How Home made a familys first trip to the movies special

July 07, 2024

I didn’t realize that my 4-year-old, Story, had noticed her skin color until last month. We’d just chosen an untouched page in her Doc McStuffins coloring book and she was guarded and watchful as she held out her 24-pack of crayons like a smoker offering me a cigarette from a dwindling stash. I chose brown and got to work filling in Doc’s face.

“Why are you making her brown?” she asked. I froze. Would these next moments mark her first introduction to the concept of race? Wasn’t age 4 too early for that? Would I have to come up with simple, off-the-cuff explanations of complex circumstances? “Because that’s the color of her skin,” I said after a quick pause. “Just like Story’s!” my daughter replied, her face brightening with recognition. My heart leapt. “That’s right! Just like Story’s!” I cried. Fortunately, she didn’t ask anything else. We finished coloring the McStuffins family brown, and the moment passed. But I’ve remained curious in the weeks since: How long has she been aware that she’s brown — and how long can I keep her so excited about it?

Thank goodness for Gratuity “Tip” Tucci, the emerald-eyed, brûlée-skinned beauty voiced by Rihanna at the center of DreamWorks’ latest feature, “Home.” The fortuitous timing of the film’s release meant that Story’s first trip to the movies featured a curly-haired Barbadian seventh-grader who boasts an A average in geometry, some killer car-driving skills and endearing candor about how long it took her to fit in at a new school as an immigrant.

“Seventh-grade girls are MEAN!” she vents to Oh, an alien whose species, the Boov, have seized Earth and relocated its humans to a sprawling suburban development called Humantown. This has resulted in Tip’s separation from her mom, just as they’ve finally adjusted to life in New York after emigrating from Barbados. Tip and Oh become reluctant allies, as she enlists his help in finding her mother and he tries to evade his fellow Boov, among whom he has made himself an unwitting enemy.

“Home” is a lovely film about overcoming fear, discovering the meaning of true friendship and finding your place in the world. Most kids (and parents) could find at least one moment of resonance in it — and if the box-office numbers are any indication, they have. But for parents of color, there’s another layer of relatability here, and it has a lot to do with Tip’s physical appearance.

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It’s difficult to describe how I felt watching my daughter absorb not just Tip’s brownness, hair texture and accent but also her fearlessness, vulnerability and ingenuity. I’d imagine it’s how parents of older black children have felt each time a new press photograph of the Obama family surfaces and there are two school-age black girls in the White House for the first time in a presidential history that dates back more than 200 years. It’s how parents in 2009 must have felt when Disney released “The Princess and the Frog,” making the film’s heroine, Tiana, the first black Disney princess in the history of the studio. For context, the first Disney princess was Snow White, and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was released in 1938.

“The Princess and the Frog” predates my daughter by one year, and when President Obama leaves office, she will still be far too young to understand the import of the time he spent in the White House or to appreciate his family’s visibility there. “Home” is the second animated film in a six-year period to feature a black girl in the lead role, and it’s the first 3-D animated film to do so. Its existence affords Story yet another opportunity to witness history being made, though I often wish animated characters who look like her weren’t still rare enough to be considered groundbreaking.

“Home,” based on Adam Rex’s novel “The True Meaning of Smekday,” is deliberate in its dealing with both culture and race. In an interview with the Huffington Post, director Tim Johnson explained:

I wanted to get the story bigger and larger than simply taking place in the United States, as it does in the book. And while we retain very much the character of Tip in the book, Tip is of African-American heritage in the book. But I love the Caribbean, I love all the melting pot of cultures there [and] we thought since Tip was the last human on Earth, how great if she sort of represented all of us. And there’s very few places that you can point to that have that influx from four different continents — South America, Africa, Europe and North America — the Caribbean is just an incredible cultural area.

How refreshing and unusual to hear a director describe a brown-skinned, immigrant girl as representing “all of us.” But it’s an apt description, a valid idea, considering the homogeneity of the girl heroines in animated films before her. This is another way in which “Home” is an anomaly among top-grossing animated features. Films like the “Rio,” “Madagascar,” “Lion King” and “Ice Age” franchises, while set on other continents, rarely explore the lives of any featured human characters. Those films are, of course, all about animals — and while those animals may be voiced by a diverse cast of actors, they don’t represent the experiences of the children watching them in terms that are as literal and parallel as those presented in “Home.” They also don’t address the concerns of parents like me who find themselves scouring media and books for characters of color whom their children can relate to and root for.

A few days before taking Story to see “Home,” I talked to a black mom friend of mine whose daughter and son are around Story’s age. “There’s a line in the film,” she told as she eagerly recommended it, “where Tip’s mom describes her as having ‘big green eyes and beautiful brown skin.’ ” We tried to think of another time when a mainstream animated film had been so explicit and loving about describing a heroine of color. We drew a blank. Indeed, as I sat next to Story, watching Tip flit around fighting for herself and her family, it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d sat in a movie theater and watched an animated black girl helm an entire film. Hopefully, when our children are older, it won’t be so difficult for them to tick off a list of films that affirm characters whose skin is brown, just like theirs.

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