Up to this point, I’ve talked about gender-related issues a lot. There are plenty of them out there, and I’ll definitely get back to them, but right now I think I’ll switch to something else. The racial issues surrounding Disney’s classics are also numerous, and with the next Disney animation coming out soon, these issues are on the forefront of many Disney fans’ minds. There are so many sensitive issues and varying perspectives having to do with race and the media that I don’t think I can address them in one post, so I’ll split it up. In this post, I’ll talk only about the basic inclusion of people of color in Disney and say nothing about how they are shown, when they are.

When it comes to sheer numbers, Disney’s got a mixed record on racial inclusion. Their animated films feature far more racially diverse characters in major roles than those of other American movie companies (like Pixar and Dreamworks), but the majority of Disney’s characters are still white. Since Disney has such an international presence, do they have a greater responsibility to be more racially inclusive? I’m not going to lie, part of the reason why I love Mulan so much is because it’s set in China. That doesn’t mean that I don’t admire people of different races, but there’s just something about having a character look like you and embody some of the same values and traditions that you do, especially if that’s not too common. Of course, Disney is an American company that started selling movies in 1937, so it naturally has an imperfect balance of racial representation. As the company has aged, it’s become more and more inclusive, but is this happening fast enough? Maybe, maybe not. There are a lot of questions raised by the issue of racial inclusion, and one film that seems to broach them all is Disney’s 53rd animated classic, Frozen. So let’s use this as a case study.

If you haven’t heard of it, Frozen is a movie set in the fictional kingdom of Arendelle, which is modelled on Norway. The story is based (very loosely) on “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen, and it will feature two new Disney princesses (Anna and Elsa). Based on the trailers and promotional images, all of the human characters are Caucasian.

First of all, let’s acknowledge that this movie will certainly be culturally diverse, if not racially so. Disney has made one other movie set in Scandinavia, The Little Mermaid, and most of that one took place underwater. Basically, Frozen will be Disney’s first proper trip into this part of Europe. And the focus won’t just be on Norway’s ethnic majority; Frozen will also feature the indigenous Sami culture. Like Native Americans in our country, the Sami people have long been marginalized where they live. (If you’re like me, you hadn’t even heard of them before you heard of this movie.) Disney has designed Frozen’s main male character, Kristoff, to wear Sami clothing, and they’re using a Sami yoik as the opening song. There’s been some controversy over whether the Sami representation has been whitewashed, with some people saying that Kristoff should be colored and other people saying Sami people aren’t colored and so on, but ideally it shouldn’t even matter. Showing different cultures is good, and the color of a character’s skin should have no impact, right?

Unfortunately, for many people, that’s just not the case. In an ideal world, the color of someone’s skin wouldn’t matter at all. In that vein, many of Frozen’s defenders argue that people of color can still look up to Anna or Elsa based on the content of their characters, not their skin color. Certainly there are white Disney fans who idolize Mulan, and Asian fans who adore Ariel, and Hispanic fans who love Pocahontas, and so on. However, this ignores the fact that white privilege has existed in the West for a long time and still exists today. That’s why a Disney fan making Elsa black is seen as a provocative statement on racial equality (not one that I agree with, incidentally) whereas someone making Tiana white, for example, would just be racist. Someday we’ll hopefully get to a place where the color of a person’s skin truly doesn’t matter, but until then we should acknowledge that it’s long been weighted one way. And when it comes to Disney in particular, it’s disheartening to many fans that Caucasian characters get to be so numerous and nuanced when other races have only one main character to represent them. So even though Frozen will feature cultures that Disney hasn’t really touched before, many feel that it’s still not as diverse or inclusive as it should be.

