I think this is the case with a lot of male characters though. Most hairstyles are similar, short, haircuts. If you look at female black characters their hairstyles are more varied.
I think that it’s like you said, it’s a shorthand hairstyle and it is very popular. I’ve seen something similar with black women’s hair too, how it’s usually the 3c/4a natural hair style that goes down to the shoulders and that’s it. I feel like this hairstyle being overused stems from a case of tokenism where they usually still only have one black person in any given role in film, video games, etc. So therefore they go for the one hairstyle for the one black guy. I don’t know if I want to say racist, because there is more of an effort to be inclusive when it comes to styles other than just the short Afro, which we’ve seen for decades. But there’s so many cool hairstyles you can use for black men that I wish creators would explore. But the entertainment industry with people in creative roles still mostly leans white and while they might be well meaning, they just simply don’t usually know the intricacies of black hair culture. It’s difficult to unless you have the our hair and have experienced going to black barbers/salons. So it might just come down to general ignorance on the culture of black hair though which could be alleviated fairly easily as more black creators naturally weave themselves into the gaming/film/entertainment industry as artists. *So I’m about to go in a long tangent:* I work as a professional artist in the animation industry as a black women. (I know I’m just a random person on the internet so you can chose to believe me or not, but I’m not giving my name or what I work on for obvious reasons lol). But I do have my own anecdotal experience after working in this industry for 4 years now. I work at a large well known animation studio and honestly I’m one of the few black artists on any of the shows there. There’s very few of us in the industry in general, which is already pretty small and we black artist all mostly know each other by name. I literally have had a sticky note ever since I first realized I was the one chocolate chip in the studio that I’ve ticked every time I’ve seen “one of us” in person. In the two large studios I’ve worked at so far in the last 4 years so far I’m at 21. About 9 or those were artist roles the others, non-artist or office roles. (Fun fact, one of those artists was Ian Quartey- who I don’t know personally we just road the same elevator lol) It’s more funny than anything and my sticky note isn’t a serious thing I fixate on. But it definitely is something you notice when you’re the “only one”. I feel like Tigger. When black artist see each other, there’s like this…knowing look we tend to give each other. Or I dunno, maybe that’s just me being weird. lol Most of my peers (all very talented awesome people who I love working with btw) are mostly white or Asian. They’re very great talented artists and friends and they all deserve to be where they are, but naturally they’re likely not going to understand the black hair experience. And I’m just the one black artist on the entire show, so even my own experience is limited as is my power in my role in the pipeline. So pretty much we just simply need more artist who can naturally add their experiences to art. Much like how every individual artist brings their necessary talent and flare to the show, character designers, BG designers, storyboard artist, all provide different but necessary skills with our diverse abilities, the same can go for having different people from different walks of life chipping in to make something unique and special l. It’d also be good for all the awesome artists who aren’t black to maybe broaden their horizons and study some black hair styles outside the typical. I hope more of us pop up in the industry over the next upcoming decades. I have a feeling that will happen because the industry really is becoming more diverse. But it’s a slow process. If you’re an artist, please consider aiming to work in animation! We need more people with different experiences to make more fun creative stories! Black, Asian, Mexican - OH GOD especially Mexican/Latin people. There’s even less of y’all than black people which is insane because I live in LA! And I know I didn’t explicitly say “white people too”, but the thing is for other races, being an artist is often considered a “white” job, so many people outside those groups are discouraged by even their own family to work in this industry. I’m lucky that my parents supported me but I still meet other black people who are shocked that I work in this industry purely because they didn’t think it was possible for me to. I don’t want anyone to ever think for a moment to throw away their dreams because of what people might have internalized that could discourage them. So of course if you want to work in animation-no matter your race-please strive for your dreams! I support you and want to see you succeed! But in this case I want to encourage people outside of those groups that already know they’d be welcome there. Lol
I would probably do voice work if anything. Out of all of the mediums I work with, animation is easily my weakest lane. I've done it in the past but I haven't dedicated the time to it. Do you have insight on how to get into vocal work as a black creative? I appreciate your insight on this post, btw.
First thing I thought of was that guy telling Sam witwer his parents designed him poorly because he looks like every other video game protagonist in the late 2000’s 2010’s 😂
One good thing about school regulated hairstyles is that you get used to everyone having a similar cut. I understand it is a popular hairstyle but the older ones are more natural at least. Just a normal "short" hairstyle. Maybe its just my opinion because I think the shaved sides with the hair sticking out like that kinda looks ugly lol. And honestly Ive never seen anyone with a haircut like that or cant remember. The top is too long compared to the almost clean shaven sides. Ive seen two tone haircuts of similar style but more "balanced". It doesnt look too strange on fictional characters because they often have odd hairstyles. Like Goku, Vegeta, Naruto, Doña Florinda or Cloud. But eh Im just not a fan of it.
