Disney
came under fire nearly a decade ago after fans noticed something peculiar about its
Star Wars
marketing campaign. British actor John Boyega, who played the character Finn in The Force Awakens, was featured in diminished proportions on Chinese posters.
“Finn (who happens to be black) and Chewbacca (happens to be Wookiee) get shafted in China,”
tweeted
Ray Kwong, a Hong Kong-based political commentator.
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It wasn’t the first time Disney had been accused of removing or minimizing black actors from posters in other countries. CNN
noted
Disney had also sidelined Twelve Years a Slave star Chiwetel Ejiofor in overseas promotional campaigns in 2013. And then there was the Chinese poster of 2018’s Black Panther, which neglected to show a single person of color (including the star Chadwick Boseman),
a sharp contrast
to the U.S. version.
“For a company that prizes inclusivity, Disney’s focus on erasing or minimizing people of certain races or ethnic backgrounds to appease China is well documented,” Zachary Faria
noted
in the Washington Examiner in 2021.
Well, Disney is at it again.
“Disney’s got itself a poster problem, because The Little Mermaid’s advertising campaign in China is, uh, a little altered,”
explains
Matt Tabor in a video for the Foundation for Economic Education.
Readers can look at the differences between the U.S. marketing campaign posters and the supposedly “
official Chinese poster
” and judge for themselves just how “racist” the differences are.
(1/5)
Disney’s marketing for the new Little Mermaid film is getting attention.
I would not have thought twice about this first photo (I actually like it!) if not for Disney’s history of playing games with its promotional materials. pic.twitter.com/CRnqjn7jlf
— Jon Miltimore (@miltimore79) July 10, 2023
Given Disney’s history, fans did not fail to notice that Ariel is bathed in blueish-white light, which led to accusations of “whitening.”
“Once again Disney changed their marketing of a black character for China,” one YouTuber
tweeted
.
For those who don’t know, Disney’s remake of the animated classic cast Halle Bailey in the title role. Bailey is black, and the decision to change the race of Ariel — in the animated version of The Little Mermaid, Ariel was white —
angered some fans
and
pleased
others.
Why there was so much controversy over the decision has little to do with Bailey and a lot to do with America’s difficult history of race relations, which in recent years has grown more intense with the rise of diversity and inclusion initiatives. For decades, Hollywood tended to neglect featuring people of color in films, but in recent years, the pendulum has swung in the other direction.
New Academy Award “guidelines” go as far as to
require
a film to include a certain number of actors or crew members from an underrepresented group to be eligible for a Best Picture Oscar, a decision that has been excoriated even by outspoken Hollywood liberals.
“They make me vomit,” actor Richard Dreyfuss
said
when asked about the guidelines. “This is an art form. … No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is.”
Dreyfuss is not wrong, and there is indeed something unseemly about ham-fisted attempts to wedge diversity into films, which is a clear departure from the American tradition of
individualism
.
To be fair to Bailey, there’s every indication she earned her Little Mermaid role through merit. The director of the film, Rob Marshall, said he was simply blown away by Bailey when he listened to her sing during her screen test.
“She was the first actor we saw for the film, the first one,” Marshall
told
Deadline. “I went immediately to Bob Iger with the screen test, and within minutes he said, yes, of course. She’s Ariel.”
But there’s no question that Disney has been at the forefront of the diversity and inclusion push, often to
the detriment of its art
.
“This company has been telling stories for 100 years,” CEO Iger
said
in a 2022 meeting. “One of the core values of our storytelling is inclusion and acceptance and tolerance, and we can’t lose that.”
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And this is the rub, of course. Iger has every right to preach the morality of diversity and inclusion. And Disney has every right to tweak its marketing to appeal to local audiences and to maximize its profits. But Disney can’t have it both ways.
It can’t project itself as a beacon of inclusivity and diversity while surreptitiously “whitewashing” certain promotional materials to appease Chinese audiences (or the Chinese government). At least not without looking like a giant hypocrite.
Jon Miltimore (
@miltimore79
) is managing editor of FEE.org, the online portal of the Foundation for Economic Education.
Follow his work on Substack
.
