Animation : The First Step in Cinematic Representation

Disney have just released new promotional art for their newest Disney/Pixar venture, “Moana”, now under production in the award-winning animation company.

The upcoming musical adventure CGI animated movie will tell the story of the titular Moana, a pacific islander princess traversing to a fabled island with her hero, the Demi-God of legend, Maui.

Fully voiced by a Pacific-Islander cast in Auli’i Cravalho and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as Moana and Maui, respectively,  the movie is the latest female-led film in the Disney repertoire and the newest to feature a new princess to add to its Disney Princesses line up. 

Why is this important you say?

Because Moana is Disney’s newest Princess of Colour, joining in within the ranks of other Princesses such as Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan and Tiana as their newest compatriot.

Animation has always been important in regards to helping out representation within the cinematic medium. Even before the roles of the most iconic characters of color was produced in reality, animation has already laid groundwork for it before.

Disney’s greater push for diversity had started in the nineties, an era more commonly known as the Disney Renaissance. In trying out more diverse characters and diverse stories – Disney has created a new perspective that helps people of color all over the world finally see themselves for the first time on the big screen.

And as someone who has personally felt that – let me tell you, its a big feeling.

Despite their less than stellar track record on this thing (Try Googling: Frozen Inuit Whitewashing), Disney have been making leaps and bounds on diversity in perspective and storylines on the background – with many of their animators and writers being people of color themselves.

Animation is a key stepping stone in cinematic representation, often being many people’s entry point to how little representation exists in actual movies and also being many directors/actors/writers’ source of initial inspiration when they enter the cinematic industry.

An article on the Daily Dot writes:

“What’s happening on screen is reflective of changes behind the scenes. Today, a visitor to a major animation studio will see men and women of every ethnic background going about their work. “At Disney and especially at DreamWorks, they seem to go out of their way to find international talent,” says [How to Train Your Dragon 2 Director, Dean] DeBlois. “I think there’s a recognition that animation travels the globe and affects people of all countries and all cultures. There’s a universal quality to the films that we make: They cross borders and take us to lands that we might know little about.””

Crossing borders and taking us into lands, giving new experiences and gaining new perspectives. Ultimately, isn’t that what cinema is supposed to give us?

Racism Is Over: The Martian

Seriously, Don’t.

Welcome to Racism is Over! A weekly post into the best cinematic offerings in current Australian theatres that offer diversity in cast and diversity in character.

This week’s movie is Ridley Scott’s Sci-fi feel good space movie, The Martian!

Based on Andy Weir’s novel, the film shows the trials and tribulations of Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) as he is left on Mars after a freak storm hit his team following a manned research mission on the planet. Watney’s efforts are supported by the ground NASA team and also his crew in transit back to Earth. Because of the distance between Earth and Mars, Watney is forced to rely on his creative problem solving, the ground team’s fast thinking and the technology left behind by his mission team to survive the harsh conditions of life-less Mars.

This movie is super good. The narrative is consistently engaging and doesn’t really bore you with exposition that is the norm of the whole Sci-Fi genre. Close collaboration with NASA enabled a real-world take on an actual space program, which made the overall movie believable despite its larger-than-life characters and storyline.

So, where do we start? Seriously. This movie almost brought a tear to my eye with all the color I saw on screen. The film brought together a message of hope and humanity that actually reflects on reality. The movie felt real because the background of characters that it reflects is real. NASA and the JPL is filled with researchers and scientists of colour – just like the real world is filled with people other than caucasians. Without ground team heroes Director Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Astrodynamicist Richard Purnell (Donald Glover), Pilot Rick Martinez (Micheal Pena) and Director Bruce Ng (Benedict Wong), Watney would’ve died there – which would make for a terrible movie, I’m sure.

Honestly, I was a bit reluctant to watch this film because the marketing team had put much emphasis on the Watney character – so I had thought that it would be another “resourceful man escapes with the glory of his mind” kind of movie. But the NASA ground team are the real heroes of this movie, with their interactions having way more screentime and affecting Watney’s story – and survival – when it really counted.

Sadly, the Hollywood machine did have its hand in changing the race of Satellite Communications Officer Mindy Park (who was supposed to be Korean here, played by Caucasian Mackenzie ) and also the aforementioned Director Kapoor (he’s supposed to be Indian). While it does have this problem, I’d have to still begrudgingly admit that the movie is still what it is – a film with the best diversity in the mainstream. (Sad isn’t it? Check out this blog post to see why!)

To recap:

In ‘Saving Private Ryan’, Tom Hanks had saved Matt Damon. In ‘Interstellar’, Matthew McConaghuey did. So, who saved Matt this time in ‘The Martian’?

Humanity did.

And I couldn’t have it any other way.

Why This Matters

“There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?”” – Junot Diaz

At the crux of it, all of this might not matter to you. It’s just a few characters in films right? Why would people make such a big deal about this?

Because it matters to us.

Representation is a mirror into what society thinks of you, their initial prejudices into what you would act like. We can dance around the notion that people don’t do this anymore but that would be denying that the whole idea of race relations is non-existent. So what do you do when people just don’t think of you at all?

The lack of representation within the film industry shows that we are constantly the other, the invisible audience to the grand stories that the industry pumps out starring people who are not us. Would you find it fair to see people say “I’m such a (Character Name)” but you find yourself worrying if you’re allowed to be that fictional character because of your skin colour? Its not.

The invisibility of minorities kills mirrors into our culture and makes our stories irrelevant to the great stage. People think that minority stories are just that, a minority that has no connection to the mainstream at all.

If people think that about stories, imagine how would the extrapolate that into real life? Imagine feeling invisible in the media, and being treated as such in the real life.

I’ll avoid being too heavy handed, but here’s Donald Glover with a story about how representational invisibility hurts culture.