I'm weirdly reassured to hear that other peope have had concerns about that as a racist portrayal in The Nightmare Before Christmas - I'm white, so when I saw it again for the first time in years I wondered if I was reaching a bit in being uncomfortable with the character (hadn't realised the name was literally a slur) - it just felt to me like they were trying to present this as a black character who of course is villainous.
The other thing I find hard to stomach is the scientist who made and now controls Sally: it's a classic example of making a character who uses a wheelchair creepy, sinister and evil, to the point where his disability becomes visual shorthand for his being repulsive morally and physically: so it comes off not that Sally wants to get away from him because she's in a coercive control situation, but because he's revolting by his very nature. And while Henry Selick would later make more effort to engage with issues like racism, gentrification and the prison industrial complex's impact on Black communities in Wendell & Wild, it too has a sinister wheelchair-using character. I otherwise loved the movie, but that aspect is a slap in the face.
Where Christmas movies are concerned, Prancer (original, not remake) is right up there. Looking at it now, I read Jessica as an autistic child who is leaning into a special interest in Christmas to help her cope with her grief following her mother's death, all of which was certainly similar enough, if not identical to experiences of mine in childhood that it always just made a deep emotional sense to me. It's unabashedly sentimental, yet in a way that doesn't feel cheap or manipulative, because there's emotional truth there.
The storyline where Jessica befriends someone else isolated by grief, an older woman who has withdrawn from the community life of their small, struggling rural town, felt extra powerful to me because again, I could've seen that lady being autistic too, and we do have a way of finding each other...
I'm weirdly reassured to hear that other peope have had concerns about that as a racist portrayal in The Nightmare Before Christmas - I'm white, so when I saw it again for the first time in years I wondered if I was reaching a bit in being uncomfortable with the character (hadn't realised the name was literally a slur) - it just felt to me like they were trying to present this as a black character who of course is villainous.
The other thing I find hard to stomach is the scientist who made and now controls Sally: it's a classic example of making a character who uses a wheelchair creepy, sinister and evil, to the point where his disability becomes visual shorthand for his being repulsive morally and physically: so it comes off not that Sally wants to get away from him because she's in a coercive control situation, but because he's revolting by his very nature. And while Henry Selick would later make more effort to engage with issues like racism, gentrification and the prison industrial complex's impact on Black communities in Wendell & Wild, it too has a sinister wheelchair-using character. I otherwise loved the movie, but that aspect is a slap in the face.
Where Christmas movies are concerned, Prancer (original, not remake) is right up there. Looking at it now, I read Jessica as an autistic child who is leaning into a special interest in Christmas to help her cope with her grief following her mother's death, all of which was certainly similar enough, if not identical to experiences of mine in childhood that it always just made a deep emotional sense to me. It's unabashedly sentimental, yet in a way that doesn't feel cheap or manipulative, because there's emotional truth there.
The storyline where Jessica befriends someone else isolated by grief, an older woman who has withdrawn from the community life of their small, struggling rural town, felt extra powerful to me because again, I could've seen that lady being autistic too, and we do have a way of finding each other...