What’s wrong with this picture?
Or perhaps the headline of this Hollywood Reporter piece (12/14/16) was supposed to be, “Seth Rogen and Six More White Men on Avoiding Ethnic Stereotypes and How to ‘Break the Mold’ of Princesses.” Even Rogen’s debut film Sausage Party was less of a sausage party.
If you’re planning to be asking questions like, “How do you approach different ethnicities and cultures in animation? Are you conscious of running the risk that some group could take offense?” or “Several of your movies have female protagonists. But they’re not looking for a prince,” you’d think that you’d try to get to get some kind of diversity in your panel of animation directors. Failing that, you might point out the monoculture in the room, and what it says about the animation business.
But interviewer Carolyn Giardina never gives any indication that there’s anything amiss about asking an all-white, all-male panel to comment on racial and gender stereotypes—unless Giardina was trying to hint at something when she wrote that the other animation directors “welcomed Rogen, 34, to their unique fraternity.”
Byron Howard (co-director of Zootopia) perhaps showed a little self-consciousness when asked what advice he would give “a first-time animation director”:
What I would say to a new filmmaker — if you’re a film student now, if you have a diverse background, if you’re female, if you’re from a different country, if you don’t see yourself being represented onscreen — animation is a great medium to explore films and ideas.
The fact is, though, that animation has not been a particularly welcoming medium for female or “diverse background” directors; if anything, it’s been worse than Hollywood as a whole. (The blog Cartoon Brew—12/14/15—noted that in 2014 and 2015, not a single major animated feature had a female director.) If Hollywood Reporter had chosen seven successful animation directors at random, it might well have ended up with seven white men.
Frozen director Jennifer Lee: What would she have said about breaking the princess mold? (cc photo: coolcaesar /Wikimedia)
But the Reporter didn’t have to pick directors at random—and there are women and people of color it could have chosen who would have broadened the discussion on race and gender. Jennifer Lee, for one, won an Oscar for writing and directing Frozen—and surely would have had interesting things to say about breaking out of princess molds. Brenda Chapman also got an Oscar for writing and directing Brave, another film with an unconventional princess, though Chapman’s fraught relationship with that production might have complicated the panel—for good or ill.
Korean-American animator Jennifer Yuh Nelson directed Kung Fu Panda 2, the highest grossing film of any kind solo-directed by a woman. Men of color with major Hollywood animation credits include Jorge Gutierrez (Book of Life), Peter Ramsey (Rise of the Guardians) and Carlos Saldanha (Rio).
I showed the photo of the Reporter panel to my 12-year-old daughter and asked her the question that began this post: What’s wrong with this picture? Without a pause, she replied, “They’re all white men.” If it’s that obvious to her, it’s time for editors to catch on as well.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. He can be found on Twitter: @JNaureckas.
Messages to the Hollywood Reporter can by sent to thrnews@thr.com (or via Twitter: @THR). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.