Turning Red, Encanto and White Fragility
A writer and editor for Cinemablend recently became the internet’s villain of the day when he published a review of Turning Red so spectacularly misguided and off-base that the critic and the publication apologized for it, pulled the piece and the review was assigned to another critic.
The gist of the review was that since Turning Red is about a boy-band-obsessed Chinese-Canadian teenager in 2002 who inherits a family curse/blessing that transforms her into a red panda it was impossible for him to relate to the film as a white man.
He seemed to think that the only people who could possibly understand or enjoy Turning Red on any level would be boy-band-obsessed Chinese-Canadians who turned 13 in 2002 and inherited a family curse/blessing that transformed them into red pandas.
This misguided gentleman was saying the quiet part out loud. His staggeringly wrong review betrayed a distressingly commonplace conviction that stories about attractive white men are universal in their appeal because these are the stories that have been told the most often and everyone can relate to Caucasian heroes.
This reactionary, outdated mindset holds that everyone in the universe can see themselves in Luke Skywalker, since he’s a white heterosexual male as well as the savior of the galaxy but only broads and people of color will be able to relate to non-white, non-male protagonists.
This is supposed to be a persuasive argument against diversity and “wokeness” but it betrays a sad, almost poignant lack of imagination and empathy in white dudes incapable of imagining anything outside their own life experiences.
These people seem to think that making a movie about a Chinese-Canadian teenager is an act of emotional violence against white kids, that they will be traumatized by the idea that other people’s stories and lives are somehow worthy of being the subject of major motion pictures.
I can say from personal experience that that is not the case. When my seven year old son watches or compulsively re-watches Encanto or Turning Red he doesn’t ask why the lead characters aren’t white, male or American like himself.
That’s partially because he’s fortunate enough to grow up in an era where the makers of children’s entertainment go out of their way to try to tell stories that reflect the experiences and cultures of people from all around the world, not just middle-class or wealthier white Americans.
Despite what the anti-diversity brigade might think, there’s nothing at all innate or inevitable about the idea that audiences will only be able to relate to stories about white folks. It’s a social construct rooted in racism, colonialism, sexism and an insultingly, dispiritingly reductive take on how children think and behave.
You have to be incredibly fragile and weak to see every story that’s not explicitly about you as an unforgivable assault on you as a human being but then people like the man who wrote that dreadful review of Turning Red are fundamentally weak.
I’m deeply grateful that my sons get to see movies with heroes who don’t look or sound like them because the wonderful thing about Encanto and Turning Red is that they’re universal in their appeal and relatability precisely because they’re so culturally specific.
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