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      In ‘Soul’ on Disney+, Pixar Has Its First Black Lead Character

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Soul’ Features Pixar’s First Black Lead Character. Here’s How It Happened.Mindful of animation’s history of racist imagery, the studio aimed to make the jazz pianist at the center of the film as specific as possible.The movie centers on Joe Gardner, a jazz pianist with a day job as a middle-school music teacher.Credit…Disney/PixarDec. 22, 2020, 3:15 p.m. ETAll Pixar features arrive with technical innovations, but “Soul,” opening Dec. 25 on Disney+, breaks important new ground: The movie centers on the studio’s first Black protagonist, Joe Gardner, a jazz pianist on what might be the biggest day of his life, and the creative team includes the company’s first Black co-director, Kemp Powers.In general, Black stories and talent remain underrepresented in American animation, onscreen and off. You can hear Black stars in supporting roles (Samuel L. Jackson as Frozone in the “Incredibles” movies) or voicing animals (Chris Rock and Jada Pinkett Smith in the “Madagascar” series). But “Soul” is only the fourth American animated feature to make Black characters the leads, following “Bebe’s Kids” (1992), “The Princess and the Frog” (2009) and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (2018).“To me, Joe represents a lot of people who aren’t being seen right now,” said Jamie Foxx, who provides Joe’s voice. “Joe is in all of us, regardless of color. To be the first Black lead in a Pixar film feels like a blessing, especially during this time when we all could use some extra love and light.”Knowing their work on “Soul” would be minutely scrutinized, the director Pete Docter, the co-screenwriter Mike Jones and the producer Dana Murray, who are white, set out to create a character who would be believably Black while avoiding the stereotypes of the past.The journey of Joe Gardner — and “Soul” — began four years ago, when Docter felt at loose ends after winning his second Oscar, for “Inside Out.” Murray recalled, “Pete had this feeling, ‘Is this it? Do I just do this again?’ I don’t know if it was a midlife crisis as much as a midlife what-am-I-doing? moment.”Docter began wondering about the origins of human personalities, and whether people were born destined to do certain things. Jones added, “In our first meeting, he told me, ‘Think about an idea set in a place beyond space and time, where souls are given their personalities.’”Docter said he and Jones worked for about two years to develop Joe, a Black middle-school music teacher and musician from Queens. But something was missing. “We wanted somebody who could speak authentically about this character and bring some depth to him,” Docter said. “That’s when Kemp Powers came on,” as the film’s co-directorPowers’s background is in live action and journalism; he adapted the coming film “One Night in Miami” (also due Dec. 25) from his own play. But he felt at home in the new medium. “Animation is a very collaborative, iterative form, which felt very akin to live theater,” he said. He was initially hired for 12 weeks as a writer, but his contract was extended. “Later, I got promoted to co-director, because Pete really wrapped me into the process.”Nevertheless, Powers understood the pitfalls of his role: “Some people might relish the idea of saying they speak for Black people, Black Americans, whatever: I am not one of those people,” he said, adding, “I’m absolutely a Black man, and I know my history; at the same time, I can’t speak for all the Black men who are from New York; I can’t speak for my generation.”Kemp Powers, co-director of “Soul,” said the filmmakers were aware of animation’s history of racist imagery. “At the same time, we didn’t want them to be white characters who happen to be brown-skinned. We had to give them distinct looks.”Credit…Texas Isaiah for The New York TimesMurray said Pixar recognized that “if Joe’s going to be Black, we’d need a lot of help,” She said Britta Wilson, the company’s vice president of inclusion strategies, helped build an internal “Cultural Trust” made up of some of the studio’s Black employees, a group that was diverse in terms of gender, jobs and age. “We also talked to a lot of external consultants and worked with Black organizations to make sure we were telling this story authentically and truthfully,” Murray added.Powers said they were all aware of the specificity needed for Joe’s character. “Treating the Black experience as a monolith makes things a lot easier: You can have one Black person rubber-stamp something and use that as your excuse for not having tried harder to get it right.”He recalled that the individual consultants brought a range of viewpoints: “We’d have 20 Black people in a room: We’d ask a question and get 20 different answers.” Their debates sometimes “broke along generational lines, which was interesting: Things I think are fine may seem offensive to the younger generation. Everyone had a different take, which made the job exponentially harder, but that care was needed.”Further complicating their work was the fact that animation is a medium of caricature: No human is as squat and angular as Carl in Pixar’s “Up,” yet audiences accept him as a crabby old man. For “Soul,” the Pixar crew strove to create characters who were recognizably Black while avoiding anything that recalled the racist stereotypes in old cartoons, from Mammy Two Shoes, the Black maid