Britain is a country that makes claim to a multicultural national identity. It champions ideas of socio-political progressiveness and has thoroughly absorbed equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) initiatives into major institutions and organisations to uphold its Equality Act (2010). At first glance, British media reiterates a positive affirmation of difference in all shapes and kinds. But a deeper inspection reveals racialised minorities are underrepresented in particular genres and across illustrative and animated mediums. At the start of my practice-based PhD in 2020, the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education found racially minoritised characters were significantly underrepresented in British children’s literature (CLPE 2021, p. 7). In the same year, JoJo & Gran Gran was celebrated as the ‘first-ever British animated series focusing on a black family’ (Skwigly 2020)… almost 50 years after America’s Harlem Globetrotters (1970), Jackson 5ive (1971) and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (1972). Why is it a multicultural nation, known globally for its strong illustration and filmmaking history, has major racial underrepresentation at their intersection?

The African diaspora’s shared history of marginalisation in anglophonic countries, particularly Britain and America (Gilroy 1993), created a filmic culture of colonial myths (Bogle 2001). As America transitioned into a segregated society of newly emancipated slaves at the turn of the twentieth century, the country shifted its ownership of Black bodies to Black representation (Haruna 2026) further crystallising colonial myths into stereotypes that was shared globally (Haruna 2023). Even in the twentieth century, Black people remain underrepresented in British and American animation production workforces (Uk Screen Alliance 2019; Zippia 2021), with underrepresentation onscreen being the presumed consequence. However, with the rise of mainstream, adult-orientated animation, and the affordability of animation software, an opportunity presents itself to challenge these grand narrative histories with micronarratives of the present day.

My practice-based research, Negotiating Black Britishness, addresses the problematic representation of Black people in Western media focusing on Black Britishness and animation with a twofold focus. In one vein, I examine what animation can reveal to us about contemporary Black British identities. In the other, I experiment with how auto-ethnographic and collaborative methodologies can work through tensions inherent to perspective, positionality and power at the centre of storytelling and representation. In this reflective essay, however, the main point of interest is drawing together a framework that answers how can the use of non-human attributes and bodies express racialised meanings embedded in Black Britishness? Within this view playful devices of personification, anthropomorphisation, zoomorphism and objectification underpin strategies of metaphorical thought which must negotiate with Western visual culture beyond animation.

A key element of Negotiating Black Britishness is working outside ‘production culture’ (Banks et al. 2016, pp. 48-49) to free creativity from its commercial constraints (ibid, p. 2). British, mainstream animation is characterised by a focus on of preschool and primary school audiences using fiction. Consequently, verbal and visual languages, alongside experiences depicted, are constrained to ensure their appropriateness for younger audiences. Thus, animations typically operate within light-hearted genres such as comedy, have moralistic overtones, or take up overtly educational and straightforward plotlines. Stepping outside of this framework as a short-film, indie animator enables my practice to freely experiment with a breadth of ideas keeping costs relatively low. Race and ethnicity can be critically deconstructed using the full gamut of genres, plot structures, and audio-visual languages.

Creating an auto-ethnographic animation anthology has provided a space to explore how my own identity, as a Black British man, has become associated with cultural meanings (i.e. the racialisation / ethnicization process). Here, I deploy a tri-polar structure, derived from definitions of race in literature and visual culture, as lenses to shift through and select memories. These memories become the core content for my animations to express, interrogate and (re)construct my identity within those moments. The first pole, Embodied Difference posits race is a socio-historical categorisation and condition that is in the body but not of the body (Dyer 1994, p. 14). In its most archaic yet enduring sense, Blackness is defined through skin (colour), hair, and bone (Du Bois 1897 in Appiah 1985, p. 23) as well as the voice. The second, Cultural Differences, reflects modern beliefs of race and ethnicity, highlighting cultural practices such as language, rituals, celebrations, culinary traditions etc as key. Lastly, Stereotyped Differences, proscriptively define Blackness through essentialised assumptions based on ill-fitting magnifications, simplifications or fantasies. Some of my practice observes how object attributes already permeate the way racialised bodies are conceived of. 