So how could this have been better? One option would be to set the story in a different place. Though Hans Christian Andersen was Danish, “The Snow Queen” is much more evocative of nearby Norway, so that’s the setting Disney chose. Should they have gone out of the box and picked somewhere completely different? Disney did this for The Princess and the Frog, of course, and that was a really great movie. But, in my humble opinion, it’s a move that they shouldn’t make too often. Stories are intimately tied to the cultures that created them, and I think that should be respected. Even in the case of The Princess and the Frog, the Disney movie is much more of a derivative of “The Frog Prince” than a direct adaptation of it. (They even show Tiana’s mother reading “The Frog Prince” in the beginning, to explicitly show that the fairy tale is not the story that the movie is telling.) Of course, the plot of “The Snow Queen” is barely evident in Frozen anymore, so this might be an irrelevant point. But Disney’s movie is still based on a Danish story which was written about Norwegian culture, so I think it’s only fitting that they stick to that inspiration. So when I see someone on tumblr posting pictures of Anna and Elsa redrawn as Inuit women, saying the movie should’ve taken place in Alaska, I have to say that I disagree.

Another option, then, is for Disney to stop adapting stories from the West altogether. If they exclusively adapted fairy tales written by people of color, then it would make perfect sense to feature more racial diversity.  Unfortunately, this option isn’t much good either. Creating art is a process that can’t be forced, and if Disney’s animators feel inspired by “The Snow Queen,” then why shouldn’t they make a movie of it? I’d love to see more films inspired by people of different races, of course, but I want them to be good films. If Disney’s making movies solely for racial inclusion, because they feel they have to, that’d probably lead to a lot of crappy movies and frustrated people.

Which leads us to the last, and probably best, option: leaving the movie as it is but including some people of color into it. Many people think that Scandinavia was entirely populated by Caucasian people in the 1800s, but that’s not entirely true. I’m feeling a bit too lazy to do any research on it, but since Scandinavia was home to the Vikings, who were obviously travellers, it’s likely that they would have brought racially diverse people home with them to Scandinavia. Some critics of Frozen claim that this is absolutely true, but again, I’m too exhausted to fact-check them. Let’s just assume, by the laws of probability, that they’re right. Despite all that, the population of Norway was almost entirely white at the time that this story takes place, so is it so bad that the cast of the movie reflects that? There are no Tajik people in Mulan, and no one complained about that. Of course, that’s because the Han-Chinese people are already considered people of color, so it’s not as big a deal as in Frozen, where the cast is all white. Is that fair? You can probably tell that I don’t really know where I stand on it.

Then again, all of those questions might not even matter because the film is set in a fictional kingdom that’s only based on Norway, and therefore historical accuracy is irrelevant. This, I think, is the most compelling argument of all. Arendelle isn’t a real place, so it can have people of any race in it. What this becomes, then, is a balancing act between sticking to the inspiration of a story and challenging our preconceptions. On the one hand, Aladdin could’ve included people of various races, since Agrabah isn’t a real city. But since the setting is so obviously based on the Middle East, surely it makes sense that the characters reflect the actual population in that part of the world. On the other hand, it’s important to keep racial diversity in the forefront of people’s minds, since it’s such a pressing issue. A few years ago, people complained when a black actor was cast as Cinna in The Hunger Games. I won’t lie, I pictured him as white too. But frankly, nothing about his character in the novels is indicative of any race, so why should it matter? Our media is so used to casting things a certain way that we start to accept as a commonplace, if you will, that characters will be that way. And obviously, that’s not okay.

I feel like my posts are always endless, but I’ll keep going for a little bit because I have a lot of feelings about this movie (the title of this post is actually a joke on one of the songs). I’ve been following Frozen for months, and I’ll definitely see it when it comes out (November 27, here I come). In the end, I don’t think what Disney has done with this movie is a mistake so much as a missed opportunity. Assuming, of course, that there really aren’t any people of color. Who knows; the movie’s not out yet!

Anyway, forgive my long-windedness. I’ll leave you with this picture. (I don’t like how they did the scaling, and they included Pixar, but it sure makes you think.)

Click for larger size!