in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, to George Pal’s stop-motion Jasper.Docter, who has written about animation history, acknowledged, “There’s a long and painful history of caricatured racist design tropes that were used to mock African-Americans.”He recalled that when he was making “Up,” he worried about how the design of the Asian-American scout Russell might be perceived. Docter said his fellow Pixar director Peter Sohn, a Korean-American artist, advised him, “‘Korean eyes are shaped differently than Caucasian eyes. Look at me and draw what you see: The truth isn’t racist.’”Powers agreed that there was an important difference between “leaning into and taking pride in those features and making fun of those features.” Pixar, he said, was mindful of the sorry images from animation history. When it came to designing appealing but stylized characters, the artists “took care not to make them insulting. At the same time, we didn’t want them to be white characters who happen to be brown-skinned. We had to give them distinct looks, so they’re not just boring, monotone characters.”To create those looks, Pixar artists and technicians needed to capture the textures of Black hair and the way light plays on various tones of Black skin. Murray said they brought in the cinematographer Bradford Young, whose work includes “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” to consult as well.Finding the voice that fits an animated character is as challenging as finding the best performer for a live-action role. “You have a voice in your head that you can write to,” Jones explained. “We needed Joe to have ambition, to want to play music at the highest level, but we also needed Joe to be excited to teach what he loves — jazz — to his students, all of which Jamie provided.”Although Foxx has voiced animated characters before, he still had to adjust his performance. “When I got in the recording booth, I was delivering the lines with all kinds of facial expressions and gestures,” Foxx said. “They were like, “Uh, Jamie, let’s try that again and remember … we can’t see you.”During the film, Joe argues — and bonds — with a recalcitrant soul known as 22, who refuses to enter a human body. As 22, Tina Fey found the purely vocal performance liberating. though she too has done other voice-overs before: “I could let go of any worry about how I looked. Even as a comedy person, you’re always thinking a little bit about finding your light and standing up straight. It’s so freeing to not have to do that.” (The relationship between Joe and 22 grows increasing complicated, but neither actor wanted to say anything that might spoil the plot twists.)Reflecting on the creation of “Soul,” Powers said, “When someone told me I was Pixar’s first Black director, I said that can’t be right. Pete said — and my hope is — this is an indicator of changes that are going to be pretty rapid.” There are more animators of color and women in the business than there were 15 or 20 years ago, he noted. “It’s sad it’s taken this long, but I’m glad it’s coming finally.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Black Student Expelled After Mother Complains About 'Fences'

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Race and PolicingFacts on Walter Wallace Jr. CaseFacts on Breonna Taylor CaseFacts on Daniel Prude CaseFacts on George Floyd CaseAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Black Student’s Mother Complained About ‘Fences.’ He Was Expelled.A dispute about the reading of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play in an English class escalated at the mostly white Providence Day School in Charlotte, N.C.Faith Fox and her son Jamel.Credit…Travis Dove for The New York TimesDec. 15, 2020, 5:30 a.m. ETWhen the mother of a Black ninth grader at a private school in Charlotte, N.C., learned last month that his English class was going to be studying August Wilson’s “Fences,” an acclaimed play examining racism in 1950s America, she complained to the school.The drama, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and was adapted into a critically praised film starring Denzel Washington in 2016, is about a Black family and is peppered with racial slurs from the first page.Faith Fox, a lawyer and single mother, said in an interview that she imagined her son’s mostly white class at the Providence Day School reading the dialogue out loud. She said her main concern was that the themes were too mature for the group and would foster stereotypes about Black families.After a round of emails and a meeting with Ms. Fox, the school agreed to an alternate lesson for her son, Jamel, 14. The school also discussed complaints with the parents of four other students. Ms. Fox’s disagreement escalated. She took it to a parents’ Facebook group, and later fired off an email that school officials said was a personal attack on a faculty member.On the day after Thanksgiving, the school notified Ms. Fox that Jamel would no longer be attending the school, the only one he had ever known.His mother called it an expulsion. The school referred to it as “a termination of enrollment” that had to do with the parent, not the student. Either way, what was meant to be a literary lesson in diversity and inclusion had somehow cost a Black 14-year-old his place in an elite private high school.Jamel had recently made the school basketball team and said in an interview that he hoped to graduate as a Providence Day lifer. “I was completely crushed,” he said. “There was no, ‘Please don’t kick me out, I won’t say this, I won’t say that, my mom won’t say this, my mom won’t say that.’” He is making plans to attend public school in January.This year has brought a reckoning with race at many American institutions, including schools. When widespread street protests erupted after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, young people across the country used social media to expose racism at their schools. At Providence Day School, Black students shared stories of discrimination and insensitivity on Instagram, and the school was among many that released statements against racism.