A Fistful of Fro’ (2025) (originally using the working title of A Hairy Situation) takes stock in recreating a secondary school experience of mine centred around Embodied Difference. In year 7, my whole year group gathered in the courtyard during lunchtime awaiting the arrival of school busses to take us to sports matches. In order to get mine, which was leaving immanently, I would have to make my way through the crowd. As I tried to meander through, someone got the idea to cheekily grab and rub my afro. Before I knew it, everyone else had got the same idea, slowing me down to a halt. Seemingly out of nowhere, my sports teacher (and bus driver) had grabbed me by the scruff of my collar and pulled me out of the tassel. But as he continued to drag me to the mini-bus, I was told off for messing about and making the bus late. Talking back to teachers was considered poor behaviour in the private school. So, I bit my tongue, compressed my frustration and accepted this would be the new norm.

The poignant feelings embedded in this memory were a sense of fatalism and powerlessness – that irrespective of my efforts or actions, I would be blamed for a situation that was beyond my control. Taking this as a starting point, I decided the story should literalise my voicelessness by taking the form of a wordless narrative. This, in turn, would ensure an emphasis on the body (choreography, gesture and posing) as the main vehicle of communication, appropriate for its exemplification of embodied difference. My peers’ fascination with my hair connected to a historic, racialised fetishisation of black bodies (exoticism) and objecthood (chattel slavery). Here they reduced my identity to my appearance and body (Langton 2009, pp. 228-229), framing me as an object without boundaries whilst actively denying my subjectivity (Nussbaum 1995 p. 257). In part these behaviours seem to recognise the cultural significance of an afro as distinctly Black and of rebellious pride (Mercer 2000, pp. 123-125; Dash 2006, pp. 31-32) but only to undermine this status. 

My first complete animatic (a dynamic storyboard that tests a story’s pacing and use of sound), heavily focused on action and aggression. In one sense it converges with live-action depictions of Blackness that hinge on performative and violent bodies, however it draws a key distinction as ‘iconic ghettos’ (Andrews 2017, p. 112) are replaced with posh schools. In some of the anmiatic’s frames you can see notes about where references for exaggerated and superhuman movements were taken from. These include popular anime and anime inspired animations including Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto (2002-2007), Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (1999-Present), Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks (2005-20214), and Liven & Limel’s Productions’ Lil Darkie animated music videos (2021-2023). This first animatic however communicates little to nothing about its crucial school setting and lacked context to understand the fast-paced sequence taking place.

Through iterative processes of storyboarding and animatics, I was gradually able to clarify the memory, experience and identity I was trying to express. The final animatic presented tensions between the character motivations of my peers, sports teacher and I. Conventional symbols such as clocks and church bells helped emphasise time-pressures whilst drawing from reference imagery of familiar poses made non-verbal communication more effective. Leaning into the Western and Film Noir genres, far removed from their respective socio-political histories, helped foreground uneasy notions of masculinity and injustice. Noir’s disillusionment and fatalistic narrative sequences foreshadow my character’s unsatisfying demise (Stephens 1961, p. ix; Selby 1984, pp. 1-2). For ‘[o]nce ensnared, the noir protagonist is unable to escape and he almost always faces his destruction stoically, unafraid’ (Stephens 1961, p. 273). Westerns’ absence of Black characters (Grant 2007, p. 99) is supplanted and recontextualised, albeit superficially, as a record scratch into hip-hop music signals a disjuncture into a contemporary, diverse world. Nevertheless, much like Phil Mulloy’s Cowboy series (1991), something essential persists from the Western: that masculinities are defined by their ‘…pursuit of gratification through conflict’ (Wells 2002, p. 47).

Character design became another opportunity to reiterate Blackness-as-object by erasing the mouth as a symbol of subjectivity. Rudo Company’s character designs for The Wolf (2019) were key to forming conclusion. I decided my character should iconically resemble me with my most defining features of an afro, glasses, an eyebrow scar, and a continual wearing of a dark jumper – all of which were consistent with my teenage (and even adult) appearance. A first attempt at a turnaround for my character’s head, however, indicated the need for further simplification. To save time, final changes to the character design were carried out in the animation production itself.

