Born to be Wild -- Colonial Legacies

So, I have been sitting on this one for quite some time due to my crazy schedule over the last few months, but I saw a movie at the Boston Aquarium recently that was adorable and yet terribly unsettling.

 The movie was called "Born to be Wild 3D" and it documents two programs that help orphaned wildlife in terribly "exotic" and romanticized corners of the world (note: this is drenched in sarcasm and distaste). While the baby animals were unbearably cute, my main critique lies with the choice of human subjects in the film. Though the documentary follows animals in Kenya and Borneo, filmmakers chose to follow elderly white women, blatant remnants of colonial legacies in these countries, as the protagonists. The white women give many interviews describing their love for the baby animals and how amazing it is that they are able to "rescue" them. All the while, black Kenyan men are seen in the background actually taking care of the baby elephants!!! These Kenyan men remain nameless and voiceless throughout the film. No one bothered to ask them about their roles in caring for the animals. While the colonial women are imparting their knowledge of these wild animals, the Bornean and Kenyan caretakers are seen playing with the animals in the background in a way that constructs them as "wild" and "animal-like."

 In this day and age, why do cute films aimed at child audiences continue to reify colonial legacies without questioning the role of race in representation? Why did it seem as though I was the only person in the theatre who left feeling mildly disturbed by the portrayal of people of color as mere props in the background of these white women's heroic stories? Normalizing this type of representation of race and colonialism in entertainment for our children makes it that much harder to deconstruct these problematic (and powerful) notions in the future. While children leave thinking about the cute monkeys and elephants, on a subconscious level there is much deeper schema-building at work. Without even realizing it, by leaving these representations uninterrogated, we encourage our children to accept these representations as truth and thereby reaffirm pervasive and institutionalized racist, Western-centric thinking.