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Sorry about the pretentious title. Having looked at other Blog Posts Against Racism, I hope my subsequent comments aren't too flippant:
A couple of weeks ago I came across a kids' show set in a jungle and featuring a tribe of white people.* Weirded out by this, and a little offended, it then occurred to me that if it had been about a tribe of black people, or indians, or anybody else, it would have been pulled within a week under a hailstorm of outrage. Evidently the writers had had their hearts set on an exotic fictional location, but didn't dare populate it with "exotic" characters.
Cartoons are by their nature visually exaggerated, which gives them power, but can lay them open to accusations of mocking their subjects (and to generally being frivolous and unimportant, but a fandom audience is used to hearing that).
So, here for International Blogging Against Racism Week is my observational, rather than prescriptive,
rambling and incomplete look at how the makers of kids' cartoons attempt to include PoC without appearing to make fun of them, and when it works.This is more of an attempt to start up a conversational topic than it is an essay.
Anime is a whole other galaxy of possibilities, but I'll leave it to the many people on the internet who know far more about it than I do - for the purposes of this entry, I'll be looking at North American cartoons aimed primarily at kids, and which held my interest through more than one episode.
First off, if you want a diverse cast, the easiest way is to set the show in a contemporary American suburb or small town, possibly with fantasy elements, though the main character will most likely be white.** Shows set in the future don't have much trouble either - presumably they're populated by descendants of the first kind of shows. ***
As noted earlier, the trouble comes if you want to do a historical setting - people think of the past as ethnically segregated except for wars and slavery, and the latter topics being considered a bit too heavy for cartoons, what we generally get is a show set in a homogenous society which though it may be "Ancient Meso-America" or "High-Fantasy Dark Ages Europe,"**** is basically populated by contemporary white Americans in historical-exotic drag. Maybe mainstream kids' programming isn't the best place to be looking for subtle depictions of other societies, but quite apart from the unexamined assumptions, this kind of theme-resort setting gets pretty boring after a while.
Samurai Jack managed to partly overcome this, within its strict formula, by 1. setting its stories in a surreal alternate present/future, in which the samurai hero (voiced by Phil Lamarr) is the only figure from history-as-we-know-it, and therefore the character the viewers identify with; 2. making Jack, apart from the non-human villain Aku (voiced Mako), the only recurring character, furthering our identification; 3. using extremely stylized art for all the characters, (this and the anthological format also lets the writers riff on different historical periods but in a playful, throwaway way) and 4. low-dialogue scripts - I feel this is a part of it, somehow, though I'm still thinking about why.
Obviously one of the things that made SJ possible was the popularity of anime - Asian characters are pretty popular in cartoons (always in an action context, however). Kung Fu Skunk, like the feature Kung Fu Panda and for that matter like TMNT, combines funny-animal character design with martial-arts-movie plotting, and can write the characters as Asian without hammering the point. (Usually the younger main characters have American accents, but it could be argued that first- and second-generation immigrant characters are being depicted.)
*Tak and the Power of Juju
** a major exception is Fillmore!, in which the lead character is a black pre-teen; this is partly because the show is a (very entertaining) riff on police dramas like Dragnet, set in a junior high, and Fillmore and his partner Ingrid are a classic black detective, white detective pairing. I have to give props to the tv department of Disney, actually - they're also responsible for the Lilo & Stitch series (pretty much everyone is either Hawaiian or an extraterrestrial) and a show I haven't seen called Jake Long, American Dragon.
*** tangent - I've noticed attempts to by unstereotypical by simply inverting the stereotypes - there are at least three shows (Danny Phantom, Class of the Titans, Billy & Mandy) where the black kid is the geek character.
**** to be fair, Dave the Barbarian is riffing on sword-and-sorcery cliches, not history.
A couple of weeks ago I came across a kids' show set in a jungle and featuring a tribe of white people.* Weirded out by this, and a little offended, it then occurred to me that if it had been about a tribe of black people, or indians, or anybody else, it would have been pulled within a week under a hailstorm of outrage. Evidently the writers had had their hearts set on an exotic fictional location, but didn't dare populate it with "exotic" characters.
Cartoons are by their nature visually exaggerated, which gives them power, but can lay them open to accusations of mocking their subjects (and to generally being frivolous and unimportant, but a fandom audience is used to hearing that).
So, here for International Blogging Against Racism Week is my observational, rather than prescriptive,
rambling and incomplete look at how the makers of kids' cartoons attempt to include PoC without appearing to make fun of them, and when it works.This is more of an attempt to start up a conversational topic than it is an essay.
Anime is a whole other galaxy of possibilities, but I'll leave it to the many people on the internet who know far more about it than I do - for the purposes of this entry, I'll be looking at North American cartoons aimed primarily at kids, and which held my interest through more than one episode.
First off, if you want a diverse cast, the easiest way is to set the show in a contemporary American suburb or small town, possibly with fantasy elements, though the main character will most likely be white.** Shows set in the future don't have much trouble either - presumably they're populated by descendants of the first kind of shows. ***
As noted earlier, the trouble comes if you want to do a historical setting - people think of the past as ethnically segregated except for wars and slavery, and the latter topics being considered a bit too heavy for cartoons, what we generally get is a show set in a homogenous society which though it may be "Ancient Meso-America" or "High-Fantasy Dark Ages Europe,"**** is basically populated by contemporary white Americans in historical-exotic drag. Maybe mainstream kids' programming isn't the best place to be looking for subtle depictions of other societies, but quite apart from the unexamined assumptions, this kind of theme-resort setting gets pretty boring after a while.
Samurai Jack managed to partly overcome this, within its strict formula, by 1. setting its stories in a surreal alternate present/future, in which the samurai hero (voiced by Phil Lamarr) is the only figure from history-as-we-know-it, and therefore the character the viewers identify with; 2. making Jack, apart from the non-human villain Aku (voiced Mako), the only recurring character, furthering our identification; 3. using extremely stylized art for all the characters, (this and the anthological format also lets the writers riff on different historical periods but in a playful, throwaway way) and 4. low-dialogue scripts - I feel this is a part of it, somehow, though I'm still thinking about why.
Obviously one of the things that made SJ possible was the popularity of anime - Asian characters are pretty popular in cartoons (always in an action context, however). Kung Fu Skunk, like the feature Kung Fu Panda and for that matter like TMNT, combines funny-animal character design with martial-arts-movie plotting, and can write the characters as Asian without hammering the point. (Usually the younger main characters have American accents, but it could be argued that first- and second-generation immigrant characters are being depicted.)
*Tak and the Power of Juju
** a major exception is Fillmore!, in which the lead character is a black pre-teen; this is partly because the show is a (very entertaining) riff on police dramas like Dragnet, set in a junior high, and Fillmore and his partner Ingrid are a classic black detective, white detective pairing. I have to give props to the tv department of Disney, actually - they're also responsible for the Lilo & Stitch series (pretty much everyone is either Hawaiian or an extraterrestrial) and a show I haven't seen called Jake Long, American Dragon.
*** tangent - I've noticed attempts to by unstereotypical by simply inverting the stereotypes - there are at least three shows (Danny Phantom, Class of the Titans, Billy & Mandy) where the black kid is the geek character.
**** to be fair, Dave the Barbarian is riffing on sword-and-sorcery cliches, not history.
