What "race" do you consider non-humanoid cartoon characters to be?

Inspired by mh posting this Vice article as a comment to me on Facebook:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/all-your-favourite-cartoon-characters-are-black

Obviously Panthro from Thundercats is black; also half the Autobots and a quarter of the Decepticons. I haven't really given much thought to the Warner Brothers or Disney characters, or whether I consider any ethnicity beyond "black" and "not-black" when I classify these characters.

Do you do this? If so, what race have you (sub)consciously assigned to non-human anthropomorphic cartoon characters?

well there's that whole crows sequence in Dumbo

not reading a Vice article tho

Voices are often racially coded as well, that's something that complicates this for me.

if anything the animal WB characters (Bugs, Daffy, esp) code as Jewish to me but that's all because of Mel Blanc. Disney yeah idk Mickey and Donald seem v ethnicity-neutral to me.

Wile E. Coyote pretty clearly a rich white dude.

the only time i do this is if the voice actor is a recognizable celebrity

I suspect Speedy Gonzales is Mexican.

Skeeter from Doug, definitely. The rest, I dunno...Elmo, Cookie Monster..? Luigi from Mario Bros., who has always been a white Italian guy?

yeah idk how luigi ended up on there

All the Gargoyles are black, too.

Luigi's inclusion made me lol really hard.

synergy from JEm is black?

Frylock = black
Meatwad = black
Master Shake = white

I'm not sure exactly where I draw the line, but I would attribute race to Arthur characters, but state that Bugs Bunny is just a rabbit (and Daffy and Donald are just ducks etc). I don't think I'd attribute race to all Muppets, e.g. Kermit is a frog, but Elmo and Bert and Ernie I would. And the Swedish chef, obv. So I guess the recurrent theme is that they have to be just over that 'humanoid' edge. I wonder if I'd default to white if asked to draw Bugs Bunny as a human? I'm honestly not sure, but quite probably.

Wile E. Coyote pretty clearly a rich white dude.

haha yes

I could see the Roadrunner as black, classic mythic trickster figure

Gaia in “Captain Planet and the Planeteers”

I don't think I ever felt anything about this strongly at all, & I definitely didn't have a concept/sense of a more general blackness which a nonhuman cartoon could exhibit

Impossible to disassociate the voice of Hong Kong Phooey from Scatman Crothers, imho

Jar Jar Binks, I guess

When I started thinking about this, I discovered a complete blind spot in my consideration of ethnicity other than "I think this character is black", which then led the others to default to being white. Have you encountered any characters you thought were East Asian, Southeast Asian, Latino, Chicano, Hispanic, Jewish, Middle Eastern, etc?

Those cats in Lady and the Tramp, never really thought about their ethnicity

"White people don't want to see race anywhere," Nakamura told me. "They're discouraged externally and internally from noticing it because they're afraid they're going to get in trouble or they're straight up racist." Not only that, but Nakamura explained white people (as any person of color can attest to) generally avoid conversations about race. "The risk of being shunned or seen as racist far outweighs the benefit of having these conversations," she added.

well, yeah. if I say "oh the Swiper from Dora is clearly black" is that not uh...kinda racist?

Eddie Murphy as Mushu in “Mulan”

Trying to think of a British character where this might apply.

well Tom already mentioned the obvious stereotype w Speedy Gonzales... I guess generally I don't do this though, unless the voice talent really foregrounds a specific ethnic character (which imo Blanc does because so much of his schticks feel like Jewish vaudeville to me)

xp

Have you encountered any characters you thought were East Asian, Southeast Asian, Latino, Chicano, Hispanic, Jewish, Middle Eastern, etc?

Star Wars has the lot :/

Trying to think of a British character where this might apply.

