Diversity, and Not Drawing Attention to it.

I'm quite certain that many of you saw Pixar's movie Up this year, which just came out on DVD and BluRay this week.



The recent DVD release of this film reminded me of some of the wonderful qualities that will no doubt give Pixar yet another best animated picture. I could go on and on about how this movie made me cry during the first 10 minutes, or how the animation is "Up" and above (pun) every other CG movie out there, or how it elevates animation storytelling to at least that of any live action film..., but I am more concerned about something else.

Up has Russel.

One joking description I had for others who wanted to know more about the movie was: "It's kinda like Gran Torino, but with balloons." Indeed, the racial qualities and ages of the two main characters are the same (White/Asian, old/young), but the movies couldn't be more different in every other regard. Where as Eastwood's work is devastatingly concerned with racism and social class, Up ignores the fact that a main character is Asian. He just is. There's no need to bring attention to it, like the most recent Die Hard movie and its Femme fatale Asian bad girl played by Maggie Q. I forget exactly what he says, but Bruce Willis makes some condescending remarks about her racial qualities that seemed completely unneeded and somewhat offensive. I could bring up countless shows that paint Asian women as dragon ladies (Grey's Anatomy) or where males are just naturally good at martial arts (Do I really have to back this one up?).

In Up, we are given a character that is simply a young child and not ONCE is a single comment made about the fact that he is Asian. This is how it's done people, you don't have to bang your audience over the head with racism to change prejudice (*cough* Crash *cough*). You show that, a lot of the time, people aren't really that different from one another. Subtlety is one of the best methods for making us see things a certain way, because outright opposition of our beliefs will invade our space and make us defensive. If one is presented with a very unobjectionable, cute child showing no signs of stereotype whatsoever...people just might think differently about it. Maybe Up alone isn't enough to make this happen, but if more movies start employing this logic, then the film world might be a more harmonious place.

Russel may very well be, one of the only mainstream instances of truly colorblind casting for Asian figures in all of American cinema.

What are your thoughts on minority (or even female) portrayals in popular media? Do there seem to be any other instances as genuine as this one out there?

Also, kudos to Disney/Pixar for finally creating packaging that makes sense. The BluRay of Up comes with the DVD version as well. I'm tired of knowing that the movies I'm still buying are already out of date, at least this way I can safely pick one package (stupid format wars). Disney is doing this for all of its new releases apparently.

I will probably be doing more posts about animation later on, since everyone else seems to be covering...everything else.