I like a lot of 80's Blaxploitation movies and in those a lot of the characters have really big hair like afros. It never occurred to me that something like that might be offensive because that really was how a lot of the fashion was like back then.
Maybe its me because im not into trends Or styles but I don't care. At the end of the day trends wont fill my bank account or pit food on the table. If it works then stick with if not try something new. Trends are a waste of time
It's not racist to give someone hair they would naturally have. Calling this racist is like saying its racist to give a white guy a bowl cut or a mullet, or saying its sexist to give a girl long flowing hair. I've got a black girl in the book I'm writing who has short, frizzy, poofy hair, am I racist because I've seen that depicted numerous times before and still did it? No, I just thought it would look good on the character lol.
To be honest I don't think this hairstyle is racist, I have a friend who has this hairstyle and his not even black. Though I still think it's lazy, I mean just check on the characters in anime...they have different colors and styles and Japanese people aren't even like that. Most Asians such as myself are mostly black hair, we still have the rare blonde and albino but as I said it's rare. They need more creativity on character designs I mean just look at Pokemons Nessa 👌😤
This is actually really interesting. I also really liked your presentation, it was straight to the point with examples and raised a question without accusations. I think this is a combination of two factors, trends and animation skill. 3D animation like your modern example is hard to do with flowing hair (Star Wars had to simplify the hair styles of a lot of the characters for the Clone Wars show because of this). This doesn't explain the earlier examples which wouldn't have cared about that as an animation budget factored. Looking back, it's strange they didn't use a more varied set of styles to help make each character more distinct (both as a silhouette and reflective of the personality of each character, which is super helpful in marketing) since it would basically add a circle or rectangle or whatever to the character's head. I'd like to see more examples from a wider range of shows, and compre them to live action shows at the same time. My guess is that you'll also find similar trends with white characters, but white people have a wider range of hair types. White people can have hair that's curly, waving, straight, frizzy, etc, and in many different colors. If you pulled similar examples by decade of say blond guys with straight hair, you'd probably find something similar, but less extreme because there are more tropes that can apply to white characters (black nerd and black jock vs white nerd and white jock have different tropes/cliches).
Tl;dr: this style is also practical and non-controversial. Large locs have distinctive sillhoettes AND are easy to render in 3D while still having enough movement to be seen on screens from afar. Video games with a lot of characters in particular need characters to have very distinct sillhouettes so players can easily distinguish them. Plus, these hairstyles code the characters as cool and badass. Giving black men long hair can be a risky move for a big game company in particular, since it invites conversations about black masculinity. Styles like afros are also risky since there are many cases of it being used for racial caricatures.
Ngl but i don't think people understand its not that easy to draw or animate hair and have it look natural especially when it comes to afro, braids, or dreads and I'm speaking as a black artist, a lot of people had to find ways of drawing a particular hair style and it would take time to find a way for it to make sense otherwise it just comes out looking terrible or extremely flat which is probably why they also use that same hair style because when u have a deadline you cant spend so much time on experimenting with hair only for it to come up with an issue with lighting or physics for the movement as it wouldn't be as that of Caucasian hair so probably go with the style that looks good and is more reliable, and not to say other black hairstyles aren't be tried out they are its just the end result isnt as refined in the rendering as the most common ones so its still going to take more time, like look at the hair for Merida and Tangled, they had to create a whole new generator or way of animating and it still took them time to animate them but it still has kinda paved the way to produce more hairstyles for black characters like the ones shown, will probably see it more in games but it will slowly bleed over to movies
look at male anime characters hair, for many decades many have had a very similar hair styles. Compare Lohengramm of Legend of The Galactic Heroes from 1982, to Yagami Light of Death Note from 2003. Yes Lohengram has slightly curly hair, but actually in the 2017 remake, they straightened it making it look even more similar. If there is anything to be discovered here, it's that men belonging to the same culture tend to have little diversity in hair styles. There is no sense in trying to mind read or search for any hint of racism in everything, it's not proactive, it's paranoid. If it's really an important issue for you, focus on what's overt, much more people will support you and you might actually make a difference.
Wow. Some people think if anything isn't tailor-made for them, it's racist. If this hairstyle isn't your thing, go ahead and explain that. But don't be an idiot and slander the designer as racist.
![บุกร้านไอศกรีม VJ วุ้นเส้น !!!! [ดูคลิปเต็มหน้าช่อง] #Short | PANG ORNHIRA](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/g549nEhKZdc/mqdefault.jpg)
I think this is the case with a lot of male characters though. Most hairstyles are similar, short, haircuts. If you look at female black characters their hairstyles are more varied.