“For the Black members of our community, we see you, we hear you and we will act,” the statement said. The school also revised its bias complaint process and created alumni, faculty and student diversity groups.But Ms. Fox said, she felt the school’s treatment of her son proved this was all just lip service.“You can have the important conversations about race and segregation without destroying the confidence and self-esteem of your Black students and the Black population,” Ms. Fox said in an interview. Just over 7 percent of the school’s 1,780 students are Black, about 70 percent are white, and the rest identify as members of other minority groups.A spokeswoman for the school, Leigh Dyer, said last week that officials were “saddened” that Jamel had to leave.“As a school community, we value a diversity of thought and teach students to engage in civil discourse around topics that they might not necessarily agree on,” Ms. Dyer said. “We have the same expectation for the adults in our community.”The Nov. 27 termination letter cited “bullying, harassment and racially discriminatory actions” and “slanderous accusations towards the school itself” by Jamel’s mother.Ms. Dyer provided a statement that said Ms. Fox had made “multiple personal attacks against a person of color in our school administration, causing that person to feel bullied, harassed and unsafe” in the discussions about “Fences.” It also said Ms. Fox had a history of making “toxic” statements about the faculty and others at the school, but did not provide examples.Ms. Fox denied this. “Instead of addressing the issue they’re trying to make me seem like an angry, ranting Black woman,” she said.The New York Times reviewed emails and Facebook messages that Ms. Fox provided and also interviewed two other Providence Day parents who said they had similar concerns about the play and about a video the school used to facilitate conversations about the racial slur. They spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their children.The school had notified parents in early November about the lesson plan in an email. Noting the frequent appearance of the slur in dialogue, it said that students would say “N-word” instead when reading aloud. It said time would be “devoted to considering the word itself and some of its more nuanced aspects of meaning.”The email included a link to a PBS NewsHour interview with Randall Kennedy, a Black professor at Harvard, discussing the history of the slur while using it repeatedly.“It wasn’t something that I thought was appropriate for a roomful of elite, affluent white children,” Ms. Fox said.Her son was also dreading the lesson, which he would have attended via video because of the coronavirus pandemic. “It’s really awkward being in a classroom of majority white students when those words come up,” Jamel said, “because they just look at you and laugh at you, talk about you as soon as you leave class. I can’t really do anything because I’m usually the only Black person there.”Ms. Dyer, the spokeswoman, said the school had introduced the study of “Fences” in 2017 in response to Black parents who wanted more lessons addressing race. In past years, there had been only one complaint about the play, she said.After her son was offered an alternative assignment, Ms. Fox posted about “Fences” to the Facebook group. Other parents said they too had concerns about the play and the PBS video. One comment directed her to an online essay by a student from a prior year who described the “dagger” she felt “cutting deeper and deeper” with each mention of the slur in the video.That’s when Ms. Fox sent an email to the school’s director of equity and inclusion, calling her a “disgrace to the Black community.” Ten days later, Jamel was kicked out of the school. Ms. Fox said that she was surprised but that she does not regret sending the email in the heat of the moment.After Jamel’s expulsion, a letter signed by “concerned Black faculty members” was sent to parents of the four other students who had complained, arguing the literary merits of “Fences.” It said great African-American writers do not create perfect Black characters when they are trying to show the “damaging legacy of racism.”That is a view held by many critics and academics. Sandra G. Shannon, a professor of African-American literature at Howard University and founder of the August Wilson Society, said schools should not shy away from the “harsh realities of the past.”Katie Rieser, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, said “Fences” is taught widely in middle school and high school, but she also urged that it be done so with care.“It’s telling a story about a Black family that, if it’s the only text or it’s one of only a few texts about Black people that students read, might give white students in particular a sense that Black families are all like this Black family,” she said.Ms. Fox said the fight to be heard as a Black parent at a predominantly white private institution had been “exhausting.”She recalled when Jamel came home upset in elementary school after a field trip to a former slave plantation. After she complained, the school ended the annual trips, she said.The other day, she said her son told her he finally understood “why Black Lives Matter is so important and is not just about George Floyd and all of these people dying in the streets, but it also has to do with how we’re treated everywhere else.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      What Country Music Asked of Charley Pride

