When picking the most pioneering films of the 1990s, Space Jam might not seem the most obvious contender. Zany and high-concept, the 1996 Warner Bros movie was an extension of a 1992 Super Bowl Nike commercial, in which Jordan had starred alongside Bugs Bunny. With the help of the full gang of Looney Tunes cartoon characters, it creates an alternative reality, imagining what Jordan might have done between his retirement from the NBA in 1993 and his incredible comeback two years later – that is, help Bugs and Co win a basketball game against some evil aliens in order to secure their freedom. Featuring a mixture of animation and live action from actors, including Jordan, Bill Murray and Seinfeld's Wayne Knight, it was joyfully absurd and designed to make the mind boggle.
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However, amid all the silliness, it also offered something more profound – a defining moment for black representation in cinema. At the centre of this big-budget Hollywood animation was not just a black lead, but in Jordan, a black superstar, an icon, and an all-American family man. (In fact Jordan was such a big deal at the time that, as shown in the recent Netflix documentary series about him, The Last Dance, he was able to get the studio to construct a court for him to practise on, where he played with other NBA stars.) Progressiveness may not have been its first concern, and the acting required of Jordan was hardly a stretch, but within the context of Hollywood animated family films and their history of both racial erasure and racist stereotyping, it was ground-breaking.
Space Jam: A New Legacy sees the Looney Tunes crew teaming up with another basketball legend, LeBron James, replacing original star Michael Jordan (Credit: Alamy)
Behind the camera, it was also notable for having an animation co-director, Bruce W Smith, who was one of the few black animators working in Hollywood – something that is, depressingly, still the case today. "I realise that our animation business is probably made up of 3-5% African Americans," said Smith, who also created Disney's pioneering black cartoon series The Proud Family, at an event last year. "Therefore, you won't get a lot of African-American content on the screen from an African-American standpoint because the people aren't there at the table to put us in primary parts of films."
However, now a Space Jam sequel arrives in an at-least somewhat different landscape. Released around the world this week, Space Jam: A New Legacy is a loud, brash retread of the original, and stars another basketball legend, LeBron James, alongside both animated and CGI versions of the Looney Toons crew. This time, though, the production has a black director (with Malcolm D Lee replacing Joe Pytka), Ryan Coogler of Black Panther fame among its producers, and an almost all-black live-action cast.
The result is a sequel that, without giving too much away, handles race with a deft touch. Meanwhile its characterisation of James' protagonist is more nuanced than Jordan's driven sportsman. He's shown to be a secret "nerd" who regrets repressing his childhood love for Gameboys and adores Harry Potter, while central to the fanciful plot this time is his relationship with his son, Dom (played by Cedric Joe), as both are sucked into Warner Bros' servers where they have to play a basketball match to defeat the evil Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle) who controls Warner Bros' virtual world. The only real problem with this film is the endless nods to other Warner Bros properties – with characters from The Flintstones and King Kong to, mind-bogglingly, the droogs from A Clockwork Orange popping up. These seem less like meta-jokes than adverts for the studio's back catalogue and obstruct the film's pleasures.
Whereas, in the mid-1990s, the original Space Jam felt like a lone pioneer, its sequel is part of an era in Hollywood animation that is beginning to show signs of change. There are more new films including characters of colour just as the racist tropes of some of the genre's most famous old films are being reckoned with – to the point now where some even come with warnings when accessed on streaming platforms.
The buried history of cartoons
Racism within the animation genre is certainly deeply ingrained. Looking at Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse it would be hard to imagine anything other than innocent fun, yet their conception was based entirely on racial stereotyping. As Nicholas Sammond, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, explored in his 2015 book Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, many cartoon characters from the early days of film and TV, such as Mickey and Bugs, have their roots in minstrel shows. He writes how these characters began "visually and gesturally act[ing] as minstrels but over time lose a direct association with blackface itself". This influence is also partly the reason why characters like Mickey and Goofy are always depicted wearing white gloves.
In other cases, the historical racism is much more apparent. One film, no longer available to watch or buy through any channels, exemplifies the legacy Hollywood has to redress. Disney's 1946 movie Song of the South – a mix of live-action and animation, like the Space Jams – tells the story of plantation workers after the abolition of slavery and contains so many offensive depictions of black people that it was dubbed "one of Hollywood’s most resiliently offensive racist texts" by Jason Sperb in his book Disney's Most Notorious Film. After deciding not to put it on its Disney + service, last year Disney also announced they were refitting their Splash Mountain log flume ride, originally inspired by the film, to remove any Song of the South elements.
