I was just looking at the live action version of Jungle Book that is coming up:
“Neel Sethi as Mowgli,[17] while the film’s voice cast will include Bill Murray as Baloo,[18] Idris Elba cast as Shere Khan,[19] Ben Kingsley as Bagheera,[20] Christopher Walken as King Louie, Giancarlo Esposito as Akela,[21] Scarlett Johansson as Kaa and Lupita Nyong’o as Raksha.[22] Filming began on August 5, 2014.”
I am impressed that they are using an Indian child for Mowgli, and a nice diverse cast.
Purportedly because the singing, dancing monkeys represent blacks, and what’s worse is they ‘want to be like you’ (whites). I choose not to believe it.
Most of the history of jazz, blues, swing etc. is of black originators copied to larger audiences by “safe” white performers. Louis Prima’s act, for example, looks an awful lot like an exaggerated, un-blackface, cartoonish interpretation of the way the black performers of the era behaved. “King Louie” may have been voiced by a white European male, but I don’t have any trouble seeing the rather distasteful cultural history behind it.
:dubious:
Errr. Yes they do. Arab is a linguistic terms more than a racial one. I have seen “negroid” Arabs and I have seen Arabs with blonde hair, blue eyes and alabaster skin. In any case “Aladdin” is a spectacularly bad choice, in the original source material, he is Chinese.
You really need to stop being offended so easily.
Louis Prima grew up in a mixed race neighborhood in New Orleans and was part of the club scene there from his teens. His act wasn’t a caricature of black performers. That’s who he was.
Reading King Louie as a racist stereotype says a lot more about modern viewers ideas of “blackness” than it does about Louis Prima.
I was thinking about this just yesterday! Specifically the cats and the racist portrayal. My conclusion: “Yeah, but those cats were freakin’ cool!” You’re right, they were jerks, and the portrayal is probably offensive, but they’re still the best part of the movie if you ask me.
It should be said I never had a problem with Inki or the ‘aborigine’ (which just looks like a dirty, hairy white guy…can’t find a pic of him though) from Warner Brothers cartoons.
A couple years ago I read Alice in Wonderland back-to-back with Peter Pan. Alice in Wonderland has no racism in it at all that I remember, by virtue of having all the humans be white. I read the Wind in the Willows around the same time. Other than an entire chapter dedicated to extolling the virtues of the Christian god, there’s nothing anyone could be offended by in that book. Peter Pan has a tribe of Indians called the Pickaninnies that Peter and the Lost Boys kill for sport.
I love the book. Peter Pan is a mythic figure the likes of which is almost never created: he feels like an ancient Pagan god. The writing is beautiful. But it’s also incredibly misogynistic and appallingly racist. There were plenty of good things written contemporaneously with Peter Pan that weren’t so horrifying. JM Barrie was a deeply disturbed man (I know what you’re thinking–his insanity puts Lewis Carroll to shame, look it up). It shows in his writing.
As for the idea that the Indians are mythic symbols instead of people–that’s not a feature, that’s a bug.
I don’t subscribe to the “well I can find one Asian who doesn’t find it offensive so it isn’t offensive” school of thought, but personally, I don’t have a problem with the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp.
To me, their antagonism and ‘evil-ness’ is a function of them being cats. When I was little I saw it the same way. Not that I think cats are evil, but on the dog v. cat thing, dog=good cat= evil is a pretty common thing. At the very least, cats being the natural antagonist to a dog isn’t earth shattering stuff.
The stereotypes are of course present, but they don’t strike me as particularly pejorative.
But again, just because I’m not offended doesn’t mean others aren’t or don’t have a right to be.
NOLA was one of the major crossover points between the black origins of the music and the white performers who took it out of the ‘darktowns.’ You’re simply confirming what I already said above.
Perhaps Prima didn’t think of himself as a whiteface performer; in his original time and place perhaps that’s too narrow a characterization. When he played all-white ballrooms and concerts, though, that were barred to black performers… well. Maybe that is a purely modern view of racism.
Watching the version of Peter Pan with Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard that was broadcast several times on tv while growing up, I realized that I never cared much for Tiger Lily. I don’t know if it was because a white woman was playing an Indian, though. I think it was more to do with her intensely over-exaggerated furtiveness.
I am sad to hear that in Peter Pan Live, the Indians were done away with, an all-too-poignant turn of phrase, indeed.
Also, a fond shout-out to Cyril Ritchard - the most swashbuckling pirate of them all!
On the topic of racism in Peter Pan, allow me to bring up the absolutely bonkers & utterly stupid decision to cast Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily in next year’s Pan. Seriously, I’m not even NA but her casting is all kinds of offensive Hollywood whitewashing as far as I can tell. It’s a total shame, too, because the movie looks to be awesome otherwise.
As a child I enjoyed all these Disney movies. While I definitely get the point about Peter Pan, the original topic of this thread, I don’t get it for Jungle Book or Lady and the Tramp. As a kid, I didn’t think, haha, those monkeys represent black people and are silly. I just thought, haha, those monkeys are silly. They want to be like humans and have fire, not like white people per se. Lady and the Tramp didn’t make me have any stereotypes about Asians… although, now that I think of it, it definitely did help me form my negative attitude towards cats. Whenever I think of how people shouldn’t have cats around babies, I picture the Siamese cats in L&tT, and how cats are evil. Huh.
Yeah, cartoon cats always seem to have that sinister manner and door-hinge type voice. But I’ll also say that I’m not Asian so if the combination of that plus the “Siamese” element makes it go too far for some people, who am I to say they’re wrong?
Well, I can definitely see someone being offended by the Siamese cats’ Engrish:
“Do you seeing that thing swimming round and round?
Maybe we can reaching in and make it drown
If we sneaking up upon it carefully
There will be a head for you, a tail for me.”
I guess that’s the thing. For me, for whatever reason, as a kid, I registered Louie was supposed to be ‘black.’ The Siamese cats went right over my head (although I learned to hate cats from that movie).
Ironically, some of the commentary in that article is more racist than the cartoons they’re writing about. One of the contributors, Hillary Busis, seizes upon Mammy Two Shoes’s dialect, calling her “poorly spoken”. Yet many millions of people in America did and still do speak like that, and not because they are ignorant of “proper” grammar. Constructions such as “I is” are perfectly natural in African American Vernacular English. To say that they’re evidence of “poor” speech is to affirm the elitist view that the prestige dialect used by upper-class whites is the only correct way of talking.
I’m Asian, and when I was little, the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp didn’t bother me. At that age, the they-are-Asian implication never occurred to me. It was about dogs = good, cats = bad.
I am no fan of musicals or Disney films and I won’t watch them unless, of course, it’s a school production featuring one of my nieces or nephews. As it happens, my niece played an Indian in a production of Peter Pan earlier this year. I was only vaguely familiar with the musical prior to seeing it then.
I wasn’t particularly offended but I was pretty surprised at the stereotypical portrayal of the Indians in the play from the costumes to the Ugga Wugga shit. I didn’t think that that stuff would fly in this day and age.
I’d say that’s pretty damn racist. What? Only white people are important enough to be in your story?