Merry Melody - Illustration

Merry Melody is a digital illustration that is a follow-up to my earlier collage works Magic Mirror and Menthol Moose. Created between October 2018 and March 2019, the drawing employs the same imitative cartoon style and semi-abstract structure of those pieces. Like Menthol Moose, which reworks shapes and characters from 1990s animations of The Simpsons to convey issues relating to family values and parental responsibility, this work amalgamates off-color characters from the “Golden Age” of animation to as a critique of popular colonial narratives in British and American storytelling.

Centered primarily on characters from Disney titles such as Peter Pan, Dumbo, Song of the South and Robin Hood, my goal was to represent both the artistry of midcentury animation, as well as the ingrained stereotypes that informed the original works. Playing upon the long-held Disney tradition of aggregating old characters into new art and merchandise, this work serves as a statement on historical revisionism, and a reminder of the dark undertones of mainstream children’s cartoons.

Merry Melody 2018
Digital Drawing
18” x 24” (single panel print)

Built on a 6000 pixel x 8000 pixel digital canvas (at 300 dpi), Merry Melody started from a series of sketches inspired by animation celluloids from Disney’s 1953 feature Peter Pan. I was interested in this film, not only because I watched it dozens of times growing up, but because I found it interesting that unlike many other re-released Disney movies (such as Fantasia) that have been edited and revised for political correctness, Peter Pan’s representation of racial identity has remained largely unchanged from it’s original release. In re-watching the film as an adult, I was struck by the colonial relationship between non-white characters such as Tiger Lily (who’s only line in the entire film is a cry for “Help!”) and the film’s white protagonists. Beyond a simple boys adventure tale, I felt the subtext of the movie communicated a clear narrative of colonial exceptionalism, reflective of both Disney’s “Golden Age” in post-war America, as well as late Victorian England - the period in which the film is set, and the era in which the original play Peter Pan was released.

Diving deeper into the 1904 source material by J.M. Barrie, I was interested by the fact that in the theatre version of Peter Pan, the pirate Captain Hook is a graduate of the world’s most exclusive all-boys private school - Eton College. Eton is the alma mater of 500 years of British royalty as well as 19 Prime Ministers, including both David Cameron and Boris Johnson. For Barrie, this reference is more than a minor biographical note. Hook’s relationship to the school is central to his character - in fact, his dying words in the play are the school’s motto: “Floreat Etona”. While this inversion of social norms didn’t make it into Disney’s film, I felt that it helped further outline the critique of colonial capitalism, as a system in which the line between pirate and politician, looter and legislature is most often drawn by those in positions of power.

Merry Melody attempts to frame this complex critique, using a collage of cartoons to communicate a history of Anglo and American entitlement, not only in the legal justification of violence, but in the creation and maintenance of popular narratives designed to re-enforce convenient conceptions of race and culture.

Beyond the references to Peter Pan which frame the four corners of the work, the remaining sections of the collage depict a cheerful musical menagerie of characters. This musicality is both a reference to the iconic scores of Disney features (ex. What Makes the Red Man Red, We Are Siamese, When I See an Elephant Fly) as well as to the song and dance minstrel tradition upon which much of Walt Disney’s early work is based. To quote University of Toronto professor, Nicholas Sammond:

“Mickey Mouse is an example of a blackface character hiding in plain sight. Mickey's first appearance in sound - is "Steamboat Willie" from 1928. In that cartoon, he plays a stevedore on a steamboat, presumably in the South. And as he loads the steamboat with materials, he starts to play a tune which is now called "Turkey In The Straw". But back in the day, it was known as "Old Zip Coon." And it was from the minstrel stage. And it wasn't just "Zip Coon." Mickey's early appearances were just layered with markers of blackface minstrelsy. His facial characteristics, the gloves he sometimes wears, the way that he acts, his bodily plasticity, his ability to take punishment are all established markers of the minstrel. We know Mickey Mouse today as a friendly character, but in those early days he was a trickster. He was a mischief-maker who was always up to no good.”

- Nicholas Sammond, Birth Of An Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy And The Rise Of American Animation

Whether Disney was directly inspired by minstrel shows (which were mainstream entertainment in America at the time) or was merely copying the style from other animators, it’s undeniable that blackface vaudeville played a central role in the development of cartoons from period.

Though these early animations were not as overtly racist as films that would follow in the coming decades, they did establish a tradition of caricature and comedy, borrowed from centuries of American folk-theater, in which the subject of the joke is very rarely the person telling the story. Nearly 100 years later, determining the appropriate boundaries of racial and gender representation remains an on-going debate.

In the process of creating this illustration, I have often had to assess the appropriateness of these depictions and the morality of benefiting from their promotion. While I understand that this work, especially taken out of context, may be hurtful in its outdated depictions - I believe that they accurately reflect the complex history of early American animation, and serve as a useful entry point in recognizing the prevalence of a white entitlement subtext in popular media narratives.