Despite that film being excised from the family canon, however, there are still plenty of films within it that have a pretty obviously troubling relationship with race. Take another much-loved film from the same era, 1941's Dumbo, which features crows acting out minstrel show routines – led by 'Jim' Crow, a character name riffing off the notorious pejorative term for black people that came to be associated with racial segregation laws in the US – and a song with the lyrics "We slave until we're almost dead/ We're happy-hearted roustabouts". And all through the rest of the 20th Century, people of colour continued to be egregiously stereotyped. "The film that radicalised me against Disney was [1992's] Aladdin," says Hemant Shah, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies portrayals of race and ethnicity in film and media. "Because that's where the imagery of the Middle East was so highly problematic. Even the theme song [Arabian Nights] would talk about how barbaric the Middle East was and how they would cut off your ear if they don't like your face." It also featured an all-white cast of voice actors.
Disney's Aladdin is among the classic animations that have proffered egregious racial stereotypes (Credit: Alamy)
In the last decade or so, some progress has been made. Major new animated releases, from 2009's The Princess and the Frog to 2020's Soul, have centred black characters and characters of colour. And Disney, in particular, has conspicuously tried to correct itself: two years ago, Aladdin was reworked with a live action remake; it featured Will Smith as the genie as part of a diverse cast including numerous actors of Middle Eastern descent, and cut the more problematic lyrics from its songbook.
However whether these efforts count as truly progressive is debatable. In Aladdin's case, it could be argued that the very aesthetic of it is inherently racist, says Dan Hassler-Forest, pop cultural theorist and assistant professor of media studies at Utrecht University. "To cater to fans [Disney] make minor adjustments but [there is still the fact] that the whole framework of Aladdin is this Western Orientalist playground that is presented as a kind of amusement park of stereotypes."
As for 2009's The Princess and the Frog, with its lead character Tiana, the first African-American Disney princess, it certainly challenged the default of white blonde princesses, but that attempt at diversity suffered from Tiana being transformed into a frog for most of the movie and the use of racially stereotypical tropes, such as voodoo, and a cliched New Orleans jazz setting. Similarly, Pixar's Soul has a black lead, music teacher-cum-jazz pianist Joe, but then kills him almost immediately and turns him into a posthumous blob, while then putting another soul, voiced by a white woman, Tina Fey, into his body. What's more, in one scene Joe is mistaken for another black man, an archetypal racist microaggression, which feels like it is scripted without any awareness of that fact.
Why do such missteps still happen? Perhaps it’s because, on a systemic level, the industry hasn't changed as much as it would like to project. Directors of the big animated films are still predominantly white men, while companies like Disney are money-making machines that follow formulas based on previous success. Soul did have a black co-director, Kemp Powers, but he was only drafted in late into the production process.
However Disney maintain that they are putting resources into redressing this systemic inequality. "We have several programmes that support the pipeline of diverse creative talent [in animation] including Pixar Spark Shorts [and] Launchpad," a Disney spokesperson tells BBC Culture. They add that the studio has also recently launched Onyx Collective, a content platform to showcase work by creators of colour and other underrepresented voices, while in the UK, they have "collaborated with the BFI's Future Skills programme" which is designed to help provide training and opportunities to young people from a variety of backgrounds.
The signs of progress
On screen, there are also signs that companies like Disney are trying to address the racist legacy of animation in a more deeply considered way. One recent example of this is Disney's Raya and The Last Dragon. Released in March, and telling the story of a young warrior princess, it is the first Disney film to feature a south-east Asian lead, and is co-written by Adele Lim, who is of Malaysian-Chinese descent. It has been met with huge acclaim from south-east Asian viewers for the detail in its representation, including its characters' spectrum of skin tones, its accurate adoption of cultural signifiers, like the use of food as hospitality, and its realistic depiction of martial arts. Then later in the year the studio's next big animated release will be Encanto, which has a story set in and inspired by Colombia. Notably, it features a cast of voice actors who are all either Colombian or of Colombian heritage and has a Latino female co-director, Cuban-American Charise Castro Smith, while the pre-publicity has been keen to assert its authentic credentials by pointing out that "the filmmakers were deeply inspired by their research trip to Colombia during early development of [the film] as well as their continuous work with a group of expert consultants".
Disney's recent release Raya and the Last Dragon met with acclaim for the detail of its South-east Asian representation (Credit: Alamy)
Watching Raya and the Last Dragon had a particularly personal impact on me: my mother is Malaysian so seeing the rice dish nasi lemak depicted lovingly in a Disney film was a watershed moment for me, having grown up feeling that my culture was overlooked in the animations I loved. It has been criticised for lumping together all south-east Asian culture into five groups and for its use of voice actors who have east Asian heritage, but overall Raya feels like a genuine attempt by Hollywood to respect a non-Western culture and the perfect tool to teach my five-year-old daughter that princesses don't have to look like Frozen's Elsa.