In animating A Fistful Of ‘Fro (2025), my memory becomes a hypothesis that when norms cannot be conformed to those who fall outside of it are spotlighted only to be erased, not for what they have done but for what they are. Within my experience, and its animated expression, objectification is an essential concept for understanding the how Blackness is subtly constructed as spectacle for the White Gaze. Featureless faces and the rare use of close ups prevent deeper emotional involvement from the audience and further cements my character as an object. The wordless nature of the animation, and thus the voicelessness of my character, becomes emblematic of his objecthood. Black British artist Sonia Boyce laid out a series of African hair specimens of varying styles titled Do You Want to Touch? in 1993. Over 20 years later, my memory attests to the centrality of hair in embodied Blackness sharing Boyce’s questions of curiosity, fetishisation and exoticism (Dash 2006, pp. 34-35).

Although I had been working on ideas of non-fiction Blackness using human forms with nonhuman attributes, I had begun to wonder how the opposite end of the spectrum, (using nonhuman forms with human attributes), might express ideas of Blackness. American, fictional cartoons had been blending together human-identities with nonhuman forms (see Conceptual Integration Theory in Fauconnier & Turner 1998) since their Golden Age (1900-1960s). For example, Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s The Old Plantation (1935) parodies Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery fiction of Uncle Tom’s Cabin through the use of toys. The once painful story of a struggle against systematised oppression is inverted into a tool that perpetuates racism. Sentimentalised slavery is enveloped in the associations of toys’ child-like innocence enabling animation’s ‘concealment of aggression within humour’ (Kotlarz 1982, p. 22). Although White characters feature in the cartoon, the narrative is dominated by Black slaves reduced to children’s playthings happy with their slave/object status. In another set of Metro Goldwyn Mayer shorts, The Old Mill Pond (1936) and its sequel Swing Wedding (1937), African American celebrity musicians are lampooned as frogs (a culturally unflattering animal) in an increasingly rambunctious party that ends in utter turmoil. America’s Pre-Civil Rights Era cartoons use of anthropomorphisation emphasised the racist rather than the racial, reinforcing White hegemony rather than challenging it. Stereotypical beliefs of Blackness were further essentialised whilst, ironically, demonstrating its socially constructed nature for neither animal nor object can be essentially Black.

Contemporary contexts, however, more consciously play with the slippage between the natural and constructed taking forward ideas of ethnicity over race. Cbeebies’ Rastamouse (2011-2015), adapted from a popular, illustrated children’s book in Britain, celebrated Rastafarian identities through crime solving mice. Executive Producer Jackie Edwards highlighted its fantasy setting meant the show could be about any identity, Black or otherwise, even if some viewers watched the show through lenses of (specifically) Caribbean authenticity or inauthenticity. Cartoon Network’s Apple & Onion (2016-2021) highlighted how anthropomorphised food (objects) could call challenge myths of ethnic absolutism in spotlighting the migratory and hybrid presence of foods, and by proxy, identities too. Limits of mixed-heritages’ audio-visual codes legibility bubbled to the surface of the show’s melting pot of characters. Although the Black British identities in either production still performed in comedic genres (as is common for mainstream, Western cartoons), humour from these newer cartoons was derived from playful scenarios rather than delighting in stereotypes or social inequalities. They spoke about, and towards, the increasingly diverse and globalised Western societies that sat outside of them speculating on what Blackness could mean in worlds where explicitly colonial histories are absent. In doing so, they foreground an amorphous space of a recontextualised embodied experience where care must be taken to navigate the humorous against the anxious; the progressive against the provocative; and the subversive against the offensive.

