Hollywood animation has had a race problem for a long time. From Walt Disney’s backward attitudes towards Black people in Song of the South to the corporation’s fumbled attempt to trademark “Día de Los Muertos” ahead of the modern Pixar film Coco. You’d think that things would change following social movements like Black Lives Matter and #OscarsSoWhite. But in 2024, just two of 11 theatrical animated movies from major Hollywood studios feature main characters of color: Moana 2 and the Pharrell Williams Lego biopic/documentary, Piece by Piece.
Piece By Piece being made at all proved to be a significant step forward for animation. Having a Black main character is still seen as a risk by many people inside the industry, so the mere fact that it exists has Piece By Piece working against industry trends (taking a star on Pharrell’s level to make it happen). Additionally, of the myriad Lego movies made to this date, very few feature Black characters, meaning that the existence of this film has forced into being a significantly more diverse pool of Lego character models.
In an interview with Animation Magazine, Piece By Piece director Morgan Neville explained how important this was to Pharrell: “Hair and skin tone were things that Pharrell knew were going to be really important. […] We wanted to be able to do more to represent the varieties of African American skin tones and hair representation.”
The film’s animation director, Howard E. Baker, backed up Neville’s sentiment, saying, “When we were showing Pharrell designs of characters using the Lego hair that was available, I remember at one point he said, ‘I really don’t feel represented.’ It was wildly eye-opening for me. From that day on, I remember trying to be more open to the idea that these things do need to change and that we had the power to do that.”
As progressive as it is, Piece By Piece still falls into a familiar pattern that has befallen past BIPOC-led films: having a white director. At this point, white directors controlling BIPOC stories are an animation tradition, a path paved by films like Lilo & Stitch, Pocahontas, and The Prince of Egypt, and is an issue so normalized that few question why it’s still happening, especially when white directors controlling BIPOC stories would be much more of a talking point in live-action cinema.
Why Animation Lags In Terms Of Diversity
Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón of UCLA, a diversity expert and member of the team who puts together the yearly Hollywood Diversity Report, explained why animation seems to lag behind current standards of diversity in TV and film. “For [live-action] television, the changes occurred more rapidly in terms of the push for diversity in front of the camera,” she told Complex. “That push happened a lot faster than for film, just because the film process takes so much longer when it comes to getting financing or getting your cast together; it can take several years. So for animation, it’s even longer. You’ll hear them say that it takes three years just to animate.”
Animation producer Pilar Flynn, whose credits include Flushed Away, Sausage Party, and Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur—and who works with Dr. Ramón at the Latino Film Institute—pointed to some more pressing issues.
“Executives fear the risk of taking someone with less experience and putting them in a leadership role,” she told Complex. “The industry itself has had major setbacks recently with the number of viewers and the money they’re making. There was a short window of time during the pandemic and during the Black Lives Matter protests where the audiences were clamoring for more authentic representation on screen and the studios heard what audiences were asking for. But now that studios are losing [massive amounts] of money, they no longer feel they can take ‘risks’ on people that don’t have experience. It’s a bit of a paradox where it takes money, mentorship, and a certain level of risk to elevate people that haven’t gotten experience in the past, and studios just aren’t as willing to do it because they don’t feel that they have the support or money to do so.”
Exemplifying that fear of risk, the first Pixar film to be directed solely by a woman was 2022’s Turning Red, almost 30 years on from the studio’s first film, Toy Story. Dr. Ramón believes that studios’ reluctance to hand the keys to women and people of color comes from the inherent size of animated films.
“Those films from major studios, their budgets are over $100 million, if not $200 million,” Dr. Ramón said. Every Pixar movie made since 2018 has had a budget of $200 million, other than Turning Red’s $175 million. “There’s this fear that if you give the job to a woman director or a director of color, then it’s a risk because they don’t have as much experience. How are we going to give them this huge budget film, this huge product and trust them with it? But they do it all the time, especially in live-action, where it’s not rare for an independent, young white male director to get a big opportunity to direct a franchise film.”
Ironically, Hollywood’s push for diversity has actually layered on more problems for the creators of color who do manage to gain some experience, as Flynn explained. “A lot has been placed on them to mentor other people of color so now we’re putting twice the amount of task and responsibility on them than we are on white directors,” she said.
There’s this fear that if you give the job to a woman director or a director of color, then it’s a risk because they don’t have as much experience. How are we going to give them this huge budget film, this huge product and trust them with it? — Ana-Christina Ramón
“I think animation doesn’t get the same attention either,” Dr. Ramón added, further diagnosing the issue. “People don’t ask ‘Who’s the director?’ They’re more focused on the studio that made the film and the big star they got, giving them credit for being really diverse. The director is usually very pivotal, but people don’t pay attention to it.”
This attitude within the industry is exemplified by how directors of animated films don’t qualify as members of the Director’s Guild of America, immediately putting them on a different playing field to their live-action counterparts.