It contrasts with another film that recently purported to celebrate Asian culture, but did so more superficially: Netflix's Over the Moon, which tells the story of a young girl in a Chinese village trying to build a rocket to fly to the moon. While it represents both Chinese and Chinese-American culture, it at times veers into clichés – the adults participate in outdoor calisthenics, bubble tea is drunk a lot – that suggest a white person's view of East Asians, which is no surprise as it was both directed and written by white Americans with "additional material" added by two Asian-American screenwriters.
The biggest strides have been happening in black representation. Although Soul had its faults, it did depict New York's black community in a touching way, not least in its portrayal of Joe's neighbourhood barbershop, while equally it evoked the jazz music scene with care and attention, both in its visuals and soundtrack.
Before that, in 2018, the animated Marvel and Sony Pictures release Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse offered the progressive template for how to successfully create a more diverse story that addresses race and racial prejudice in a subtle yet thoughtful manner. Co-directed by trailblazer Peter Ramsey, who was the first African-American to both be nominated for and win the best animated feature Academy Award for it, it tells the story of a young Afro-Latino boy, Miles Morales, who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and acquires power similar to Spiderman. Among the superhero antics, it shows Morales struggling with fitting in in his majority white elite school, while he has a touching relationship with his policeman father, who is focused on providing his son with academic opportunities, that rebuffs negative stereotypes about black fatherhood. "It's a terrific example of how a story can draw on [a familiar franchise] while reframing it in a way that is really meaningfully about race without being didactic about it." says Hassler-Forest.
Last month, it was announced Issa Rae would be voicing a black Spiderwoman in the film's sequel, which will again blaze a trail for Hollywood animation in not only centring a black woman, but an action heroine rather than a princess.
Why this matters so much as a parent
The importance of diverse representation in animation has truly hit home to me since I became a parent. Unfortunately, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is aimed at an older age-group than that of my daughter and, while it's heartening that a film like Raya and the Last Dragon now exists, it is difficult to get a child of that age to deviate from the familiar when they are already obsessed with a cultural juggernaut like Frozen, whose merchandise and marketing is everywhere. That obsession has become a bigger problem than I thought it would be as, in her love for Elsa, my daughter has started to equate blondeness with beauty, power and strength which has led her to always try to seek out friends who are white girls.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) was a perfect example of how to create a more diverse kids' animation (Credit: Alamy)
"It's hard to combat the power of Elsa," says Sarah Coyne, associate director of the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University, Utah. "But it's important to point out the misperception that blonde people are better than any other type of people. And talk to the teacher and address this at the school level, so she's hearing it from lots of different people".
However, while this is something that my partner and I have indeed tried to address with the help of teachers, we've had mixed results, as it's such a huge systemic problem that it can't be overturned by a few conversations in the playground. It's a problem though that Shah thinks Disney can actually do a lot more to help with. Currently, the only teaching resource on negative stereotypes the media company provides is a website that goes through their animations' history of offensive imagery. As mentioned before, the company also provides warnings before certain films on streaming platforms, such as Aladdin, but these will only have any real impact if they're backed up with an adult explaining why exactly the depictions being warned about are offensive. "What's missing is a more comprehensive media literacy component," explains Shah. "They could create materials that they could share with schools and parents to talk about why [certain] images are problematic."
In the meantime we're left with a situation in which new animation films are pushing to create a more diverse landscape, with mixed results, while systemic racism still casts a shadow over the genre. The Space Jam films are actually the perfect amalgamation of this problem, featuring as they do both strong black role models and outdated cartoon characters, like Speedy Gonzales (based on offensive Mexican stereotypes) and Bugs Bunny, who, as mentioned above, was originally inspired by minstrel performers. "[With Bugs Bunny alongside Michael Jordan and LeBron James] we're seeing two different versions of how America views blackness and one version that doesn't really acknowledge their race or racial identity," as Hassler-Forest puts it.
Nevertheless, while the presence of Bugs Bunny may be a throwback to historical bigotry, Space Jam and now its sequel at least show some of the way forward for Hollywood animation in reckoning with its race problem, and centring stories with strong nuanced characters of colour. Indeed, when my daughter is old enough, I'd love for her to enjoy the Space Jams and to be lost in a virtual world where blonde is not the default. These films may seem like wacky inanity but for parents like me, they can be used to show our children that there's an alternative to white culture – and that is far from frivolous.
David Jesudason is a freelance journalist who writes about culture and has a weekly newsletter Episodes of My Life on Substack
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