Oscar-Nominated Films, Starring Animals

This is a hella racist. For the longest time people of colour have been reduced animals to deny our humanity. It is particularly problematic for the Django image because not only is Jamie Foxx a Black man, he is a Black man playing a slave. Why the hell don’t people think about context before they start doing shit like this.

But all the other images are ok because the actors are white? There is no context at all, they’ve just made some silly animal-based puns with the titles.

Yeah well White people don’t have a history of being called animals as an attack on their humanity. How about we stay away from revisionist history and deal with the facts.

Yeah, I’m gonna call troll on this comment.

No it’s not a troll comment at all. In fact I spend quite a bit of my time writing about social justice and that you can’t see how replacing characters of colour with animals is racist, is rather telling.

Right, and normally you’d be right, comparing minorities to animals is offensive. And if that’s what this post were about, I’d be right there with you. But obviously it’s not, it’s a post making animal puns out of the titles of Hollywood movies. I could also maybe go along with your reasoning if there were some stereotype comparing African-Americans to dingoes, but there never has been as far as I’m aware, and since both Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz were replaced with pictures of dingoes in a poster the entire purpose of which was to make a pun using “Dingo” in place of “Django,” I can reasonably deduce, as most logical people could, that not only is that not racially motivated in any fashion, it’s not racist and shouldn’t offend anyone of any race, color, religion, creed, gender, age, sexual orientation, or number of Oscar nominations.

Therefore, since this post is so far from anything any reasonable human being would ever consider racist, I don’t believe you when you accuse it or other people of being racist, and therefore I believe you’re trolling.

Sorry to spoil the joke for you.

There is no joke here and as a Black woman and a womanist, I think I am experienced enough to call something racist. It doesn’t matter what the intent behind the photo is, intent does not magically erase racism or harm done. You cannot for any reason compare are depict a person of colour as an animal and then erase the historical context of such action.

Intent has nothing to do with it. It’s the action. If you didn’t know who the actors were in these movies, but you knew the titles, would it still be racist? No. But the joke, the very reason these pictures exist, would still be the same. It has nothing to do with the race of the actors and everything to do with puns. I don’t know the name of the woman in Amour, but I know the title, and know changing it to “A Boar” and putting in a picture of a boar is funny, and that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the actor in the original poster. So yes, you can depict a “person of color” (who, as far as this post is concerned, is just a person, no qualifier necessary) and completely separate it from historical context because the person in the poster has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the joke or the resulting image.

What am I doing? I’m conversing with a troll.

no, I’m dealing with a racist. Whether or not the joke can exist without the characters of colour is irrelevant because the fact is it does not. They have turned people of colour into animals and the viewer is expected to laugh, That is racist.

Think of it this way: There are three people of color in all of the posters above. One of them (Jamie Foxx) is wearing gloves, and his head is replaced. The other (Suraj Sharm) is replaced entirely by a lion, so his body isn’t even there. The only actor of color whose body you can sort of see is Quvenzhané Walli, and it’s such a hazy image you could argue that it’s hard to tell what her skin color, or certainly her racial heritage, is.

But, disregarding the fact that this is a silly argument we’re having all around, let’s hypothetically consider that you’d heard of these movies, but didn’t know the actors involved, including what their race is. Would you look at a picture of, say, the “Lion of Pi” poster and say, “Hey, that’s racist,” if you didn’t know the race of the actor being replaced? Of course you wouldn’t. Because you understand, as the rest of us do, that it’s not about the person on the poster, it’s about making a pun off the word “Life” by replacing it with “Lion.” They’ve basically removed the actors from the equation for the sake of making a joke about movie titles and animals. The posters don’t even have the actors names on them. So they are in no way making some sort of statement comparing individuals or races to animals, because in all cases, regardless of who the original actor was on the poster, they have replaced the original designs with animals and pretended there never were real people there to begin with. It has nothing to do with the racial histories of the actors on the posters because there aren’t actors on the posters. They’ve been replaced with animal-people, who have no race at all.

So really they haven’t “turned people of colour into animals” and expected the viewer to laugh, they’ve replaced all the original actors, across the board, from every single film, with an animal that relates in no way to the original actors other than the position of their bodies.
I’m starting to think you don’t know what racism is.

Though you clearly know what trolling is, because you’re doing a tremendous job of it.

PFFFT these are hilarious! I’m cracking up imagining a whole movie of a lion and tiger roaring at each other on a boat.

I think you must be seeing something completely different to everyone else, where only the black actors have been changed. That is the only explanation here. If that’s the case, then I’m sorry.

If not, then go cry on Tumblr. Stop seeing racism where there is none.

I’m a Black woman too and I’m no stranger to racist and misogynist undertones.

I’m sorry to have to say this to you, but you are really going for a stretch here.

You’re right that people of color are often portrayed as animalistic and less civilized, but in this case people of color are not being portrayed as animals. The posters of this year’s Oscar nominated films are being portrayed as animals.

Calm down.