Black Animation — Davonne Dupart
After listening to the first half of the ASIFA South podcast Labor of Love and Black History I was confronted with yet another compelling notion from Ms. Davonne Dupart. After she spoke about artists becoming more savvy business people, Davonne then spoke on the representation of minorities in animation and how that stems from the animators themselves. Davonne recounts times when she was working in animation studios and looked around at the people she worked with and noticed that she was the only minority or only black woman working there. She also talks about how this may be one of the root causes for a lack of representation in the animation world. She talks about how she only sees a few animations today that have more diverse apparent plentiful representation. She also debunked some of the stigma that the animation industry does its part in refusing minority animators a job. She does talk about how her race and gender does indeed cause problems with getting work, but does not go into great detail as to how that is specifically.
I do agree with her that there is a distinct lack of representation in newer animation. Just as she said, “I haven’t seen black characters doing black things since the Proud Family…” I realized that there is a distinct difference between having one or two minority characters and having a much larger ratio of minority characters in popular animation produced by large companies.
Though plenty of small indie animation companies have no problem with creating and producing minority characters, it seems the bigger companies have a much more difficult time doing the same. This could be caused by higher ups in the companies not seeing the need for representation, stories not needing human characters or even doing the bare minimum to appease the audience. However, I think the problem come from larger companies not understanding how large their demographic is as well as not knowing how to addresses representation properly. As Davonne said, there aren’t a lot of people of color working in animation studios and said studios don’t have too much obligation to create a minority-centric cast of characters.
To keep things short and brief, it is very important to have more representation in animation and the products there of. It’s not only important to younger viewers, but to viewers of all ages to see their demographic represented in the media to show that they can exist alongside majority characters as well as showing minorities that they can also be the focus of entertainment in a positive light. Because the demographic of animation is so diverse, it only makes sense for the content to be the same. What we as artist show people in the entertainment world should reflect what we want to see in the real world. Hopefully one of those things is a bond that cant bring unity through diversity.