Rastamouse.

xp the show Doug too. Mr Dink was Jewish, Connie was Asian, Roger was Latino

boo boo is totally a pisces

this is kind of a silly question

but

https://media.tenor.co/images/6127f8b549251659121bb3c0441ba5bf/tenor.gif

This certainly isn't something I did as a kid - like in adulthood the first time someone mentioned that Panthro was black my reaction was "oh yeah, shit". Nowadays I might do because I understand how accents are coded a lot better than I did aged seven, but only if they audibly talk like humans (so maybe Bugs Bunny or obviously someone like Pepe Le Pew but probably not Roadrunner or Donald Duck).

also i don't think you can generalize and think non-blacks were mostly "whites" because cartoon characters play off caricatures from different european countries; eg pepe le pew

matt otm

basically if they try really hard to sound different or their character is based on not being the same as the other characters, i would notice

I suppose I did identify mumm-ra as egyptian

Skeeter from Doug, definitely. The rest, I dunno...Elmo, Cookie Monster..? Luigi from Mario Bros., who has always been a white Italian guy?

― frogbs, Thursday, May 25, 2017 8:38 AM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there was another guy from doug where they actually specifically mention he is pakistani, i don't remember his name right now

Panthro was a black panther

also many jewish characters, i mean how do you not notice?

bobby's world
rugrats

for starters

all the rabbits in Watership Down = Jews, but then this is an obvious allegory

Foghorn Leghorn is depicted as a large, anthropomorphic white adult Leghorn rooster with a stereotypically Southern accent, a "good ol' boy" speaking style, and a penchant for mischief.

Interestingly, despite seeing the voice actor and knowing where he got the foundation for Jar Jar's patois from, I never actually considered Jar Jar to be black. Boss Nass, though, is 100% black.

Also, why the hell would we talk about Rugrats and Bobby's World in a conversation about non-humanoid cartoon characters?

Foghorn Leghorn has always coded as one of those Good Ol' Boy Southern Dem Senators (LBJ etc.)

i remember trying for foghorn leghorn in a post some years back and not quite being prepared for djps reaction

the beast in beauty and the beast is latvian

new york italian gang?

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/hanna-barbera/images/f/f8/Top_Cat_and_Gang.jpg

also half the Autobots and a quarter of the Decepticons

now I'm curious which Decepticons

Also, why the hell would we talk about Rugrats and Bobby's World in a conversation about non-humanoid cartoon characters?

― PJD PDJ DPJ (DJP), Thursday, May 25, 2017 9:08 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

because doug went unchecked, and i always thought they were more or less human

Foghorn Leghorn began as a direct parody of a Southern character, Senator Claghorn, who was on Fred Allen's popular 1940s radio show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senator_Claghorn

xxxp Top Cat is explicitly Phil Silvers in cat form though, right?

oh okay

not read up on it

chickens are NOT alieans

more uncertain territory - Song of the South

lol

This does open the door back up for me to make the "Br'er Roadrunner" joke that I was too late to post earlier in the thread, though.

surprised no one's mentioned krazy kat yet, where posthumous research into george herriman's life and identity have provoked a lot of interesting takes on the original work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herriman#Race_and_identity

ppl we are overlooking a more urgent question hidden as a link halfway down the vice article viz: "is spongebob squarepants the new che guevara?"

I do see him on a lot of T-shirts

no I mean that their ethnicity is indeterminate, ie, I do not detect any ethnic signifiers, beyond them speaking English (nominally, in Donald's case).

― Οὖτις, Thursday, May 25, 2017 12:04 PM (yesterday)

White culture is often/typically blind to itself, to its own distinct ethnic character. Therefore, relative to white culture, to be "indeterminate" is to be implicitly white. E.g., a simple stick figure reads as a "white guy" to many/most white people. In order to seem, for instance, black or female, it needs some othering detail.

I can't speak for everyone, but I suspect that Bugs Bunny seemed (invisibly) white to most white kids of my generation - and moreso to my parents. He's a caricature of a once-common 20th century stereotype: the white working-class Brooklyn boy, loud of mouth and small of stature. He was created and voiced by (Jewish) white guys, and the rare appearances of distinctly "black" nonhuman characters in those old Warner Brothers cartoons are very differently stylized.

I don't think Bugs was created by Jewish guys btw.

If you haven't seen it already, I would recommend NOT watching "Sausage Party." All the "ethnic" foods are, ha-ha, embued with stereotypical "ethnic" characteristics, tee hee. Snicker snicker, the Jewish bagel is a Woody Allen neurotic, and it just goes downhill from there. The box of grits is black and resents the crackers, and after that point it's fine to just turn the movie off because it does not get better.

