"Ew, Ew, the Body!": Submerged Racialization in American 21st-Century Children's Animation

Abstract

In this thesis, I analyze the Minions from Universal Pictures' Despicable Me franchise (2010-2020), Olaf from Disney's Frozen franchise (2013-2019), and Ducky and Bunny from Pixar's Toy Story 4 (2019). Although these characters are not intended to represent human beings but are fictional nonhuman species, examining them through the lens of racialization defamiliarizes them and reveals how children's media not only perpetuates specific caricatures of people of color but subtly naturalizes what race is as an assemblage of visual, verbal, performative, and affective components. While scholars studying racial representations in children's animated films often focus on how animated characters speak in non-white dialects, engage in stereotypes, and reproduce visual aspects of race, this interpretive framework does not address the ways in which race goes beyond the surface, nor does it address complex interactions between race, gender, and sexuality. Rather than asserting that nonhuman animated characters are certain races, my term "submerged racialization" suggests that animated characters are not direct representations of "real" non-white bodies but are aggregates of what it is to be racialized in historically specific ways that are co-constitutive with gender and sexuality. These features dwell beneath the surface like a skeleton, overdetermining how the characters perform without necessarily influencing their outward appearance in easily recognizable ways. In the first chapter, I analyze how the Minions enact a multi-layered submerged racialization as Black, Asian American, and indigenous beings. The second chapter discusses how Olaf's racialization shifts across different objects in the Frozen franchise, addressing his relationship to Blackness and Hawaiianness in the first film, the featurette, "pull apart" plush toys, and Hula Olaf figures. Finally, in my third chapter, I show how Ducky and Bunny fulfil roles as Black comedic sidekicks and demonstrate how Black men have been constructed as aggressive, hypersexual threats. By uncovering the submerged racialization underlying today's most popular children's franchises, I stress that race is reproduced and reinvented in the seemingly innocent intimate spaces around us.