On the “Souls” of Black Folk: Disney’s Soul and the Magical Negro trope in film
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it” -Zora Neale Hurston
Like all relationships, we must always critique the aspects of culture that we effortlessly love and are inclined towards, especially those feel-good narratives handed down to the common folk from large corporations such as Disney.
The Good
Disney Pixar’s Soul — starring Jamie Fox as the voice of main character Joe Gardner, and written by Pete Docter, Kemp Powers and Mike Jones — affirms a message that is refreshing, healthy and highly needed as we end a year of COVID-19 lockdowns and look towards at least a few more months of the same. Many people have had to confront deeply embedded capitalist logics about productivity and self-worth. With companies firing their vulnerable employees, corporations making unionizing harder for gig workers through California voting yes on Proposition 22, and people facing extreme uncertainty regarding sustainable income, future aspirations, and one’s purpose in life — especially those like art and music teachers, whose careers included the cultivation of the soul — Soul takes stage and firmly denies any inherent link between one’s purpose and what one does for a living or a side hobby. It tells us that living itself is purpose enough and experiencing life, the good and the bad, is a life well-lived. Through our two main characters (Joe and “22”), we learn that whatever we do, however we spend our lives, whether it’s walking down the street, or enjoying a slice of pizza, the most important thing is feeding our souls.
Easy enough. Good.
Still, there have already been critiques that point out the obvious frustrations for Black viewers of this movie. The main one being that, like Princess and the Frog and Lion King, black people spend the majority of animated and some live-action films as non-humans. Yep. This trope is unflattering to say the least, and still, there is an even older, more insidious, trope of Black characters in film, at work. A type of unintentional “magic” I suspect Disney would rather not be known for. But given the animation studio’s history of mirroring minstrel shows, Soul seems to be in alignment with a long list of Disney’s daggers to Blackness.
Magical Negroes in Film.
The Magical Negro trope is to Whiteness in film what the manic pixie dream girl trope is to patriarchy in film. The goal is to bring white people out of their daily stupor while providing them with a moral consciousness. Many times racism is either the reason said Black person is there or it is simply not accounted for at all in a post-racial liberal multicultural approach. These characters remain in the background, reappear like the fairy princess in Pinnochio, elongate the white nose when needed, pat them on the back once the lesson is learned, and then disappear into the horizon once the deed is done. We’ve received many examples in film history and you can probably name some yourself. Bruce Almighty is probably one of the most popular examples that I can drum up for people my age.
There is a great Key and Peele sketch on Youtube that critiques the trope, its titled “Magical Negro Fight” wherein two custodial workers fight it out for the opportunity be the moral guide for one white man. And of course there was the “Magical Negro Rehab” sketch from Netflix’s Astronomy Club wherein a collection of Hollywood’s most beloved Magical Negros are seated in a class. The Characters recite the phrases like “I am more than the advice I give White people” and “I am the lead character of my own story”. Morgan Parker’s recent collection of poetry titled Magical Negro also explores the legacy of the media trope with poems titled “Magical Negro #3: The Strong Black Woman”.
The Magical Negro trope is hard to spot if you are not looking for it. It’s even harder to spot when race is obscured to a point where the characters become universalized and raceless.
De-racializing and De-politicizing Blackness
On the surface, Joe Gardner and the unborn soul named “22” are both “not human”, they are “souls”. Yet given the legacy of the word “Soul” in Black History, Black life, and Black culture it’s hard to forget Joe’s Blackness and it is hard not to be a Black person entering this film without at least half expecting it to cater to the intimacies of Black life. We even get a sense of that well known, very Black, out of body feeling that Black music offers. The movie dedicates the first few minutes of the film to making the audience understand just how Black Joe — a tall loveable Jazz adoring band director with pictures of Nina Simone on his wall — truly is. Pixar outdoes itself with the animation detail, giving us beautiful Black natural hair that bounces softly against painstakingly detailed Black features. The textures, voices, and sounds of the movie are undeniably and specifically, Black. I loved it, I almost cried.
