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Chapter 7. United Productions and the End of Animated Black Representation
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104 SEVEN United Productions and the End of Animated Black Representation Changes in African American imagery in the animation industry corresponded to a period of change in race relations which the nation entered after World War II. As African Americans began serving in integrated military units and playing on major-league baseball teams in the late 1940s, some independent cartoon producers used their films to promote racial integration throughout society. At the same time, segregation still persisted in many communities, and audiences still enjoyed crude caricatures of blacks. Hollywood animators found ways to preserve racial humor without attracting anti-stereotype activists. A pamphlet deemed subversive by the federal government was an unlikely source of inspiration for animators. When adapting literature to animation, studios usually drew from fairy tales, although government information had been used for military training cartoons like “Private Snafu.” In the late 1940s, however, the pamphlet “Races of Mankind” by Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, professors of anthropology at Columbia University,providedunusualinspiration.TheUnitedServiceOrganization (USO) had asked the scholars to write the pamphlet for U.S. soldiers fighting alongside indigenous people of color in such areas as the Philippines and the Solomon Islands during World War II. Although the authors argued that wealth and education affected performance on intelligence tests, the armed forces withdrew the pamphlet from distribution and banned it from military libraries on the grounds that it appeared to describe Northern blacks as more intelligent than Southern whites. The authors’ rebuttals that they had found the causes to be environmental instead of racial fell on deaf ears. Although Benedict died in 1948, Weltfish had to United Productions and the End of Animated Black Representation 105 defend her research and her patriotism to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Internal Security Committee and soon thereafter lost her professorship at Columbia.1 Despite the controversial history of the pamphlet, the independent animation studio United Productions of America (UPA) decided to adapt the pamphlet as a documentary cartoon to serve as a tool for improving not only race relations but also the images of blacks in films. The United Auto Workers had commissioned UPA to produce a film that would help ease racial tension in recently desegregrated union branches in the South. In the resulting cartoon, Brotherhood of Man (1947), prejudiced American suburbanites of various racial groups learn about the stereotypes that prohibit them from living together harmoniously with their neighbors. The cartoon uses visual humor to show that brain size does not determine intelligence in a scene featuring a cross-eyed narrator who says, “The largest brain on record was that of an imbecile.” The cartoon illustrates the pamphlet’s argument that environment determines behavior in an amusing dialogue between a business-suited Chinese American who asks, “Got a match, bud?” while a white character in Chinese clothing answers him in Chinese.2 The radical look of the film visually complements the revolutionary racial theme. Each character in the film has the same facial design, in particular a pointed nose inspired, according to supervising director John Hubley, by the print cartoonist Saul Steinberg’s drawings. The cartoon’s black character thus broke with the standard racial image of large lips and bulging eyes. In addition, the backgrounds are very linear and spare in comparison to the usual heavily detailed scenes—a technique popularized by Disney in the 1930s.3 At the same time, Brotherhood of Man was itself participating in systemic racism by using racial stereotypes to illustrate cultural differences. For example, in the cartoon the neighbors do not all live in the same kind of home; an Eskimo’s igloo and an African’s hut appear next to the white man’s house. To be sure, the film does not set out to stress the Americanness of different groups or the blending of the races into a “melting pot”; instead it promotes acceptance of and respect for cultural differences. Aside from the narrator, however, only the white man has a speaking role. Consequently, the film discusses multicultural sensitivity from the white [23.20.220.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:41 GMT) 106 Chapter Seven point of view without taking into account the specific concerns of the other racial groups represented. Nevertheless, the progressive graphics, humor, and racial message of Brotherhood of Man attracted attention in the press for months. Covering the sneak preview of the film at the New York Preview Theatre in May 1946, the New York Times called the film “a plea for...