The credentialed class uncovered more reasons to be outraged as a new analysis claims animated films from Disney and others promote white privilege.
In the age of DEI, anti-racism and woke politics, making race an issue where it isn’t remains the bread and butter of the perpetually outraged. Now, after looking at Oscar-nominated films from 2016-2024 and critiquing other popular full-length animated features, college professors contend popular films geared toward kids are rife with “racist cultural narratives.”
Titled, “Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism (MARS) test finds Oscars so AnthropoScenic in contemporary animated films,” and published Jan. 6, 2026, the research presented conclusions based off hyper-focused scrutiny under the lens of questions like, “Do the racialized characters fulfill harmful, simplistic, or racist stereotypes?” and, “Does the movie ignore or downplay the shared roots of racial and species-based oppression?”
“Hollywood’s cartoons and animated films have forged a checkered path in harnessing white privilege and recycling racist cultural narratives,” argued Georgia Tech Director of Middle Eastern and North African studies, Associate Professor Natalie Khazaal, Bowling Green State University Associate Professor Ellen Gorsevski, and Sweden’s Lund University communication department head Tobias Linné. “For example, while Lion King invites audiences to perceive Black people as inferior to Whites, A Goofy Movie elevates Blackness to a cultural icon. Overall, though, animation has struggled to eliminate negative stereotypes and the unfair treatment of racial minorities.”
The analysis referenced another academic work that asserted that the racism in “The Lion King,” 1994’s Academy Award-winning retelling of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” could be found in the contrast between Mufasa and Scar, despite being brothers, as the former was king and the latter was portrayed as not having a “highly recognizable vocation or professional position.”
Other questions included:
“Do the nonhuman characters fulfill speciesist stereotypes as pests, threats, game, or cute animals/charismatic megafauna?”
“Does the movie imply that the struggles against racial oppression and those against species-based oppression are incompatible or in competition with one another?”
“Are the racialized characters mostly background or symbols?”
“Is the lead creative team (e.g., director, writer, producer, production designer, main voice-over actors) unrepresentative of the story’s culture?”
Describing the 2021 film “Luca,” about a young sea monster who exists as a human on dry land, the professors argued the story represented “humanness and whiteness to be the superior, desirable forms of being” with the added zeal for climate alarmists as the creatures that “let go of the primacy of their fish-like form and embrace human society … helps accelerate the depletion of sea life,” by helping fisherman locate populated waters. “The cost, however, is steep — White cannibalizes racialized, human eats nonhuman species.”
Meanwhile, criticism of 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” begged the question, “But why was the first Black Spider-Man (Miles Morales, voiced by Shameik Moore) introduced together with the character of Spider-Ham, who is ridiculed for being a pig? To what extent did having a Black main character nudge the movie over the edge to win the Oscar?”
A brief glimmer of the analysis’s pseudointellectualism peeked out when the authors wrote, “In many cases, racist portrayals are subtle because they are just so ambiguous. There is clearly a racial component, but it is unclear exactly what it conveys.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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