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWhat Country Music Asked of Charley PrideThe singer put himself on the line to become the genre’s first Black superstar. He died on Saturday not long after performing at a largely mask-free awards ceremony.Charley Pride onstage in 1975. The country star’s 1994 memoir, “Pride: The Charley Pride Story,” details a litany of aggressions he experienced in his career. Credit…Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesDec. 14, 2020At the 54th annual Country Music Association Awards last month, there was Charley Pride, onstage singing his indelible 1971 hit “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” alongside the rising country star Jimmie Allen. In the socially distanced audience, Nashville luminaries took in the wondrous spectacle. Eric Church, exuding stoic cool — no mask. Brothers Osborne singing along — no masks. Ashley McBryde swaying to the music — no mask.Here were two kinds of wish fulfillment, tightly holding hands. First, honoring Pride, who also received the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award that night, was a belated effort at demonstrating sufficient respect for country music’s first Black superstar. Pride was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000. In 2017, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys. “I’m going to put this with all the other awards,” he said backstage after the show, clutching the trophy.And then there were those unadorned faces, telegraphing a certain blitheness about the coronavirus, which was, at the time of the show, raging through the country. On the day the awards were filmed, 1,576 Covid-19 deaths were reported in the United States, according to the Covid Tracking Project — at the time, it was the most in one day this country had seen since mid-May, near the end of the pandemic’s initial wave. (That daily death count has been topped 15 times since the CMAs.)[embedded content]Of all the recent awards shows — the BET Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, the Academy of Country Music Awards, the Billboard Awards, the Latin Grammys, the American Music Awards — the CMAs were singular in showing almost no people wearing masks, either onstage or in the audience. (It was also one of very few shows with an audience of any kind.)If you believed what you were watching, you might think that the country music business was a tolerant one, encouraging of Black performers and willing to acknowledge the genre’s debt to Black music. And you might believe that it was possible for a gaggle of superstars (and the behind-the-scenes people who help them navigate the world) to keep the pandemic at bay.The optics were pretty much seamless, the reality less so. Five of the show’s planned performers pulled out because they tested positive for the coronavirus, or were exposed to someone who did. And most cruel was the news that this past Saturday, a month after the awards, Pride died, at 86, of complications of Covid-19. It is likely impossible to know whether Pride contracted the virus traveling from Texas to Nashville, or at the CMAs, but many, including the country stars Maren Morris and Mickey Guyton, expressed reasonable concern on Twitter that Pride’s appearance on the show might have led to his exposure. (The CMA released a joint statement with Pride’s representatives after his death noting that Pride had tested negative for the coronavirus before, during and after attending the awards.)It would not have been the first time Pride risked his well-being and safety in the name of country music’s embrace. His 1994 memoir, “Pride: The Charley Pride Story,” details a litany of microaggressions and macroaggressions he experienced in his career. To be a Black performer in country, especially in the throes of the civil rights era, when Pride was getting his footing, was to put yourself on the line. Opening for Willie Nelson in Dallas in 1967, Pride was warned the crowd was potentially hostile. Not to worry, the promoter told him, because they were prepared to rapidly pull him offstage if the situation turned dire.