Disney really ought to have known better. Their upcoming live-action adaptation of Aladdin in May, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Will Smith as the Genie, was in the news for all the wrong reasons last year. First we learnt that the makers had added a new white character to accommodate actor Billy Magnussen. Then, in an even bigger PR disaster, an Aladdin crew member named Kaushal Oededra revealed that about 100 extras of Caucasian descent were ‘browned up’ via make-up to blend them into crowd scenes. Disney admitted this, but defended its decision in a calamitous PR move, claiming that these were a “handful of instances when it was a matter of specialty skills, safety and control”, like animal handlers and so on.
When classics are rebooted these days, more often than not the challenge is to update the original’s politics. Because let’s face it, if the ‘classic’ in question was written by a white man, especially pre-World War II, odds are there will be something or the other that is at least insensitive, if not outright racist. And one doesn’t even have to go that far back in time, actually. The 1994 musical The Lion King was the first Disney animation film to be set in Africa. Is it a coincidence that unlike Snow White or Mulan or Cinderella, this film, supposedly Disney’s big Africa adventure featured only…animals? Also, The Lion King actually had a character called Jim Crow, not to mention its questionable choice of featuring mostly Hispanic voices for villainous characters.
In the jungle
Jon Favreau is currently developing a CGI remake of The Lion King, due to be released exactly 25 years after the original. The makers have already stated that this version is acutely conscious of the politics around the original. Moreover, Favreau has headlined the cast with actors of African descent, with Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino), Beyoncé and James Earl Jones playing Simba, Nala and Mufasa, respectively. They’re backed up by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Keegan-Michael Key (from the comedy duo Key and Peele) and John Kani.
Favreau isn’t the only director in Hollywood to opt for this course-correction. For instance, none of the reboots of The Jungle Book feature ‘I Wanna Be Like You’, a song from the 1967 original. In that film, we see the leader of the monkeys, King Louie, singing this song to Mowgli just after his gang has captured the boy. The song itself is a Dixieland-styled singalong, with King Louie meant to be a stand-in for the famous African-American jazz musician Louis Armstrong (although, of course, the 1967 film featured a white actor playing the part). The monkeys are themselves written and voiced in a way that makes the allusion towards black people clear — their voices are exaggerated to sound gravelly and harsh. Baloo rebukes them by calling them “flat-nosed, little-eyed, flaky creeps”. And although Mowgli himself is not white, his relationship with King Louie (an ape) is analogous to the power dynamic between black and white people.
Making the choice
No creator wants to be associated with people or politics that damage the reputations of their work Hollywood has only recently started to wake up to this fact, as evidenced by director Ridley Scott’s decision to re-shoot Kevin Spacey’s scenes in the 2017 drama, All the Money in the World. It was an expensive choice but the right one, after numerous men accused Spacey of sexual harassment in October 2017. In the wake of the allegations against Disney’s Aladdin, the studio should have quickly apologised and re-shot the scenes with brown actors. Instead, they bizarrely defended their decision to ‘brownface’ their extras.
Of course, Hollywood jumped all over this non-starter of an excuse. Kal Penn tweeted that “someone just didn’t want to spend the $ to do it right”. It’s 2019, Disney, and not all of us want to be like you, you know.