How Peter Pan & Wendy attempts to correct Disney's racist history with the story
Disney knew it would need more than faith, trust, and pixie dust for the new version of Peter Pan.
"It needed a little bit of modern pixie dust sprinkled over it," Jude Law, who stars as the dastardly Captain Hook in the live-action Peter Pan & Wendy, told EW at D23 in September. (Okay, so maybe some pixie dust then.) "It was clear David [Lowery, the writer-director,] was going to honor the iconic status of this, but you imbue it with conviction and honesty. You could tell he wanted to ground it."
Seventy years after Disney's release of the animated Peter Pan, the Mouse House and Lowery used this new direction to address long-held critiques of the original. The animated classic notoriously features a song "What Makes the Red Man Red?", as well as racist caricatures of indigenous people and multiple slurs. The new film (now streaming on Disney+) offers diverse casting and more nuanced portrayals of characters.
Peter Pan, which was released in 1953, is hardly the only Disney movie with problematic depictions of race and ethnicity. (See: Song of the South, the crows in Dumbo, etc.) In 2020, Disney+ added disclaimers to many of its films, including Pan, which opens with a content warning that notes the film "portrays Native people in a stereotypical manner that reflects neither the diversity of Native peoples nor their authentic cultural traditions." With its live-action approach, now retitled Peter Pan & Wendy after the 1911 J.M. Barrie novel on which both versions are based, Disney attempts to course correct.
The movie hews close to the original story. Wendy (Ever Anderson) and her two brothers, Michael (Jacobi Jupe) and John (Joshua Pickering), are whisked off to Neverland by Peter Pan (Alexander Molony) and Tinker Bell (Yara Shahidi), where the children ponder a world in which they never have to grow up.
While the blueprint is the same, there's been some welcome updates. For starters, they've cast an indigenous actress as Tiger Lily, Alyssa Wapanatâhk. Wapanatâhk is a member of the Bigstone Cree First Nation tribe in Canada, and she brought much of her heritage to the role, from Tiger Lily's attire to the fact that she largely speaks the Cree language (and not English) throughout the film.
"The second that I read the script I fell in love with it," said Wapanatâhk at D23. "Really being able to take Tiger Lily into my own hands and to have that responsibility and that honor, that's what really got me. It was a few weeks in and David and I were talking and he was saying, 'I really want you to make this your own.' They gave me the reins on it, and they let me take that into my own hands. I felt very empowered to have that responsibility, to be able to do that. Of course, I decided to bring my Cree background into it, and I really did a lot of research and I worked with my adopted Mushum [the Cree word for grandmother/grandfather]. I worked with my grandmother, and of course, a cultural consultant, Dr. Kevin Lewis. I brought all these different things to it to make sure I took care of it because it's huge to take on a character like Tiger Lily and make her into a beautiful, bold character that is telling a story of her own."
In the animated film, Tiger Lily is a victim, captured by Captain Hook and his pirates and left to drown, until she is rescued by Peter Pan. In gratitude, she performs a dance for him and kisses him, spurring Wendy's jealousy. Here, Wendy and Tiger Lily get a Bechdel Test-approved makeover. They instead team up to fight Hook and his motley crew together, bringing far more prowess and skill to the fight than Pan himself.
Wapanatâhk is not the only person of color in the cast. South Asian actor Molony plays Peter Pan and Shahidi is Tinker Bell. The Grown-ish star literally sparkles as Tink, although the only principal role for a Black actor is one incapable of speech. It can feel troubling given the context, even if true to the character in the original story.
As her name suggests, the fairy uses a tinkling, bell-like sound to communicate, but no one can understand her. This adaptation even suggests that Peter claims to understand her, but he doesn't bother to listen to her. Only once Wendy — still depicted as a white woman — takes the time to really hear Tink does Shahidi get a single line of spoken dialogue the audience can comprehend.
Since it first premiered on the West End in 1904, Peter Pan has been read as a colonialist text, a more academic take on the fairy tale suggesting that Barrie was creating an allegory for British imperialism and (as they perceived it) the less civilized, more simplistic countries they colonized. That's a lot to put on what is at its heart a children's story, but nevertheless, over a century of analysis has pointed to the potential theme.
In Peter Pan & Wendy, it's (unintentionally) emphasized by casting choices. It's easier than ever to see Barrie's story as a meditation on British colonialism in India and the white savior complex when the boy who will never grow up is played by an actor of South Asian descent. Wendy, who after a short time in Neverland quickly supersedes Peter in his abilities and intelligence, must save the day and help the childlike Lost Boys and their leader best the piratical plotting of Hook. That's some big 19th-century energy.
There is a clear desire on the part of Lowery and co-writer Toby Halbrooks to counteract whatever might be considered insensitive in Peter Pan. Wendy is less madonna figure, more "strong female character" — and when she teams up with Tiger Lily and Tinker Bell, it's intersectional girl power for the win. But even with that going for it, some more pixie dust might have been helpful.
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