The Representation of Mixed-Heritage Characters in Animated Media

Caballero Jesuthason, Laetricia Janiel (2025) The Representation of Mixed-Heritage Characters in Animated Media. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology.

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Abstract

The world of cinema is a vast and ever-growing one, comprising a myriad of opportunities in terms of stories, genres, character archetypes and backgrounds. This industry harnesses countless stories once left untold, using its format to showcase them to audiences regardless of geographical and cultural differences. Despite this, a well-known, decades-long struggle within the prolific Hollywood, as well as the traditional film industry, is the need for fair representation and the subsequent lack of it. This is especially the case when it concerns elements such as gender and race (Malik et al., 2022). A 2020 study conducted in the United States of America revealed that out of four groups that represented the spectrum of perceptions on race, three groups expressed a desire for more racially-diverse representation in films, with the fourth group not even against the sentiment, but prioritising story quality (King et al., 2020). Over the past few decades, technological advancements have offered a new format to the film industry: animation. From the emergence of hand-drawn (or traditional) animation, the developments of clay animation, and the later advancements of 3D animation, over the past few decades, the accessibility and popularity of this style of film production has grown vastly (Das & Soni, 2024). This format is unique in that it does not suffer from the same barriers that affect traditional film production (transportation to sets, visual-based casting, et cetera). This format offers nearly infinite possibilities for creativity, which, in turn, allows more opportunities for better representation. Because of this, the emergence of minority-focused animated films is no surprise