Where We’re Going, Not Where We’ve Been

A brief look at how far the depiction of Black characters has come in animation.

About thirty-five years ago, I had a fever dream that began with me drool-lipped and caulk-eyed.  I was a nearly blind child, eyes still dream-hazed, flailing an alarm off at 7:17 am. The bus left for school at 7:50, with the stop still a ten-minute bike ride away.  I still needed to shower. 

I was already the only Black kid in class, so I couldn’t be the gross one, either. So, despite a bruising series of stumbles from someone in the middle of their adolescent coordination, I managed to get a short shower and change of clothes before placing Pop-Tarts to warm in the microwave. 

Backpack swung on over shoulders, Pop-Tarts searing the roof of my palette, I catch an image on the TV of something I wasn’t meant to see, something that threatened that I’d miss the bus and have to call my mom from work in the middle of the week.  

“Sorry, Mom,” I would have said with deepest sincerity. “I didn’t mean to be late, but I saw this cartoon on TV.  It was called ‘Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs.’ Can you believe it, Mom? Cartoon-like Snow White! But everybody is Black!”

The Honestly Good Intentions Behind Coal Black

In truth, however, I didn’t stay. I shut it off after I saw Coal Black dance with a man who had dice for teeth.  I remember asking anyone at school back then if they had ever seen this cartoon. “Sounds like something you made up in your sleep,” was a common response. And, it had felt like a dream. Aside from Fat Albert, I had never seen an animation with an all-black cast.  

There was something intriguing about a magical world where people looked like me, having their own stories. Many years later, while researching an article covering the work of the late Akira Toriyama, I stumbled upon a grouping of cartoons known as The Censored Eleven. The Censored Eleven, according to the Museum of Uncut Funk, is “a group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons that were withheld from syndication by United Artists (US) in 1968. 

UA owned the distribution rights to the Associated Artists Productions (AAP) library at that time and decided to pull these eleven cartoons from broadcast because they are based on racist depictions of Blacks and are deemed too offensive for contemporary audiences.” Among the Censored Eleven was the catalyst for my fever dream, Coal Black.  

After finding it on YouTube, the fever and the dream had officially snapped. I had only been able to see the open minutes when I was younger and couldn’t reconcile that this was how people like me were being seen by the creators by my own memory of the cartoon.  It wasn’t until seeing again nearly a century after it had been created that I saw all the problematic depictions were steeped in minstrelsy.  

Minstrels’ common features, such as thick lips that don’t match the rest of the skin, broad tablet-like teeth, and massive, wide eyes, are the fundamental elements of these caricatured designs. These designs were popular during the Jim Crow era, and many of these depictions can still be seen on the Jim Crow Museum website.  

The twist is that even though the depictions are minstrel-inspired, Coal Black originated as an attempt at meaningful representation. As reported by Open Culture, the story goes that director Bob Clampett was approached in Hollywood by the cast of an all-black musical off-Broadway production called Jump For Joy while they were doing some special performances in Los Angeles. 

They asked me why there weren’t any Warner’s cartoons with black characters, and I didn’t have any good answer to that question. So we sat down together and came up with a parody of Disney’s Snow White, and ‘Coal Black’ was the result. These performers provided the voices (credited, out of contractual obligation, to Mel Blanc), and Clampett paid tribute in character designs to real jazz musicians he knew from Central Avenue.

Yet, and still, many elements celebrated stereotypes: Coal Black’s Betty Boop figure, the insinuation that she was a sex worker, and the lips, faces, and teeth of all the characters. Good intentions considered, it’s still a frustrating animation to watch as an adult.

Coal Black is a misfire. It is a well-intended, sadly accurate reflection of how non-marginalized people interpreted blackness in a style meant to ridicule, not celebrate, the richness of the culture. However, the animation of characters of color has evolved significantly since then. 

Obviously, designs like Coal Black’s are unacceptable in the modern era, so the conversation shifts. Coal Black wasn’t an original character.  She was what is commonly known as a “race-bended” or “race-swapped” version of Snow White done horribly wrong. What happens then when the criteria are changed?  What happens when the race-swapped character is done well?  How do certain audiences react? 

