To Win By Losing

Lilo & Stitch

RACE IS OFTEN A 'CAPITAL' OFFENSE

The immense amount of racial capital enjoyed by Whites routinely translates into a much more extensive and complex character range – even when such White characters do not fall within traditional mainstream categories associated with normalcy or success.

Case in point, consider Meet the Robinsons, an animated children’s movie by Pixar. The storyline revolves around an orphaned, young White male who is in search of acceptance and family. Interestingly enough, this movie departs from the “traditional” mainstream family structure anchored by two married parents as routinely seen with many children’s or animated movies. What is even more interesting is to conduct a comparative analysis of how the concept of “orphan-hood” is dealt across racial lines.

Two notable examples of non-traditional minority family structures in children’s or animated movies can be found in Lilo & Stitch and Brother Bear. In Lilo & Stitch, Lilo (voiced by Daveigh Chase) is a young, female Hawaiian protagonist, who is an orphan living with her older sister in a borderline-dysfunctional household. In Brother Bear, Koda (voiced by Black actor Jeremy Suarez) becomes an orphan by Kenai’s (voiced by White actor Joaquin Phoenix) own doing – the movie begins with Kenai as a human hunter who kills the bear that is Koda’s mother. These non-traditional minority families stand in stark contrast to the stable, middle-class, White family of four in the animated feature The Incredibles, and they stand out even further given the small number of minority or minority-voiced protagonists in mainstream animated features.

More importantly, with Meet the Robinsons, the protagonist Lewis’ orphan status (voiced by Daniel Hansen) is temporary and transient  during the course of the visible continuum, which contrasts sharply with the status of the aforementioned minority orphans (e.g., compare with the transitory of Whites in jail settings in contrast to minority characters, pp. 112, 117 “CH 8: Menace to Society”). Further, Lewis not only finds concrete evidence of a wacky, but wonderfully loving family that will be his to claim in the future, but his brilliantly gifted mind changes the entire future of mankind, making him one of the richest men in the future.

Even though calamity and misfortune befalls minority and White characters alike, the Bottom Line is that it pays to be White in mainstream movies.