand Iâll grant you that Brother Bear and Atlantis both came out during the Eisner years and thatâs undoubtedly why they suffered, but youâll notice they didnât under-market Tangled (2010) or Frozen (2011), even though they were part of the same new-properties blitz that brought us Princess and the Frog (2009).
Conclusion: If youâre just slapping whitewashed/lightened art on a screen and yelling SEE YOUR CONCLUSIONS ARE BAD AND WRONG, you failed to look at context, history, actual Disney marketing and storyline processes, and basically made OPâs point for them, which is: THEREâS A FUCKING PROBLEM HERE.
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