Starting with snow white

his
animation. 
Animating American History 
To understand how the 
Snow White 
tale has been interpreted in light of or unmade 
by the vision of Bob Clampett in his 
Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs
, one need only 
look toward the reception and critical discourse concerning the same. While the 
animated short is rarely discussed, likely based on its representations of race, those that 
do enter the conversation gesture to its significance: (a) as a projection of the Warner 

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Bros. company and/or director’s influence, and/or (b) as an historically American cultural 
representation of its time. More often than not, these two aspects merge together. In 
Animation and the American Imagination
, Gordon B. Arnold gestures toward both, first 
noting, “Warner Bros. animation directors mocked many types of people and situations.
However, the cartoons they made told stories with a brashness that sometimes veered into 
dubious territory” (117). Like other critics, Arnold finds it significant to draw the 
company’s/animator’s style and artistic inclination into discussion of the film. Even 
though the animators from the Warner Bros. studio attempted disassociate themselves 
from categorization as artists, Arnold’s comment shows the types of stylistic leanings or 
tendencies that drove constructions of character and ideologies presented within animated 
shorts such as 
Coal Black
. As Arnold continues, one finds the other significant 
analytical perspective, that even though “At times, some films repeated egregious racist 
stereotypes […] racist attitudes remained commonplace in American films generally, 
which continued to be made in studios dominated by white men and for U.S. audiences 
that were often not very diverse” (117). Therefore, although the representations of race 
are deeply problematic in the film, they importantly offer something of the individual 
(studio/animator’s) and popular interests and views of the time. In a more general 
assessment of animation in the United States, Arnold asserts that such productions “often 
mirrored the attitudes, prejudices, and inclinations of the culture at large,” enabling them 
to be viewed as “historical artifacts, […] provid[ing] valuable insights into specific eras” 
(238). In other words, while recognizing the problematic nature of racial representations, 

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Arnold rationalizes the cartoon’s continued critical significance and historical relevance 
based on these representations.
Other works, such as Christopher P. Lehman’s 
The Colored Cartoon: Black 
Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954
, focus more keenly on 
Clampett’s artistic interpretation of African Americans. “
Coal Black an de Sebben 
Dwarfs 
reflects the director’s fascination with black entertainment. Clampett appreciated 
African American music and frequently used it in his films” (Lehman 77). However, 
Lehman does not use this explanation to excuse the problematic racial representations 
that have been put forward, noting that “For all his unique ethnic imagery, Clampett 
could not divorce his attempt to illustrate African American swing from the stereotypes 
that shaped his business,” and further, “His love of black music did not prevent him from 
drawing characters who sport the usual exaggerated eyes and lips” (77). The problem of 
race here becomes the director’s, not necessarily one that was illustrative of a larger 
cultural perception.
From an opposing perspective, critics, such as Michael Barrier, defend these 
representations, asserting that 
Coal Black
’s characters are “no more grotesque than, say, 
the middle-aged white men Clampett lampooned in cartoons like 
Draftee Daffy 
and 
The 
Wise Quacking Duck.
The characters are black because the idea for his cartoon was born 
when Clampett saw the Duke Ellington revue 
Jump for Joy 
in 1941” (Barrier qtd. In Beck 
103). While this comment gestures toward a potential motive for the cartoon’s content, it 
ignores obvious stereotypical racial perceptions of the animator, which not only 

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represented his individual taste but also spoke to and even shaped broader pre-
conceptions of American culture, so easily represented through animation.
Examining this larger context of animation in its cultural usage of racism thus 
becomes significant. In this broader frame, Lehman argues, “animation relies on 
caricature,” and in a “medium [which] had its origins as an act in vaudeville shows, […] 
audiences came to expect cartoons to be funny” (3). The result of this usage of humor, 
Lehman finds, was often “ridicule” (3). As described here, the bent of animation toward 
racially infused humor was almost natural, in order to speak to the tastes of 
predominately white audiences. Similarly, when speaking on the usage of race in 
animation, Nicholas Sammond contends that “the demise of minstrelsy on the stage 
coincided with a period of far more intense racist caricature in American animation” (30).
Although Lehman is speaking on what the “medium” or form itself permitted, and 
Sammond is speaking to the lineage of racial (mis)representation that the animated form 
produced, both depict the ways in which “commercial animation actively participated in 
(rather than simply reflected) racial formations of the day through its circulation of 
fantastic embodiments of dominant notions about the relationship between blackness and 
whiteness in the United States” generating “visual correlates […] literizing and animating 
long-standing stereotypes” (Sammond 30). More than serving as an extension of 
directorial influence then or even an American artifact representing racial views of a