#Dumbo racist skin
Aladdin’s skin colour is much lighter in the 1992 film than any of the Arab villains of the piece. Some racist manoeuvres in Disney are more insidious. It’s a wonder they didn’t get Mickey Rooney to voice him. Much like the crows, these minor players are mainly wheeled on for musical and/or background colour, which could also be said of the Native Americans in Peter Pan (1953), with their wildly exaggerated terracotta features and thoroughly not-cool signature song What Makes the Red Man Red? Or take the Siamese cats, passim in Disney, popping up with devious-looking slanted eyes, buck teeth and some form of Engrish to impart – that evil pair in Lady and the Tramp (1955), for instance, or the one playing the piano in The Aristocats (1977), who sings “Shanghai, Hong Kong, egg foo young! Fortune cookie always wrong!”, puts a cymbal on his head, and quips “Boy, he brew it!” when Berlioz plays the trumpet. There was that film’s crab, Sebastian, with his heavy Jamaican accent, but also two passing characters in Under the Sea – the fluke (“ the duke of Soul, yeah”), who looks like an old black jazz player, and the briefly glimpsed black fish (“she sings”), who has massive red lips. Well into the Eighties and Nineties, when the studio’s Renaissance began with The Little Mermaid (1989), there are still very dubious racial caricatures to contend with, almost all of them sidekicks. To add insult to injury, he’s voiced by a white actor, Cliff Edwards – the same guy who did Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio – so the general veneer of minstrelsy is compounded by what you might call “black-voice”.ĭisney’s lack of racial sensitivity in this era – and for a long time past it – is well-trodden ground. He’s called Jim Crow – a glib nod towards America’s still-extant segregation laws of that name.
The leader of the pack, puffing his chest out and clutching a cigar in his wing, is a whole checklist of affronts to African-Americans.
Appearing in the original’s last 10 minutes or so, this jive-talking, openly stereotyped quintet (who sing When I See an Elephant Fly) can’t be comfortably made over to placate modern sensibilities. Tim Burton’s Dumbo – which opened on Friday to decidedly mixed reviews – is nearly twice as long as Disney’s 1941 classic, but there’s one set of characters you won’t find reproduced even for a nanosecond of screen time: the crows.
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