“My mouth went so dry it felt like it was stuffed with cotton,” Pride wrote. “He’s not talking about name calling. He thinks something really bad might happen in a room with ten thousand people, and he only has two guys to get me out?” (The show went smoothly.)He had to be careful about his song selection. “There was a time, after all,” Pride wrote, “when it was deemed unsafe to sing ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ because it was about a condemned prisoner dreaming of his woman with ‘hair of gold.’”Pride remembered being called slurs by performers who were his colleagues and friends; how George Jones and another man scrawled “KKK” on his car after a bender; and how he had to remind Webb Pierce — who told him it’s “good for you to be in our music” — that “It’s my music, too.”Pride mostly relates these stories with dispassion, sometimes even with flickers of affection: These occurrences were simply the cost of doing business as a boundary-crashing pioneer. In the book, he is expressly resistant to politics, and seems eager to assure everyone — fellow Nashville stars, show promoters and people he meets along the way — that he’s got no interest in starting trouble, or being near it.Pride was a pathbreaker, but the path largely remained empty in his wake.Credit…Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesUltimately, Pride was rewarded by the country music business — by the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he was one of the genre’s central, crucial performers, a part of the firmament. But he was also, naturally, the exception that proved the rule — even with his success as an example, the country music industry remained largely inhospitable to Black performers. He was a one of one.Nashville is ever so slightly more progressive now when it comes to diversity. Still, of all the pressures applied to the save-face-insistent country music industry this year, the racial justice reckonings of the summer certainly have been the most challenging to face up to.The CMAs are the most revered of the Nashville industry awards shows — in 1971, Pride won entertainer of the year, the show’s highest honor — and its choice to bestow Pride with the lifetime achievement award this year felt, at a minimum, conspicuous.It was of course a lovely gesture on its own terms. Darius Rucker, one of the show’s hosts and the most successful Black country singer since Pride, has frequently cited Pride’s influence. And Pride’s duet partner, Allen, is a promising young pop-country talent and one of a handful of Black singers with recent hits. But their performance also had the air of tokenism — did no white country star also want to pay tribute to a genre legend?Pride is not the first victim of the coronavirus in country music; the 1990s star Joe Diffie died in March, and John Prine (who wasn’t even acknowledged at the CMAs) died in April.But just because the coronavirus has hit close to home has not discouraged country music stars from taking public risks with their health and others’. In June, Chase Rice played a concert for several hundred fans, and was roundly criticized after video appeared online of maskless revelers clustered together near the stage. Around the same time, Chris Janson was similarly criticized for performing for hundreds of fans. (In this, country stars are not alone; an Ohio venue was recently fined for hosting a Trey Songz performance, and New York officials have reported routinely shutting down dance parties in the city.)In October, Morgan Wallen was forced to withdraw from a scheduled appearance on “Saturday Night Live” after video emerged on TikTok of him partying with — and in one case kissing — fans in Alabama. Wallen ended up performing on the show earlier this month, and even participated in a skit poking fun at his indiscretions.Those things don’t simply happen because of individual choices — they happen because of a system that forgives certain kinds of transgressions, and because of an industry that sees no tension between satisfying the thirst of fans and potentially putting them and their loved ones at risk.Those responsible for organizing the CMAs were not unaware of the risks posed by the coronavirus. The CMA president, Sarah Trahern, told Variety that the organization administered around 3,000 coronavirus tests to performers and staff, in addition to temperature checks and questionnaires. The performers who attended were given face shields to wear anytime they were not seated at their table or onstage during the event. In footage posted from backstage during show rehearsals, the show’s executive producer, Robert Deaton, is shown wearing a mask and a face shield when speaking to Pride and Allen about their performance.Unsurprisingly, the CMAs went into damage control mode this weekend. The organization’s news release about Pride’s death mentioned his award, but made no mention of his performance last month.Regardless, recent events are a painful asterisk on Pride’s career, and a reminder of the ways Nashville remained deaf to his unique circumstances. That insensitivity continues apace. Pride was a pathbreaker, but the path largely remained empty in his wake, owing to an industry for which the image of racial comity is more important than the furtherance of it, and for which the appearance of freedom during a pandemic far outweighs any cost that arises from that hubris.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      August Wilson, American Bard

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesTo accompany this essay, the Baltimore-based artist Jerrell Gibbs painted “Portrait of August Wilson” (2020), exclusively for T.Credit…Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim. Photo by Joseph HydeSkip to contentSkip to site indexArts and LettersAugust Wilson, American BardPerhaps no playwright has asserted the richness and complexity of everyday Black lives and language so deeply. Now, two screen projects affirm his legacy for new audiences.To accompany this essay, the Baltimore-based artist Jerrell Gibbs painted “Portrait of August Wilson” (2020), exclusively for T.Credit…Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim. Photo by Joseph HydeSupported byContinue reading the main storyBy More