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Reading Disney is like having one's own exploited condition rammed with honey down one's throat.
Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (1984, 99)
If Wells (2002, 1) is correct in his assertion that animation, in common with jazz, the western, and the musical, is an art genre originating in the United States, then, as Lehman (2007, 1) proposes, the wildly popular form surely "owes its existence to African Americans." Unlike jazz, which African Americans have long constituted the overwhelming majority of creators, and at times consumers, animation has historically fed on blackness, recycling caricatures-such as Mammy Two Shoes in Tom and Jerry and the crows in Dumbo-and inspiring characters-Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny for instance-even as Blacks were excluded from the production of the medium (Lehman 2007; Lindvall and Fraser 2002; Sampson 1997). Importantly, as Pigeon (1997) argues, animated representation projected accounts of racial difference through black face, even after minstrel shows had fallen out favor. In fact, it is hard not to read the history of animation in the United States as anti-black racism, persistently reiterated for the pleasure of white audiences and the profit of (largely) white owned corporation.
Oddly, even as one credits the anti-racist struggles that grew ever more powerful after the Second World War with effectively dismantling negative images of African Americans in animation and beyond, a troubling question remains: why have so few positive portraits replaced these negative images? That is, with the exception of Fat Albert and the more problematic Coonskin, what accounts for the virtual absence of animated representations of blackness in the aftermath of the civil rights movement? Moreover, even as multiculturalism flourished in marketing and entertainment, why have African Americans remained all but invisible, marginal, and tokenized-so much so, that the appearance of Frozone in The Incredibles lifts one's spirits? Is the world of Disney princesses ruled by an unspoken apartheid, allowing entrance only to whites and honoring white heterosexual maidens? These questions and many others about animation and difference were rattling around our heads as we wrapped a monograph on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in the genre (King et al. 2009). The then-impending release of Walt Disney's animated feature, The Princess and the Frog...