I think that it’s like you said, it’s a shorthand hairstyle and it is very popular. I’ve seen something similar with black women’s hair too, how it’s usually the 3c/4a natural hair style that goes down to the shoulders and that’s it. I feel like this hairstyle being overused stems from a case of tokenism where they usually still only have one black person in any given role in film, video games, etc. So therefore they go for the one hairstyle for the one black guy. I don’t know if I want to say racist, because there is more of an effort to be inclusive when it comes to styles other than just the short Afro, which we’ve seen for decades. But there’s so many cool hairstyles you can use for black men that I wish creators would explore. But the entertainment industry with people in creative roles still mostly leans white and while they might be well meaning, they just simply don’t usually know the intricacies of black hair culture. It’s difficult to unless you have the our hair and have experienced going to black barbers/salons. So it might just come down to general ignorance on the culture of black hair though which could be alleviated fairly easily as more black creators naturally weave themselves into the gaming/film/entertainment industry as artists.
*So I’m about to go in a long tangent:*
I work as a professional artist in the animation industry as a black women. (I know I’m just a random person on the internet so you can chose to believe me or not, but I’m not giving my name or what I work on for obvious reasons lol). But I do have my own anecdotal experience after working in this industry for 4 years now. I work at a large well known animation studio and honestly I’m one of the few black artists on any of the shows there. There’s very few of us in the industry in general, which is already pretty small and we black artist all mostly know each other by name. I literally have had a sticky note ever since I first realized I was the one chocolate chip in the studio that I’ve ticked every time I’ve seen “one of us” in person. In the two large studios I’ve worked at so far in the last 4 years so far I’m at 21. About 9 or those were artist roles the others, non-artist or office roles. (Fun fact, one of those artists was Ian Quartey- who I don’t know personally we just road the same elevator lol) It’s more funny than anything and my sticky note isn’t a serious thing I fixate on. But it definitely is something you notice when you’re the “only one”. I feel like Tigger. When black artist see each other, there’s like this…knowing look we tend to give each other. Or I dunno, maybe that’s just me being weird. lol
Most of my peers (all very talented awesome people who I love working with btw) are mostly white or Asian. They’re very great talented artists and friends and they all deserve to be where they are, but naturally they’re likely not going to understand the black hair experience. And I’m just the one black artist on the entire show, so even my own experience is limited as is my power in my role in the pipeline. So pretty much we just simply need more artist who can naturally add their experiences to art. Much like how every individual artist brings their necessary talent and flare to the show, character designers, BG designers, storyboard artist, all provide different but necessary skills with our diverse abilities, the same can go for having different people from different walks of life chipping in to make something unique and special l. It’d also be good for all the awesome artists who aren’t black to maybe broaden their horizons and study some black hair styles outside the typical. I hope more of us pop up in the industry over the next upcoming decades. I have a feeling that will happen because the industry really is becoming more diverse. But it’s a slow process.
If you’re an artist, please consider aiming to work in animation! We need more people with different experiences to make more fun creative stories! Black, Asian, Mexican - OH GOD especially Mexican/Latin people. There’s even less of y’all than black people which is insane because I live in LA!
And I know I didn’t explicitly say “white people too”, but the thing is for other races, being an artist is often considered a “white” job, so many people outside those groups are discouraged by even their own family to work in this industry. I’m lucky that my parents supported me but I still meet other black people who are shocked that I work in this industry purely because they didn’t think it was possible for me to. I don’t want anyone to ever think for a moment to throw away their dreams because of what people might have internalized that could discourage them. So of course if you want to work in animation-no matter your race-please strive for your dreams! I support you and want to see you succeed! But in this case I want to encourage people outside of those groups that already know they’d be welcome there. Lol
I would probably do voice work if anything. Out of all of the mediums I work with, animation is easily my weakest lane. I've done it in the past but I haven't dedicated the time to it. Do you have insight on how to get into vocal work as a black creative? I appreciate your insight on this post, btw.
Hard to find black fictional male character that dont use this kind of hair sty even in anime.
First thing I thought of was that guy telling Sam witwer his parents designed him poorly because he looks like every other video game protagonist in the late 2000’s 2010’s 😂
Oh wow that makes sense.
One good thing about school regulated hairstyles is that you get used to everyone having a similar cut. I understand it is a popular hairstyle but the older ones are more natural at least. Just a normal "short" hairstyle. Maybe its just my opinion because I think the shaved sides with the hair sticking out like that kinda looks ugly lol.
And honestly Ive never seen anyone with a haircut like that or cant remember. The top is too long compared to the almost clean shaven sides. Ive seen two tone haircuts of similar style but more "balanced". It doesnt look too strange on fictional characters because they often have odd hairstyles. Like Goku, Vegeta, Naruto, Doña Florinda or Cloud. But eh Im just not a fan of it.
