Amid evil-battling Hindu deities and the tensions between father and son, Pixar emerges with a 2016 Oscar winning short film which uses self-expression as a way to accurately represent the personal experience of being both Indian-American and a second generation immigrant.
Sanjay’s Super Team, Pixar’s first Indian-based short film, illustrates the cultural differences which can divide a household into two, with first-generation parents holding onto their native heritage, and second-generation children preferring to adopt a new one.
The portrayal of two clashing cultures, one American and the other Hindu, is not only an important step towards minority representation, but by telling an individual story of understanding between a boy and his immigrant father, it contributes to the diversity of experiences within the second generation and Indian culture.
This short, which was showcased as a prelude to the Pixar Film “The Good Dinosaur,” tells the story of Sanjay, an Indian-American child consumed with a superhero television show, and his devote Indian father who instead prefers to practice Puja, a Hindu prayer, at his shrine. Despite Sanjay’s initial reluctance to understand his father’s culture, while daydreaming about Hindu deities battling a terrifying villain, a parallel to his television show, he comes to finally understand and share his father’s joy of Hindu culture.
While groundbreaking in image representation, the short is particularly innovative for being one of Pixar’s first personal stories. In Vulture, Sanjay Patel, director and creator of the film, discusses some of his initial hesitancies to share a self-expression of his own life. Yet as Vulture notes, one of the major features of the film was not that it was necessarily about Hinduism, but rather it depicts the unique relationship of an individual and his father who struggled to understand each other’s worlds coming from entirely different circumstances.
The animation opens up to the morning routine of both Sanjay and his father. Despite sharing the same space, the two couldn’t be more divided as they each face opposite sides of the room. Sanjay, wearing superhero pajamas, watches his TV screen with delight at his superhero characters, white, blonde, and blue-eyed. The embodiment of America.All of this clashes with his father’s own traditional clothing, and antiquated shrine which houses Hindu relics. As Patel notes, “Every morning, my dad worshiped his gods, which were the Hindu gods, in his shrine, and every morning I worshiped my gods, which were superheroes.” This image illustrates the separation between immigrant parents who still have strong ties to their ethnic culture, and their children who rapidly embrace the American culture.
In the film, the father clearly wants his son to share his appreciation for Hindu culture, at one point smiling with joy and clapping approvingly when young Sanjay lights the candle on the shrine. Yet just as his father doesn’t understand Sanjay’s joy for superheroes, Sanjay visibly groans when he begrudgingly joins his father in prayer.
By attempting to escape this chore, he dives into a dream-world. Here, Sanjay is able open up and understand his father’s culture by integrating it with his own. In the face of a terrifying smoke demon, Sanjay summons the very same deities his father was praying to before. Yet they are no longer stoic statues, but rather stimulating and powerful beings who bear slight resemblance to his television superheroes.
Not only is this blend of American super-heroism with Indian characters a dazzling animation, but the assimilation of two cultures effectively presents what Sanjay experiences as a second generation child, teetering the line between American and Indian culture. As Sanjay is able to identify with his Indian heritage, he is able to open up to his father’s Hindu culture to finally understand where his father is coming from, as well as understand a part of himself.
Sanjay depicts an individual Indian-American child’s attempts to understand a world that is separate from his own. An experience many minority groups living in a majority-dominated world endure in their own lives. This unique perspective contributes to the broader range of representation among different cultural groups without using stereotypical motifs to achieve it.
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall emphasized the importance of individualized expression within the media to effectively display the diversity of minority groups. In What is this "black" in black popular culture? Hall states, “We are always in negotiation, not with a single set of oppositions that place us always in the same relation to others, but with a series of different positionalities.”
What he indicates here is that as people, regardless of our racial, gender or sexual backgrounds, we are not defined by one set of differences but rather numerous differences. Hall’s notion of individualized expression is effectively presented in Sanjay’s Super Team.
Much of the bias in media representation of minorities stems from the overt focus on the differences based on central concepts of race, gender, or sexuality. This opens the door to stereotypes, or cultural appropriation, to depict these differences. In contrast, the Pixar short is not a story that narrowly focuses on an Indian-American child and Hinduism.
Rather, the short re-tells a personal story in which the differences in cultural identity between father and son is one instance of the difficulties second generation immigrants experience. This type of expression contributes to a diverse representation of second-generation immigrant lives.
While not every second-generation, or Indian-American child has the same background or situation as Sanjay, it is an important story to tell because it emphasizes that minority groups are not all identical, but composed of distinctive unique members with diverse experiences.
Ultimately this makes the representation of both Indian and second generation immigrants authentic and meaningful. As Patel notes in Wired, “I never got to see an image of people from my community in the cartoons…What kind of miracle this is—to be able to craft something that I can give to my nieces and nephews and all these other immigrant kids.”
By attempting to escape this chore, he dives into a dream-world. Here, Sanjay is able open up and understand his father’s culture by integrating it with his own. In the face of a terrifying smoke demon, Sanjay summons the very same deities his father was praying to before. Yet they are no longer stoic statues, but rather stimulating and powerful beings who bear slight resemblance to his television superheroes.
Not only is this blend of American super-heroism with Indian characters a dazzling animation, but the assimilation of two cultures effectively presents what Sanjay experiences as a second generation child, teetering the line between American and Indian culture. As Sanjay is able to identify with his Indian heritage, he is able to open up to his father’s Hindu culture to finally understand where his father is coming from, as well as understand a part of himself.
Sanjay depicts an individual Indian-American child’s attempts to understand a world that is separate from his own. An experience many minority groups living in a majority-dominated world endure in their own lives. This unique perspective contributes to the broader range of representation among different cultural groups without using stereotypical motifs to achieve it.
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall emphasized the importance of individualized expression within the media to effectively display the diversity of minority groups. In What is this "black" in black popular culture? Hall states, “We are always in negotiation, not with a single set of oppositions that place us always in the same relation to others, but with a series of different positionalities.”
What he indicates here is that as people, regardless of our racial, gender or sexual backgrounds, we are not defined by one set of differences but rather numerous differences. Hall’s notion of individualized expression is effectively presented in Sanjay’s Super Team.
Much of the bias in media representation of minorities stems from the overt focus on the differences based on central concepts of race, gender, or sexuality. This opens the door to stereotypes, or cultural appropriation, to depict these differences. In contrast, the Pixar short is not a story that narrowly focuses on an Indian-American child and Hinduism.
Rather, the short re-tells a personal story in which the differences in cultural identity between father and son is one instance of the difficulties second generation immigrants experience. This type of expression contributes to a diverse representation of second-generation immigrant lives.
While not every second-generation, or Indian-American child has the same background or situation as Sanjay, it is an important story to tell because it emphasizes that minority groups are not all identical, but composed of distinctive unique members with diverse experiences.
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