I could be wrong but old school animators/directors often seem to be from the Mid West and/or the back of beyond.

Blanc was Jewish

"Sausage Party" is pretty bad, I was disappointed. Despite finding the orgy scene nominally funny.

xp

Leon Schleshinger = also Jewish

Schlesinger too. And Fritz Freleng.

and the fleischer brothers

White culture is often/typically blind to itself, to its own distinct ethnic character.

I am aware of this dynamic. If you want to point out the distinct ethnic characteristics that code as white for Disney's characters feel free to point them out (beyond them speaking un-accented English, as I've already noted). Note that we have some people here who think Mickey is black/in blackface.

? Fleischers didn't work at WB or create Bugs Bunny

xp

i know that Οὖτις: tom d's generalisation re who old-school animators were and weren't seemed to be becoming more wide-ranging than just bugs bunny's creators

ah.

I'd say it was a mix - Avery, Jones, Clampett hailing from the south/midwest/southwest and then you have a bunch of Jews from NY/LA in there as well. Blanc is such a crucial part of Bugs' character though, I'd give him an outsize share of the credit for Bugs' personality and its Jewish vaudeville character

fleischer bros' betty boop also based on a black singer, baby esther -- possibly indirectly, via helen kane's blatant appropriation of baby esther's shtick (kane attempted to sue the fleischers but lost)

"White culture is often/typically blind to itself, to its own distinct ethnic character."

I am aware of this dynamic. If you want to point out the distinct ethnic characteristics that code as white for Disney's characters feel free to point them out (beyond them speaking un-accented English, as I've already noted). Note that we have some people here who think Mickey is black/in blackface.

― Οὖτις, Friday, May 26, 2017 9:23 AM (eleven minutes ago)

To strip a character of obvious ethnic signifiers is (relative to a white American audience) to render it white. The presumed "normalcy" of whiteness fills in the blanks. Also, I'd say that Mickey and Donald's cartoon suburban life is consistent with then-common representations of the "average" white American experience.

what ridiculous tautology is this: from White culture is often/typically blind to itself, to its own distinct ethnic character. Therefore, relative to white culture, to be "indeterminate" is to be implicitly white. to To strip a character of obvious ethnic signifiers is (relative to a white American audience) to render it white.

you're saying that since they do not have any obvious signifiers indicating they belong to a specific ethnicity they are, by default, "white", instead of indeterminate. But this contention is entirely dependent on who the audience doing the interpreting are. Remove white America from the picture, do Asians think Mickey Mouse is white? Do Latinos? Better to stick to the text, not the audience.

I'd say that Mickey and Donald's cartoon suburban life is consistent with then-common representations of the "average" white American experience.

and this is ignoring all the many, many times Mickey and Donald are depicted in decidedly NON-suburban life scenarios

and this is ignoring all the many, many times Mickey and Donald are depicted in decidedly NON-suburban life scenarios

Yeah, the classic Disney characters are wonderfully variable, plastic. That's a big part of what makes them so durable.

I've been talking about how I think a certain group tends to perceive depicted characters. I think that's appropriate here, but I don't insist you agree. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

now I'm thinking about how there are black transformers. "Jazz" So , on Cybertron, there was ethnicity variations? I mean there wasn't "race" in a skin tone sense as they are all different colors of car. Why did Jazz have the mannerisms and speech of a 20th century black person in america? Did he grow up on earth before going to cybertron?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOzmiZ_HJ_A

lol

I thought that vox was familiar its Scatman Crothers !

fleischer bros' betty boop also based on a black singer, baby esther -- possibly indirectly, via helen kane's blatant appropriation of baby esther's shtick (kane attempted to sue the fleischers but lost)

― mark s, Saturday, 27 May 2017 2:06 AM (nineteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

With my 4yo daughter having become a massive betty boop fan, i know that there's a very early cartoon of her leaving home to become a singer, and her parents are absolutely stereotypes of 1930s jewish immigrants in new york

When I was a kid I knew next to nothing about other cultures, so I thought of them as sui generis.

The non-humanoid cartoon characters, that is.

What about just non-humanoids? We figured out my wife codes all North American forest animals as regional varieties of white people.