I like a lot of 80's Blaxploitation movies and in those a lot of the characters have really big hair like afros. It never occurred to me that something like that might be offensive because that really was how a lot of the fashion was like back then.
You mean the 1970's.
Maybe its me because im not into trends Or styles but I don't care.
At the end of the day trends wont fill my bank account or pit food on the table.
If it works then stick with if not try something new.
Trends are a waste of time
It's not racist to give someone hair they would naturally have. Calling this racist is like saying its racist to give a white guy a bowl cut or a mullet, or saying its sexist to give a girl long flowing hair. I've got a black girl in the book I'm writing who has short, frizzy, poofy hair, am I racist because I've seen that depicted numerous times before and still did it? No, I just thought it would look good on the character lol.
Animators do what they have to do but they could put effort in more diverse 🥷🏾haircuts
Its like this with white people too, like ever whit guy protagonist has short brown hair thats slightly longer on top
What League of legends did was pretty lazy lol 😂😂😂
I feel like African Americans aren't a target demo for that game. Might be wrong though.
Yeah and all white male protagonist have clean cut look, is this an issue?
To be honest I don't think this hairstyle is racist, I have a friend who has this hairstyle and his not even black. Though I still think it's lazy, I mean just check on the characters in anime...they have different colors and styles and Japanese people aren't even like that. Most Asians such as myself are mostly black hair, we still have the rare blonde and albino but as I said it's rare. They need more creativity on character designs I mean just look at Pokemons Nessa 👌😤
Woah woah phoenix isn't American, he's British but I agree with you
This is actually really interesting. I also really liked your presentation, it was straight to the point with examples and raised a question without accusations. I think this is a combination of two factors, trends and animation skill. 3D animation like your modern example is hard to do with flowing hair (Star Wars had to simplify the hair styles of a lot of the characters for the Clone Wars show because of this). This doesn't explain the earlier examples which wouldn't have cared about that as an animation budget factored. Looking back, it's strange they didn't use a more varied set of styles to help make each character more distinct (both as a silhouette and reflective of the personality of each character, which is super helpful in marketing) since it would basically add a circle or rectangle or whatever to the character's head. I'd like to see more examples from a wider range of shows, and compre them to live action shows at the same time.
My guess is that you'll also find similar trends with white characters, but white people have a wider range of hair types. White people can have hair that's curly, waving, straight, frizzy, etc, and in many different colors. If you pulled similar examples by decade of say blond guys with straight hair, you'd probably find something similar, but less extreme because there are more tropes that can apply to white characters (black nerd and black jock vs white nerd and white jock have different tropes/cliches).
Tl;dr: this style is also practical and non-controversial.
Large locs have distinctive sillhoettes AND are easy to render in 3D while still having enough movement to be seen on screens from afar.
Video games with a lot of characters in particular need characters to have very distinct sillhouettes so players can easily distinguish them. Plus, these hairstyles code the characters as cool and badass.
Giving black men long hair can be a risky move for a big game company in particular, since it invites conversations about black masculinity. Styles like afros are also risky since there are many cases of it being used for racial caricatures.
Ngl but i don't think people understand its not that easy to draw or animate hair and have it look natural especially when it comes to afro, braids, or dreads and I'm speaking as a black artist, a lot of people had to find ways of drawing a particular hair style and it would take time to find a way for it to make sense otherwise it just comes out looking terrible or extremely flat which is probably why they also use that same hair style because when u have a deadline you cant spend so much time on experimenting with hair only for it to come up with an issue with lighting or physics for the movement as it wouldn't be as that of Caucasian hair so probably go with the style that looks good and is more reliable, and not to say other black hairstyles aren't be tried out they are its just the end result isnt as refined in the rendering as the most common ones so its still going to take more time, like look at the hair for Merida and Tangled, they had to create a whole new generator or way of animating and it still took them time to animate them but it still has kinda paved the way to produce more hairstyles for black characters like the ones shown, will probably see it more in games but it will slowly bleed over to movies
look at male anime characters hair, for many decades many have had a very similar hair styles. Compare Lohengramm of Legend of The Galactic Heroes from 1982, to Yagami Light of Death Note from 2003. Yes Lohengram has slightly curly hair, but actually in the 2017 remake, they straightened it making it look even more similar. If there is anything to be discovered here, it's that men belonging to the same culture tend to have little diversity in hair styles. There is no sense in trying to mind read or search for any hint of racism in everything, it's not proactive, it's paranoid. If it's really an important issue for you, focus on what's overt, much more people will support you and you might actually make a difference.
Wow. Some people think if anything isn't tailor-made for them, it's racist. If this hairstyle isn't your thing, go ahead and explain that. But don't be an idiot and slander the designer as racist.
I mean...I literally explain why It's NOT racist but go off.
I don’t think it’s that different than animators defaulting to a genetic ponytail for white girls.