Editor’s Note: Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) is a freelance writer in Chicago. The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
David Lowery’s “Peter Pan and Wendy,” a new Disney+ film out Friday, tries to sidestep the colonialism at the heart of “Peter Pan” by employing less uniformly White casting than other remakes. It’s a worthy effort, but racism, unfortunately, is harder to disarm than Captain Hook.
Peter Pan was, and remains, popular because it combines ideas about childhood and still-beloved pulp colonialist tropes into an exciting, whimsical narrative. Children are (supposedly) carefree, creative and eager for new experiences. At the same time, in England and the West, colonies were seen as dangerous, exciting venues for adventures.
Author J.M. Barrie linked these two, recognizing that the people over there were often seen as childish and irresponsible, contrasting them with the staid norms of the imperial center. Peter Pan’s message is that if you just travel to the British colonies, you can recapture lost time and lost youth.
That message was hugely appealing at the time; the initial 1904 play had a 10-year run, and Barrie turned it into a successful novel as well. Over the years, as the colonial implications have grown less and less comfortable, many creators have tried to salvage it. But in every version, including the most recent, a Neverland without racism remains elusive.
The first major screen version of “Peter Pan” aired in 1924 and was a fairly straightforward filming of the play. Wendy Darling and her two brothers are whisked off to the magical, vaguely Caribbean realm of Neverland by the impish Peter Pan and his tiny glowing fairy companion Tinkerbell. There the Darlings learn to fly and join forces with Peter’s followers, the Lost Boys, to fight pirates led by Captain Hook and Native Americans.
Those Indians are presented as unabashed stereotypes. Tiger Lily, the Indian princess, is played by Anna May Wong, a Chinese American actress. Hollywood at the time apparently thought that all non-White people were interchangeable.
Racist as the 1924 version was, the iconic 1953 animated film was somehow even worse. The illustrators were able to distort the Native Americans’ appearance even more, turning them into grotesque caricatures. They are onscreen for much longer, and there’s a profusion of slurs. The children parody the Indians, who are themselves a parodic imitation of children playing at racist imperial imaginings.
It’s a painful illustration of the way that non-White people are seen as infants and their land as a playground for White people’s fantasies and wars. Barrie delights in the adorable innocence of children, and in their capacity for imagination and play. But their innocence is illustrated in part by creating a racism-filled analogy with supposedly less-developed communities; adulthood means growing into responsible Britishness.
Peter Pan’s popularity continued with a hit 1954 musical that was turned into a hugely successful 1956 television broadcast starring Mary Martin as Peter Pan. But by 1991, when Steven Spielberg’s “Hook” was released, the Native American caricatures were widely recognized as offensive. The story — involving a grown-up accountant Peter Pan (Robin Williams) returning to Neverland to battle Hook (Dustin Hoffman) — excises native people from the narrative altogether.
“Hook” tries to add people of color in other ways — but runs into racist stereotypes when it does. Filipino-American actor Dante Basco as Rufio, an adolescent who leads the Lost Boys in Peter’s absence, is an appealing and energetic character. However, with numbing inevitability, Rufio is first made to kneel in deference to the White adult Peter and is then murdered to give Peter motivation to fight Hook with renewed fierceness. It’s a speedrun of racist moviemaking tropes.
Recent adaptations have tried to add even more non-White actors. Most notably, “Wendy” in 2020 cast a Black actor, Yashua Mack, as Peter Pan, and in this year’s version, Peter is played by Alexander Molony, a mixed-race actor. Tinkerbell is played by Black actress Yara Shahidi and Cree actress Alyssa Wapanatahk plays Tiger Lily. But the colonial framework is still in force. Both “Wendy” and “Peter Pan and Wendy” make their non-White Peters less heroic, less competent and more morally compromised.
The intention in both is to elevate Wendy as the hero, giving her more agency and adventuresomeness than the sexist prototype in Barrie’s writing. But in centering (White) Wendy, the Peters of color are pushed toward stereotype.
They’re not the heroes of their own stories but childlike colonized people whom the White protagonist has to save, physically and spiritually. The films both become tales of White women going on an adventure to educate and elevate non-White people (in the Disney+ film, Wendy ends up flying better than Peter in the third act).
The problem is that the narrative associates Peter with the colonies. He’s a Tarzan/Natty Bumppo/mighty whitey character who leaves Europe (running away from his mother to avoid growing up), learns the ways of non-White people and becomes the greatest warrior/hero/leader among them.
Casting Peter as a POC flattens out some of the most offensive connotations. But it retains the basic imperial dynamics. White people like the Darlings adventure in the colonies because the colonies are where childlike people such as Peter live and have childlike adventures. An adaptation that wanted to escape from that narrative probably needs to give a person of color the role not of Peter Pan, but of Wendy.
Wendy is the one in the story who is supposed to change and grow up; she’s the one who is less of a symbol and more of a person. She’s how the story recognizes that childhood isn’t an eternal state which exists over there, but a temporary thing. If she’s always White, that reserves development, and adulthood, for White people. White Wendy is a White person setting aside her whiteness briefly to stay young and free. A POC Wendy looking for freedom in a less White world, though, means something potentially quite different.
Of course, British history and creative works are soaked in colonialism, and Peter Pan is hardly the only one unable to overcome this past just by casting more diverse actors.
Many critics of the 2020s romance drama “Bridgerton” have noted that the 1812-set Netflix series mostly avoids engaging with the history of slavery and abolition in Britain, preferring to imagine a post-racial past in which people of color such as a Black Duke of Hastings (played by Regé-Jean Page) face no prejudice or stigma. As a result, it ends up blinding itself to its own racist dynamics. The series, for example, largely ignores the connotations of a storyline in which a white woman sexually assaults a Black man.
In the same vein, the last James Bond film finally gave us a Black female 007 — but she (like Rufio) quickly defers to the white male version, essentially cosigning his authenticity and value.
Racism and colonialism are built into the workings of these stories, and switching in different actors isn’t enough to address that. Hollywood and big budget productions have been leery of more ambitious narrative changes, however, presumably fearful that they’ll alienate fans of a given franchise or genre.
Barrie’s novel is a lot of fun in a lot of ways. But it’s also extremely racist in its presuppositions, its morals and its ideas about who is and is not childish. If you want to keep telling this story, and don’t want your retellings to be racist and colonialist, you have to put some work in and take some chances. I appreciate that recent adaptations, including Lowery’s “Peter Pan and Wendy,” are trying. But Peter Pan was created in important ways out of racism, and no one in film has yet figured out how to make him fly free of it.