Groundhogs = Appalachia
Squirrels = New England
Beavers = Minnesota
Deer = Southeast, also "old money"
Bears = Jeff Bridges

Re: Boop's Jewish signifiers, the essential reading here (which I think I've linked on ILX before?) is Amelia Holberg, "Betty Boop: Yiddish Film Star," in American Jewish History, no. 4 (1999): 291-312. She points out, e.g., the "Old Country" father with yarmulke-shaped bald spot in "Minnie the Moocher," and the way "כּשר" (kosher) pops up visually as a comic aside. To Holberg, "it was exactly this inability to lose all trace of ethnicity and vulgarity which prevented the Fleischer cartoons from becoming as popular as Disney’s."

On the 'urban' in Fleischer and lack thereof in Disney, see Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story (New York: Scribner, 1997), pp. ~63-73; and especially Norman Klein, "Fleischer: Cities, Machines and Immigrant Life," in Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (New York: Verso, 1993).

I mashed all of these together in a term paper a few years ago, trying to tease out the "urbanity" of these different cartoons; to the extent that depictions of the characters' milieu matters for "reading" their race - and I think it does - then hopefully this is germane to this thread. Basically I think Disney's cartoons look like the world that WASPs who moved west to Los Angeles (as Disney did) thought they would find there. Broadly, to quote myself, "Betty’s world is urban: the street, the apartment, the cabaret, and sometimes the suburb. Donald’s is pastoral: the sea, the wilderness, the farm, the small town." If you'll indulge me:

Specifically: Betty Boop appeared in one hundred twenty film shorts between 1930 and 1939. By my count of the one hundred and thirteen surviving shorts, thirty-nine (35%) are set at least partially in a visibly urban milieu. Donald Duck, between his 1934 debut and the 1944 drafting of Dialectic of Enlightenment, made eighty-three non-trivial appearances in Disney shorts. Only fifteen of these (18%) take place in unambiguously “urban” settings, with three more hesitatingly suggestive of a city.

These numbers do not tell the full story. As Klein puts it, of Fleischer’s cartoons, "none was more packed with urban imagery than Betty Boop." Boop’s city is fully populated with background signifiers familiar to an urban audience: laundry lines strung between tenements, boarded-up Depression shop-fronts, alley cats, densely-packed high-rises, street performers, cigarette girls. “Betty Boop For President” (1932) features haywire trolley cars, a long-shot of a Manhattan-esque island, and throngs of celebrants at a ticker-tape parade. While some later Boop appearances mimic Disney’s nostalgic Americana (and many confine her to a domestic interior, urbanism unknown), others maintain her cosmopolitanism: in “Grampy’s Indoor Outing” (1936) she lives in a streamlined concrete apartment building, complete with abstract-art rug; “So Does An Automobile” (1939) revolves around an “auto hospital” in a loft building with elevator; and “More Pep” (1936) takes place in downtown Manhattan – both as cartoon and as live-action footage. Boop’s urban spirit is apparent even in cartoons with garbled scenography, such as “Riding the Rails” (1938). Here, Betty somehow rides a subway from a Disneyesque suburb to a downtown toy store – but the humor derives from subway inconveniences familiar to an urban audience, like overstuffed cars and oversized fellow passengers. Even cartoons set far from the city are made more urban than necessary: “Poor Cinderella” (1934) is set largely in the “townish” parts of the fairy tale, complete with buzzing crowds, and many of the small-town shorts quickly relocate the action to a vaudeville theater interior.

Donald's infrequent urban adventures are a mixed bag: sometimes the city is as bright, colorful and clean as Donald himself, but not always. In “Mickey’s Trailer” (1938), Donald and his friends begin the day’s drive by abandoning their urban stopping point in front of a grotesque city dump. “Officer Duck” (1939) sees Donald sent to the wrong side of the tracks to arrest a hardened criminal at his gray, run-down house in the shadow of a dour brown gasometer. And in “Donald’s Lucky Day,” (1939) Donald’s job as a bicycle deliveryman in a rough dockside district puts him in mortal danger, as gangsters hire him to deliver a package (shoved through a speakeasy door-slot) containing a live bomb. But much more often, Donald appears on the farm, or in the American wild, where he usually has some ill-fated recreational ambition (picnicking, camping, moose-hunting). The most typical Donald setting is a loose amalgamation of rural, small-town and suburban signifiers: cheery detached houses with backyards and picket fences give way rapidly to rolling hills, dirt roads and leafy woodlands, with occasional stops by a swimming hole, skating pond, or one-room schoolhouse. This world is typical of Disney from the middle Thirties on; Mickey, Goofy and Pluto all occupy similar terrain.