Although Rastamouse and Apple & Onion represent mainstream success in creating resonant stories that explore anthropomorphised racial identities, racialising non-human characters carries additional risk. The racial ambiguity caused through the loss of human bodies might enable people across different ethnicities to feel represented, but equally it might read as a mask of minorities’ absence. In addition, using nonhuman attributes and forms for Black characters might always be read as an attempt of dehumanisation due to a colonial history and legacy of objectification and animalisation. This logic is epitomised by Brian Anthony Hernandez’ (2021) amongst other online critics’, scrutiny of Disney’s Princess and The Frog (2009), Blue Sky’s Spies In Disguise(2019), and Pixar’s Soul (2020). Within the space of a decade, these 3 major, American animation studios had released films with their first, Black, lead characters who spent significant screentime as nonhuman entities. The popularity of the minority-as-nonhuman strategy suggested that colonial myths had never been dispelled but had been respelled along the continuum of the nonhuman, inhuman, and subhuman (Hall 2003, pp. 92-93). 

Although research can be free from commercial constraints, experimental practice must still balance ethical considerations with creative possibilities; the nonhuman space is no exception to this rule. A work-in-progress framework of nonhuman racialisation could help manage these ethical concerns, providing practitioners a way of representing racialised minority groups whether they belong to them or not. Borrowing from Alex Widdowson’s research into animated documentary ethics, his flow diagram, guiding how animated documentaries can represent neurodivergent communities from an outsider perspective (2023, p. 152), can be used as a solid foundation. His inclusive model’s key insights are usefully transferable into racialised, nonhuman contexts, awaiting to be expanded upon through insights that recognise ethnicities’ differing social histories and visual cultures.

In reflecting on my own practice and analysing case studies from industry, I can tentatively propose 6 key insights that begin to chart the complex landscape of nonhuman representation:


1.    The use of nonhuman characters or attributes to express ethnically minoritised identities may be readily linked to strategies of dehumanisation.

2.    With the loss of a contextualising human form, nonhuman characters require additional cultural signifiers to clearly represent an ethnicity.

3.    Using nonhumans to express mixed-heritage presents a unique set of challenges since audio-visual codes are most recognisable for singular ethnic groups. 

4.    The greater the emphasis placed on nonhuman bodies to perform in recognisably racialised ways, the more the nonhuman will become stereotypical and essentialise difference.

5.    The illustrator-animator must work with the dominant contextual connotations of the nonhuman form (and its symbolic, nonhuman relations) to determine the parameter of misreadings. 

6.    Nonhuman characters inherently emphasise their form as symbolic. Thus the symbolic relations amongst nonhuman characters and their environment can indicate defining identity characteristics (e.g. Art Spiegelman’s use of Jewish people-as-mice and Nazis-as-cats in 1986’s Maus to foreground the Nazi’s predatory opposition to Judaism).

Much work is still needed to be done before a useful model can be offered to the community. Animating my own experiences within non-fictional and research contexts has enabled me to focus on illustration/animation as a product, deriving insights accordingly. However, a greater infusing of general anthropomorphic theory and application of the key insights to existing animations would refine the insights. My autoethnographic work could further test the insights with more risk as representational risks are always lowest representing oneself. By opening up the nonhuman element of my practice outwards in collaborative and authorial endeavours the key insights can then integrate observations about practice (e.g. working with race-based traumas) too.

In asking how can the use of non-human attributes and bodies express racialised meanings embedded in Black Britishness? a complex entanglement between narrative, character and context as well as objectification, anthropomorphism, and zoomorphism was foregrounded. By projecting ideas of Black Britishness onto nonhuman forms, cultural ideas of the ethnicity are deconstructed and made more explicit. Experimenting with the objectification of humans characters in practice-based research highlighted that nonhuman features already influence everyday thought and interaction. Analyses of animated anthropomorphisation across animals and objects, demonstrated across time, there has been shifts away from overt stereotyping towards flexible models of Blackness and diverse creators. In a more cultural competent Britain, experimental practices will only continue to be more daring, and illustrators / animators using nonhuman attributes and characters, will have to critically engage with race and ethnicity. For as King et al. point out, ‘… characters are not simply transformed in some generic “human” (for there are no generic humans); rather, they are inscribed, for example, as white “humans,” black “humans,” Asian “humans,” or Latino “humans”’ (2011, p. 37). 

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