The Cuphead Show! team grappled with the animation’s racist history from the start
Like its video game source material, Netflix’s The Cuphead Show! takes heavy influence from the American Golden Age of Animation — the early-20th-century era that popularized sound cartoons and gave birth to iconic characters like Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Bugs Bunny. It is also an era of animation notoriously riddled with racist caricatures. When the game came out,Cupheadwas met with criticism for divorcing the art style from the loaded context of the 1930s.
“It was definitely something we were aware of,” executive producer Dave Wasson tells Polygon. “That era of animation is loaded with problematic portrayals of characters and race. And there’s also misogyny. It’s definitely problematic. It was a very different time.”
Art director Andrea Fernandez explains that the team approached these creative decisions with care, seeking out different perspectives on the potentially harmful tropes when necessary. Whether or not they ended up using a particular animation element often ended up being a long discussion.
“It wasn’t just staying away from it for the sake of like, Oh, don’t touch that,” Fernandez says. “We really did discuss the root of what was problematic so that we could end up [asking] OK is the style or art of this worth detaching from this awful trope at times? Sometimes it wasn’t.”
That era of animation encompasses a wide gamut of cartoons, from the Fleischer Brothers shows to Disney’s Silly Symphonies. Beyond the conversations about the loaded imagery of the time period and what to leave behind, the team also had to narrow the scope of inspiration. They ended up looking at the game and pinpointing boss characters.
“That was the thing that was so fun about this,” says Fernandez. “Each boss character almost had
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