(See again Klein and Kanfer. By the way, you can find basically all of these shorts on YouTube if you search by name.)

This can be illustrated by a comparison of Duck and Boop cartoons with similar premises, for example “Donald’s Gold Mine” (1942) and “I Heard” (1933), both set in mines. The Boop cartoon is introduced by African-American jazz conductor Don Redman, and caricatures an industrial mining operation. With a backdrop of smokestacks, an endless series of workers trudge in and out of the mine, arriving at “Betty Boop’s Tavern” where Boop and Redman (as a canine waiter) perform and serve up chow. It is the way a miner or a factory worker would understand mining. In Disney’s cartoon, the mine is an artisanal operation populated only by Donald and his donkey. It has a conveyer belt, but no operators and no foremen. While both cartoons must logically take place in remote settings, Boop’s is fundamentally more “industrial” and thus arguably more "urban."

To me, all of that would have - for a 1930s-40s audience - certainly made Donald and Mickey more "white," just considering the demographics of access to the landscape of picket fences and easy living that the Disney shorts depict.

I love ILX

I Love Cultural Studies

I Love Doctor Casino

xp. no ebenezer scrooge is not of scottish decent. i had always assumed it was just due to scots being known for their thrift/maybe biographically influenced a little by andrew carnegie?

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Thursday, May 25, 2017 2:58 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There seems (based on the force of the article arguing against this) to be an attempt to read Scrooge as Jewish.

I see Bugs Bunny as "Brooklyn" (Italian and/or Jewish), but as said upthread, Mel Blanc's voicework has a lot to do with that.

I can speak to the white liberal guilt theme: years ago I decided Magilla Gorilla was rooted in anti-black stereotypes, and haven't watched many cartoons since.

Not Irish?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgZlw4O1qzk

as a mouthy member of a race best known for producing huge families, he's practically the bunny dmac

I Love Doctor Casino

awww <3

Always thought Destro from GI Joe was supposed to be black, but from looking into it, it appears he's white (thought the live action version might have been white washing). It's just one of the main voice actors was black and the way he was drawn sometimes. I can't be the only one who thought he was a black character.

Found this about the black voice actor Arthur Burghardt.

http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2014/02/26/the-voice-of-gi-joes-destro-was-a-badass-imprisoned-for-draft-resistance

The walrus ghost played by Cab Calloway is obvs Cab Calloway

Don't have much more insight other than, you know, as I get older I really appreciate the urban tradition in American kid's entertainment Dr Casino mentions. Trolleys and tenement blocks and street scenes in Boop cartoons and, for someone of my age, the reference points are Sesame Street and Ghostbusters and Turtles. There was also a homegrown Thomas-like series called TUGS which featured various tugboats living the life on the Hudson Bay. I have a distinct childhood memory of demanding to go and look at the statue of Madonna and being disappointed that it was in New York which was in another country.

Being white I have no idea how well or how badly any of this stuff handles race per se, but it feels like a big positive step to have general urban life celebrated.

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/tugs/images/1/17/Zebedee.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100921010724

Looks like Bob Hoskins.

as a mouthy member of a race best known for producing huge families, he's practically the bunny dmac

― heck i've even been an 'oyster pirate' (bizarro gazzara), Saturday, 27 May 2017 18:16 (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Eyyyy

xp The model-making on TUGS was first-class. Details like using planks of wood as shock absorbers along the hull because the usual rubber car tyres were too expensive in the Depression, and those tower cranes and warehouses. Soot and dirt everywhere. One of the characters was a dredging platform.

This man played Barney the dinosaur for 10 years — here's what it was like pic.twitter.com/RbdrQ5UxBD

— Business Insider (@businessinsider) June 7, 2017

I assume all of the Backyardigans are black. Maybe not Pablo.

The California Raisins are black

Does Audrey Jr. in Littel Shop pf Horros count?