“West-Indian accent”? I though Jar Jar was supposed to sound Creole. And previously in this thread his accent was described as resembling Jamaican. This is really why the Jar Jar criticism confuses me so much. People can never agree on how exactly he is offensive. Also this is literally the first time I’ve heard mention of Jar Jar’s “buttocks”, and what does that have to do with Indians?
Also when was “crafty Japanese trade villains” ever a thing? I’ve heard people make ‘yellow peril’ comparisons, but apart from the accent (which the voice actor based on Philippino I belive) there’s not much about them that resembles any Asian cultures. Not that I’m aware of at least.
LoL
Well, sure but the point is that Jar Jar sounds decidedly stereotyped in that fashion. Be it Caribbean or Jamaican they all have a very noticeable trait that is very much human being of color. The trade federation have very obvious, thick Asian accents with large slitted eyes…they walk around like Geishas with their hands folded in front of them. I took the “crafty” in that phrase to just illustrate they were stereotypes that were cast as villains. Nothing more. Yellow peril certainly would fit that stereotype.
Watto and Jewish is ( I hope) not in need of an explanation?
Large slitted eyes…that’s a contradiction in terms if I ever saw one.
Obviously Asian…
The alien on the right is definitely Asian in facial characteristics but that is not the only trait I’m talking about. At any rate it is not important for my basic premise to be true. Many thought similarly, including the persons in the piece I linked. All my friends felt this way at the first viewing.
Yes, but the fact that many thought similarly doesn’t make it true.
Really? How does that make sense? If one person or a few dozen thought this then you might have a case. The debate over this issue in general with the TPM and the PT is well known and well documented. As noted before, I don’t believe Lucas was going out of his way here but To say this has no legs is just false.
Watto in the next movie has a small beard and hat that looks decidedly Hasidic. Am I really just imagining this? Seriously?
Humans see patterns in things that simply aren’t there. It is our nature.
Is the cloud deliberately or subconciously attempting to look like Winnie the Poo, or is it all in the eyes of the beholder?
Actually that is a cloud that looks very much like Winnie the Pooh. Not sure how that helps your case.
You’re missing the point. Looks like and is are two different things. The cloud looks like Winnie the Pooh, because we through our history associate the shape with Winnie the Pooh, but the cloud isn’t Winnie the Pooh. The cloud doesn’t look like Winnie the Pooh by design. It’s just incidental. In the same way some of us see racial stereotypes in some of Lucas’ characters, but that is not the same as them being racial stereotypes. The characters don’t look like racial stereotypes by design. It’s just incidental. We think we see a pattern, but it isn’t there. We think we see Winnie the Pooh, but it’s just a cloud that for no reason whatsoever shares some similarities with Winnie the Pooh. To me those here that try to convince me, that Neimoidians are Asian, and Jar Jar a black dude, are trying to convince me that the cloud is actually Winnie the Pooh. The fact that some of these characters share some vague similarities with racial stereotypes (along with plenty of differences) doesn’t make them racial stereotypes.
I understand what point you are trying to make but it doesn’t ring true for me. I know the cloud is not Winnie the Pooh…but anyone who has ever seen the character would immediately recognize the formation as that bear in a heart beat. Many who have seen and heard a racist stereotype of an Asian or Jew would recognize and have recognized Watto and the Neimoidians.
Doesn’t that last sentence kinda fit with what dredre is trying to say though? Just because you recognize a similarity, doesn’t mean it was intentional (or even subconsciously based off of something). And it implies that it could have been coincidental.
Like I said earlier about how the Gungans speak; people can’t even agree what accents they’re supposed to sound like. There’s only so many sounds youn can make, and in the end its bound to end up sounding like something that already exists. I mentioned Boss Nass and Tarpals earlier. Neither follow any clear accents, but still resemble in subtle ways the speech patterns of people from vastly different cultures. Sometimes the voice actor of captain Tarpals makes the character sound Samurai-like. I don’t think the he specifically thought about Samurais, I think he was just trying to make the character sound a bit gruff and it accidentally ended up sounding a bit like typical movie-Samurais. Same things goes for Brian Blessed’s take on Boss Nass; with the odd dialogue written by Lucas, the words he choose to alter and emphasize, combined with his deep vocals, it can sound vaguely Caribbean. It’s not an actual Jamaican accent like they chose to give Kit Fisto in the Clone Wars, but some of the same “gestural” aspects are in there. Ahmed Best seemed to add some retroflex to some of the sounds, especially the D’s, and as such he can sound sort of Indian at times. It seems like an odd conscious choice, but it’s possible that he did it simply because it’s such an unnatural sound for English speakers to make (hence it sounds “foreign/alien”). When Blessed does these sounds with his deeper tone of voice, you get that vaguely South African feel.
Newt Gunray’s voice has a gruff-ness (best way I can describe it) similar to Tarpals, but the other Neimoidians don’t have it. The Neimoidian pilot (the one with the weird metal mouth-piece and goggles) speak in a more higher pitched and ‘stilted’ manner that kinda resemble Indian, as opposed to Japanese. Same thing goes for Watto, who’s accent, despite being compared to Jewish or Arab accents, also has a tendency to add little vowel sounds at the end of- or in the middle of sentences (I think this is called epenthesis), which is more commonly associated with stereotypical Italian accents. Again, this has nothing to do with imitating a real accent, but rather adding sounds and grammatical errors that makes a character sound like a non-native speaker, and in the end this is absolutely bound to resemble real accents and dialects.
Even the Geonosians in AOTC, despite being insect people, have, out of necessity, similarities to real languages, either intentionally or unintentionally. The sentence structure has a lot of glottal stops, ejectives and rolling R’s which really have nothing to do with bug sounds, but it exists in Polynesian languages and (to a lesser degree) Xhosa dialects, both of which are about as far away from familiar Western languages as you can get. This could have been intentionally, but it could easily have been a case of simply asking the English-speaking voice-actor “do the most unnatural sound you can make”.
OK, this was kind of long and rant-y, but what I’m trying to say is that the PT accents are such a vague hodgepodge of sounds that I fail to see how they can represent any specific language in an intentional and “insensitive” manner.
Regardless, how one thinks or interprets an image or portrayal is an important aspect of art compared to how that image or portrayal was originally intended. It is arrogant imo to suggest that what people see and hear is “not there” though, Dre. To me they are as obvious as that bear looking EXACTLY like Pooh. I am truly puzzled how these caricatures got by the the design team and Lucas, frankly. I just think they were a bit lazy in trying to come up with these characters and/or thought using cliches would send the message they wanted with respects to who the villains were, who the sidekick was…who knows. I don’t think there was any conscious effort to appear racist but insensitive? Yeah.
As for the character appearances, I think similar concepts apply there. The designers had to have borrowed from real-life simply out of necessity, but hat doesn’t mean that the Neimoidians wear Chinese-outfits, any more than Amidala is wearing a Mongolian dress and hair-style, despite that having been an inspiration. Hell, the Neimoidians’ weird hats might as well be inspired by the Pope as opposed to anything Chinese.
When making aliens, regardless of whether you borrow something intentionally, or you simply make something you think is completely made up, there’s only so much to take from, and there is only so much the human brain can imagine. And we do tend to look for patterns and similarities, so naturally, we will find cultural similarities in both the human and alien characters; their clothes, speech, mannerisms, etc. when we are watching a space-fantasy where everything has to me made up from scratch (or as much from scratch as is actually possible).