And yet, somehow, as soon as Joe enters the non-human world, he suddenly becomes an everyman that “everyone” can and is supposed to relate to at the expense of the warm Black Manhattan experience that was previously being woven. Sort of like when Black people voted for Obama and then he said he was not the President of Black America but the “President of America”. In Disney’s Soul, Joe’s universalization would not be that much of an issue or a stretch if Joe remained a body-less soul for the entirety of the movie. This is not the case. We return to Joe’s body except without Joe’s soul. At this point the movie does not encourage us to forget Joe’s Black identity in a cultural sense. The cultural capital of Blackness remains stable through barbershop visits, beautiful jazz performances, and the beautiful African American Vernacular English (AAVE) lilt delivered through the likes of Phylicia Rashad. However we are encouraged to forget — as the audience listens to a middle-aged white woman’s voice, voiced by Tina Fey, protrude through Joe’s mouth — the political implications of Blackness. This is not to say that the cultural aspects of Black life are not political, they are. Still, there is an uneasiness and sense of alarm about a lifeless soul, uninformed about the nuances of Black life, running through NYC inside an adult Black man’s body, completely unaware of exactly how dangerous that is day-to-day. The free-ness and lack of concern for harm while running through NYC, jumping subway turnstiles, suddenly lying in the middle of the street. This reckless abandon did not read like childlike wonder but instead felt akin to the familiar movements of deeply socially and environmentally unaware privileged white adults. The whole time my heart was racing, waiting for the moment the police officer turns up and 22 is forced to experience the true fullness of Joe’s Black life. Yes this is a fictional Disney movie but exactly how much reality am we expected to suspend here? There is a difference between carefree and careless, both on 22’s part and the writers of the movie.
The decision that really sets Soul aside in a league of its own is Joe’s decision to sacrifice his life so 22 can begin theirs. Who was rooting for that? I wasn’t. Instead of the Magical Negro remaining in the shadows, in a Disney turn of events — or an alternate universe where a Black character from the afformentioned Astronomy Club Magical Negro Rehab sketch breaks free before the healing is complete and truly does becomes “the lead character of [their] own story” — Soul offers a world wherein the Magical Negro disguises themselves as the main character, gets a life lesson of their own, has the audience develop empathy for them, then returns triumphantly to the trope by sacrificing their life for the sake a not-white-just-white-sounding character. This is media trope representational gymnastics to the extreme. And then to top it off, we receive a moment of white saviourism wherein the Magical Negro is given their life back.
The harm of the magical negro trope, as with all tropes, is that it minimizes the humanity of the demographic that’s depicted.
It’s a part of a larger idea in media representation called “Symbolic Annihilation”. This is a tactic used to dehumanize certain subsections of humanity (races, genders, classes, etc). It involves three elements working separately or in tandem: 1). making a group literally invisible and never present on screen or stage or page, 2). trivializing, and 3). criminalizing. Each one of them serve to showcase a non-holistic, incomplete representation of a group. In the case of Disney’s Soul, trivialization is of primary concern. Trivializing can look like turning someone into a token, as most magical negroes are. Or making it seem like Black people are impervious to the emotional, economic, and psychological wounds of their oppression. They just keep smiling and mopping, smiling yet crying, smiling yet dying.
What’s worst is when these ideas are internalized by viewers young and old and sometimes put into practice in the non-animated world. Like when doctors don’t listen to Black women, even Black woman doctors, who express health concerns, and instead allow them to die.
Imagine instead, we received a story where Joe finds his joy in the art of teaching and commits to the Black, Brown and POC students we met at the beginning of the movie. Or Joe realizes that without his existence, his former student Paul’s love for music would’ve never been enriched. Imagine if 22, who had the option of any voice in the history of humankind, was at least voiced by a Black woman or girl. That would’ve made a world of difference. Imagine if Disney actually gave us a movie where a Black person stays in possession of their human body for the entire film.
While the message of loving life for the sake of living is vital in a year filled with death and the daily death toll in the U.S. rising to 3,000 deaths per day in the final days of 2020, the way in which the fullness of Black identity was ignored to get to this message was disappointing. No, Black identity is not validated only by the presence of oppression and exploitation, but if life is inherently valuable and Black life matters and Black souls matter, then we shouldn’t think it too hard to showcase the context in which most Black life is lived to garner a deeper appreciation for it. As Jesse Williams said at the BET Awards a few years back, “Just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real”.