For instance, in the case of Annette in Netflix’s sequel series Castlevania: Nocturne. Nocturne is a follow-up to the surprise success Castlevania, which took elements from stories within the old Konami video games and piecemealed them into a cohesive narrative that spanned 28 episodes.    

While season 1 of Nocturne has many flaws, one, in particular, rattled with the loudest buzz:  Annette, whose original design was Euro-centric fair-skinned damsel, was changed to a Haitian woman skilled in magic powers inherited from the Yoruba, a religion with deities from West Africa.  A Forbes article placed the backlash in an all-too-familiar box: 

I was perplexed by the 52% audience score, literally half of the 100% and “rotten,” as it were. I wondered what was going on here, and ah, it’s another one of these. Having watched nearly all of the series now, I cannot agree with the “bad writing, bad characters” complaints at all that you see in the user reviews, but instead, a lot of focus is put on what else, its prevalence of black characters and other characters of color, altering a few origin stories to make that work. There’s a throughline of oppression and the horrors of slavery in the plot, and outside of that, a focus on gay characters as well.

It’s an infuriating game.  When looking back at a piece of work like Coal Black, it feels like history asks us to look back at the “attempt” to represent Blackness despite almost none of it is done with a sense of love or reverence.  Then, about a century later, when animators have learned and listened, a wonderfully designed character with richness and nuance gets dragged because they changed the race and role of the character from a white woman in the back background to a Black woman doing work on the frontlines.

To make something your own and watch it, too. 

The reason companies like Marvel or DC choose to race-bend and not create something new is glaringly simple: recognizable Intellectual Property. Why use a lesser-known character or an original character as the face for a new animation or Hollywood franchise? 

Simply put, the more recognizable the name, the bigger the audience. For instance, DC has the rights to characters of color like Icon and Martian Manhunter. In terms of power, either one is equivalent to Superman within the universe. Both have enough backlog content to make a Superman-like movie with a Black male lead. However, since neither one of these characters will be recognized by the general public, the chances of them being used in film will forever be relegated to deleted scenes on YouTube.  

This, sadly, is the bad news.  However, as Self-proclaimed “Blerd” Tony Weaverly Jr. often posts on his social media, the future is bright just over the horizon.  Further, the time for Black-created content is now.  The world of indie comics is burgeoning with titles like Kesha: The Demon Eater, Crescent City Monsters, Killadelphia, and Harriet Tubman: Vampire Slayer. Sometimes, the success of these can become animated series of their own.

The fever from thirty-plus years ago has broken. And so is the dream of what I hoped Coal Black would be, but in reality, there are so many people out there aiming to uplift Black culture through representation and storytelling, and I can’t wait to see what they and others are going to do next.   

Here’s a list of a few shows that have recently released or are slated to release later this year: 

Iyanu: Child of Wonder

Similarly to the revision of Annette in Castlevania: Nocturne, Iyanu is a character whose power comes from the Yoruba, the deities found within the West African religion.  Iyanu lives in Yorubaland.  She’s lost her memories, but in their place, she finds that she has incredible powers that rival the gods of her land.  The journey is a classic one that leans into the idea of confidence and belief.   

The Invincible Fight Girl

Protagonist Andy, born on Accountant Island, wants to be a wrestler. One day, when wrestlers come to Accountant Island to do their taxes, Andy ends up failing their tax return because she shirked off her accountant studies to watch self-help wrestling VHS tapes.  Now, she has to fight for her life.  The show is a love letter to Shonen, anime and wrestling.  The show uses the general idea of “wrestling” as a magic system. Instead of objects of power like broomsticks and wands, the fights have to take place in a ring.  Instead of casting spells, she has to shout the name of her wrestling moves.  It has the quirkiness and charisma that is akin to Anime like Inuyasha or epic journey narratives like Fellowship of the Ring.  This currently airs on HBO Max and Cartoon Network.

 

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Rule 56

A forthcoming project from Creative Theory World, Rule 56 is inspired by the nearly unheard-of history that details the existence of the Coloured Hockey League of the Maritimes (CHLM), which was founded in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1895. According to On the Shoulders of Giants, many black men who would play baseball in the spring and summer would opt to play hockey to stay in shape.  Rule 56, the rule that allows for fighting in hockey, gives this anime the space it needs to create a truly unique anime that, with any luck, can be mentioned in the same breath as Hajime no Ippo and Blue Lock.