Op-Ed: Will FOX’s “The Great North” Be Subject To The Same Racial Miscasting Scrutiny As The Rest Of The Animation Domination Lineup?

 

 

Last year, several major moves in the world of voice-acting happened across existing adult animation franchises. No matter the fact that this is animation and the purpose of animation is that anybody can be anything and the job of an actor is to portray attributes to a “character”, not depict real-life, franchises from FOX like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, and Central Park (for AppleTV) had mandated that white voice actors can only portray white roles while black characters are the exclusive domain of black actors. In an industry where actors of all races, creeds, genders, and political views could portray any character regardless of the same at any given time thereby reducing costs and accentuating talents of the actors (South Park is a prime example), Hollywood’s contribution to the important Black Lives Matter movement was removing white actors from voicing BIPOC characters. You know the rest of this story…

Mike Henry opted to step down in his long-standing role of BIPOC character, Cleveland, on Family Guy

Hank Azaria opted to relinquish the BIPOC roles of Bumblebee Man, Apu, and Carl for The Simpsons

Kristen Bell had stepped down as the voice of a BIPOC character in Molly on Central Park

The ironic part about that last bit is that Central Park was nominated for an NAACP award for Best Animated Series. 

But, now a new fighter has entered the arena. The Great North has cast Aparna Nancherla, an amazing voice actress known for roles like Hollyhock on BoJack, Susmita on Bob’s Burgers, and others (I thought she was one of the few bright spots of what was an overall terrible Space Force series for Netflix). That said, Aparna Nancherla is a 2nd generation South Asian national with her parents hailing from Hyderabad, India. And while there’s no questioning Aparna’s acting chops, she is, in fact, a BIPOC voice actor voicing the role a white character in the form of The Great North’s “Moon Tobin”.

Knowing all of this, would it be fair to say that The Great North has racially miscast a character? How could it not be? The casting of a BIPOC actor in a white-facing role follows the same artifices put in place from those forces unknown that did so for the aforementioned examples. That’s not also to mention the fact that Aparna is voicing the role of a young boy, gender-bending, if you will. Now, before you comment hard with “women voice young male roles all of the time”, I know this, better than most. But, Bob’s Burgers was about a half-a-second away from having additional ‘splainin’ to do about having both “Tina” (Dan Mintz) and “Linda Belcher” (John Roberts) voiced by men just before a litany of other 2020 big stories had come into focus which included the likes of COVID-19, the Presidential Election, and our US Capitol nearly being invaded by terrorists.

Personally, I think Aparna is perfectly cast in the role of “Moon”. If we were going strictly by the rules set forth by Twitter that everyone has to voice characters that more accurately portray the amount of color pigmentation that evolution had bestowed upon the different populations of the world, there would be no place to put Aparna Nancherla in the show, I mean, the South Asian population in the State of Alaska according to the 2010 US Census was less than 1%. After having watched the first few episodes of The Great North, I’m happy that she is a part of the show and I hope she’ll continue to flourish in the role and that The Great North will have many more seasons to follow. But, I also thought Kristen Bell was great as “Molly”, Hank Azaria had won an Emmy award for “Apu”, and Mike Henry stepping down as a character that had room to grow in The Cleveland Show thereby also giving us the likes of “Rallo” (also voiced by Mike) who we will probably never see again, is sad.

There’s a double-standard in a Hollywood that constantly sets in arbitrary sets of rules in an attempt to stave off creativity and ingenuity. Perhaps if producers were able to listen more towards their inner-creativity, and less of that of PR departments that constantly hit the phantom red buttons in the face of controversy, instead of embracing them, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

The Great North airs new episodes every Sunday Night on FOX @ 830 pm ET, check your local listings.