The Most Racist Kids' Movies
We don't like to think that Hollywood has bad intentions for our kids, but these movies are chock full of horrible racism that'll turn our kids into little bigots.

10
Aladdin

So big ups for Disney for venturing out of Anglo-Europe for Aladdin, but the movie has... some problems. The film's opening "Arabian Nights" song contains the line, "Where they cut off your ear/ if they don't like your face./ It's barbaric, but hey, it's home." Nice interpretation of Shari'a law there, guys. That line was censored for later releases.

The racism continues with the designs of the main characters - Aladdin & Jasmine basically look like white people with a little bronzer, while the bad guys have hook noses, massive eyebrows and are ultra-Arabic. Robin Williams is in this movie as the genie - pay attention, this will be important.

9
North

Roger Ebert's not a man to mince words, so when he says that Rob Reiner's 1994 comedy North is one of the worst movies he's ever seen, you believe him. Starring Elijah Wood as a child prodigy who emancipates himself from his parents, it's 90 minutes of horrible racial stereotypes disguised as family fun.

Where to even start? With Graham Greene and Kathy Bates playing Alaskan Inuits sending their grandfather (Abe-freaking-Vigoda) out to sea on an ice floe? As North travels the world looking for replacement parents, he runs into one creepy racist tableau after another, before eventually reuniting with the good ol' WASPs that spawned him.

8
Happy Feet

How the hell can a movie about penguins be racist? Ask Happy Feet, the disturbing 2006 animated film that also stars Elijah Wood (wow, a double appearance) and... Robin Williams! I think we're starting to form a pattern here. The tale is classic Ugly Duckling, but things go off the rails when protagonist Mumble (played by Wood) crosses over to the wrong side of the tracks and meets a group of Adelie penguins that, charitably, could best be described as cholos.

So whatever, the cholo stereotype is annoying and offensive, but at least it gave some Mexican actors work, right? Nuh-uh. Ramon, the leader of the group, is played by... Robin Williams. In full-on horrible accent mode. Why did they need to have him do this part? He was already narrating the movie and playing another character? It is a mystery.

7
The Jungle Book

How can a movie with only one human character be racist? Ask The Jungle Book. In an imaginary rain forest where all of the animals speak in clipped Oxford accents, there's one exception: those lazy, shiftless, watermelon-eating monkeys. Okay, so they don't really eat watermelon, but pretty much every aspect of their portrayal is designed to portray them as Black folks.

Worse than that? The whole point of the scene is that King Louie wants to be human - i.e. white. Nice.

6
Jungle 2 Jungle

This remake of the French comedy Little Indian, Big City takes the "nature vs. nurture" argument and makes it racist as all hell. When Tim Allen visits his ex-wife, who lives with a primitive tribe in Venezuela, he discovers he has a 13 year old kid who has lived in the jungle his whole life. Of course, being around all of those uncivilized brown people has made little Mimi-Siku incapable of acting in polite White society.

This is no mere Tarzan story - after all, the King of the Jungle cleaned up nice in a tux. Instead, Mimi-Siku is portrayed as a public-pissing, goldfish-eating, undisciplined monster who will never understand which fork to eat with.

5
The Littlest Rebel

We're not venturing far back into film antiquity for too many movies on this list - it would be all too easy to populate it with pickaninny stereotypes from the '30s and just let it slide. But for the 1935 Shirley Temple vehicle The Littlest Rebel, we made an exception. As six-year-old Virgie Cary, she tackles the horror of the American Civil War with exactly as much sensitivity as you would expect a child in blackface to have.

In the movie's most ridiculous scene, she dons blackface to hide out from Union soldiers who are raiding her family's plantation. The reaction of the real Black guy is priceless.

4
Peter Pan

Back to the world of Disney for another racist musical number, this one against Native Americans. The "noble savage" conceit is adopted by Peter Pan's band of Lost Boys as a counter-cultural signifier, but let's stop in and check out what they thing about the real ones with "What Makes A Red Man Red."

According to Disney, what made the red man red is blessed ignorance. Toothless squaws, hawk-nosed warriors, smoke-um peace pipe - this one has it all.

3
The 7 Faces Of Dr. Lao

For some reason, back in the day, it was considered Just Not Possible for a person of Asian descent to play an Asian in a movie. So we got disasters like Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany's with buck teeth and horrible accents. Possibly even worse is Tony Randall as the titular Chinese doctor in The 7 Faces Of Doctor Lao.

Of course, the good doctor isn't entirely Chinese - it's some kind of demented metaphor - but it doesn't make Randall's sub-Fu Manchu act any easier to watch.

2
Thumbelina

For some reason, animators love to make gangs of horny little dudes into Latino stereotypes. Case in point: Don Bluth's 1994 Thumbelina. The tale of the titular tiny woman gets a serious blemish with the introduction of a group of horny frogs who want to ravish the one-inch protagonist. Is there any reason for these frogs to have broad Hispanic accents? I can't think of any. And casting Charo as the female one?

1
Fantasia

Yes, even one of Walt Disney's most beautiful movies has been tarred by the bristly brush of racism. In the "Pastoral Symphony" segment of Fantasia, we see a group of centaurs frolicking in the grass. But what's that? There's a big-lipped, brown-faced pickaninny centaur bringing them food and polishing their hooves.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sunflower. Later releases of the film are edited to crop out this horrible caricature, but we know he's there. We know.