Where Are All the Non-White Faces in Animated Movies?

Pixar's new short has an Indian lead character. But why are modern day Hollywood cartoons so bad at representation?

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If you go and see the new Pixar animation The Good Dinosaur that’s in cinemas right now, you’ll also see the short cartoon that precedes it, Sanjay’s Super Team. Like all Pixar films, Sanjay’s Super Team is funny and inventive—a small kid keeps getting dragged away from the TV by his dad to pray, and ends up imagining Hindu gods as superheroes. And as you can probably tell from the title and that description, it features an Indian protagonist. It’s a semi-autobiographical tale, based on director Sanjay Patel’s own childhood (Patel also worked on Ratatouille and Monsters Inc). Sanjay is the first Asian lead character in a Pixar film. Their first non-white protagonist at all, actually. Which leads us to the question: Where the hell are all the non-white faces in animated films?

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