A white movie reviewer takes umbrage at Pixar’s microaggressions

Kirsten Acuna writes for Insider, an online publication with a decidedly leftist tilt. One can’t help but feel that Kirsten must have graduated from a very expensive college because she’s internalized so much white guilt that she feels she must be a white savior of black people – which is precisely what she complains is wrong with Pixar’s latest movie, Soul.

If you’re planning on seeing Soul, a highly-rated animated feature from Pixar, you need to stop reading this post immediately. Acuna managed to take a movie that is apparently quite beautiful and charming, and was made with racially sensitive consultants, and turn it into the second coming of Birth of a Nation. To explain her racial madness, I need to give the plot away, just as Acuna does.

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So, everyone is here who wants to be here, right?

Here’s the plot: Jamie Foxx (who is black) gives voice to a black character, Joe, a middle-school band teacher who wishes he could make a living with his passion, jazz. Then he gets killed and becomes a cute-shaped greenish-blue soul. He’s sent to an in-between land where he’s paired with an “unborn” soul, another blobby blue-green creature, 22, played by Tina Fey (who is white), who can return to earth but doesn’t think life is worth living. It’s up to Joe to convince 22 that life has value.

There are people of many races behind the animation. A co-director, Kemp Powers, is black. Running down the list of first billed actors, we see that Rachel House, is Polynesian; Alice Braga is Brazilian; Cora Champommier is Asian; Wes Studi is Cherokee; and Richard Ayoade, Phylicia Rashad, Donnell Rawlings, Questlove, Angela Bassett, Margo Hall, and Daveed Diggs are black.

But Acuna is one of the crazy white women who have crawled out of the woodwork this year. They’re almost invariably college-educated. (Acuna majored in liberal arts at Syracuse.) They’ve been taught to feel incredibly guilty about their toxic white privilege. To repent, they are exceptionally attuned to all the sins society visits on black people and they feel compelled to act as white saviors.

What’s so inordinately funny about Acuna’s effort is that one of her main objections to the film is that she believes it shows white savior syndrome because it takes Tina Fey’s character to teach Jamie Foxx’s character how to appreciate life, setting Joe up (almost) to become a black savior. Confused? You should be. Modern racial sensitivity is hard work.

Briefly, the movie is offensive because

1) Joe, a blue-green blob that’s the soul of a black man, seems willing to sacrifice his chance for a shot at earth to show the meaning of life to 22, a blue-green blog voiced by a white woman.

2) It’s racist to portray black men in animation as blue-green blobs. (Pete Doctor, the white co-director, didn’t know this but it’s true. It’s right up there with lynching, I think.)

3) When Joe gets a chance to return to his body, Tina Fey ends up in his body instead. Tina Fey is a racist because her comedy show 30 Rock had to pull blackface episodes and still has a brownface episode. Having her voice trapped in Joe’s animated body is “insensitive.”

4) The central offense: 22 “leaves Earth so Joe can continue living. It begs another question: Why does a dying Black man have to help a white woman live?” Maybe because we’re all children of God and the majority black cast saw virtue in a more developed soul’s willingness to sacrifice for another?

5) Another “cringe-worthy” moment occurs when a character searching for Joe initially picks on the wrong black man, traumatizing him. Acuna knows a microaggression when she sees one.

6) Acuna concedes that the movie is gorgeous and life-affirming. Still, she’s certain that the only reason it has good reviews is that “33 critics who reviewed the film . . . are overwhelmingly white” (just like she is). Acuna feels half the reviews should have come from “critics of color.” She seems unclear that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t assign reviewers; it just aggregates reviews.

Acuna is what happens when leftists control society. Everything is viewed through a racial lens and white women with white savior complexes can then object to a cartoon because it has a white savior complex and barely misses having a black savior complex. God help us all if Acuna is America’s future.

IMAGE: Jamie Fox and Tina Fey. YouTube screengrab.

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