Additionally, animation in general is often mischaracterized by industry folks as a genre for children rather than a legitimate medium of cinema to tell all kinds of stories. Every year at the Oscars, some of the best films are excluded from the Best Picture race because of how the Academy sections off animation into its own category. The host of the 2024 Oscars, Jimmy Kimmel, introduced the category by saying, “Please raise your hand if you let your kid fill out this part of the ballot.”
How Animation Can Improve Its Diversity Efforts
Dr. Ramón pointed to a band-aid solution studios often use to appear more progressive than they actually are. “Animation studios like Pixar started to hire co-directors for their films, and that’s when they started to hire more women and people of color,” she said. This phenomenon is pervasive in Pixar, with Adrian Molina co-directing Coco with Lee Unkrich, Kemp Powers being brought in on Soul to support Pete Docter, and Brenda Chapman directing Brave alongside Mark Andrews.
However, Flynn noted how vital those co-director roles can be. “On Moon Girl, we were 84 percent diverse on our crew. We had director positions, but then we created three co-director positions. We had the head of story position, but then we created a co-head of story position. Those co- roles became diverse voices that could shadow that person, that could learn from them, but also have a full seat at the table so their voice could be heard. But it took the studio allowing us time and money to do it, and nine Emmy nominations later, you can see what that yielded.”
For Flynn, solving issues of diversity starts at the grassroots level. “What we have to start with is getting them laptops in elementary school,” she explained. “Young people of color don’t even have the tools that most white young people would easily have access to. When I say to privileged white people, ‘Hey, please help donate to Latino Film Institute,’ their response is often one of misunderstanding where they say, ‘Can’t they just go online and learn [animation software] Maya like everybody else? There’s so many tools for them now. What are they complaining about? There’s so many websites, there’s schools they can go to, there’s lectures they can do on Zoom.’ However, says Flynn, this kind of free access isn’t always readily available to everyone.
But change is brewing elsewhere in the industry. At Sony Pictures Animation, the team behind the Spider-Verse franchise—an oasis of on- and off-screen diversity in animation—exists the Leading and Empowering New Storytellers (LENS) program. Targeted at creators from minority backgrounds, the program aims to provide “animation industry relationships and storytelling techniques through experience within the production process and workflow, as part of their path to becoming a director, writer, VFX supervisor, and animation supervisor,” according to the Sony website.
The fruits of this program have already ripened, with the 2023 edition of the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival premiering The Spider Within, a short film set in the Spider-Verse world crafted by graduates of the LENS program.
The director of the short, Jarelle Dampier, explained the significance of this opportunity to Skwigly Animation Magazine: “I don’t know if I would have directed for five more years without something like this. It just takes forever and there’s a limited amount of things to direct. […] It did seem like this weird, unpaved road with no real end or no real way to get there. It’s just, ‘Stick around, kid, and one day, you’ll be trusted with the reins.’”
We had director positions, but then we created three co-director positions. We had the head of story position, but then we created a co-head of story position. Those co- roles became diverse voices that could shadow that person, that could learn from them, but also have a full seat at the table so their voice could be heard. — Pilar Flynn
Other initiatives include Reel Start, an organization started by Evan Goldberg (Superbad, The Boys) and educator Adrienne Solver to “build a path from the classroom to the film industry,” according to their website.
Flynn thinks that the democratization of technology can also help bridge the gap between POC youth and the film industry. “I’m hoping that if there are opportunities for young kids to learn the newer technologies and they can get into it now, we have an opportunity for a new crop of creatives to put a stake in that ground and create what that future might look like. I hope they can create their own content that they can drop on the studios’ lap and prove that it can reach a wider audience in a way you couldn’t have 10 years ago.”
And if studios were paying more attention, they’d see what a smart financial decision increasing diversity would be. The overwhelming whiteness of the animation industry is actually at odds with the audience demographics of animated movies. In the 2024 edition of UCLA’s Hollywood Diversity Report, multiple animated movies were in the top 20 films seen by Asian, Black, Native, Latin American, and female audiences. There was not a single one in the top 20 for white audiences.
“It goes back to the demographic of communities like the Latinx community that generally have larger families,” Dr. Ramón explained. “So they usually buy the most tickets because they bring everyone in their family. They try to find a film where they can bring everyone, from the baby all the way to the grandma. Films that meet that criteria are going to be animated films. People of color are the ones that are really saving the theatrical business. They are the reason why the top movies make so much money because they’re the majority of those audiences going for those opening weekends that are so vital for a movie’s success.”
Animation has been reflecting its board of executives more than its actual audience. This disparity is in need of equalizing, a process that won’t happen without people in the industry pushing for it. Flynn put it succinctly: “It’s critical for their own business survival that they create programs that enrich their stories, that bring unique perspectives, that bring different kinds of passions in, because audiences are demanding a multi-colored tapestry of stories and experiences.
“The less that those studios achieve that, the more they are burying themselves.”
