So I just went to see this with a friend and I wanted to talk about it with someone. (That's basically all.) Spoiler: movie (and possibly book?) spoiler I am pissed off, however, that once again, the only black character was the villain, and the only other character of color was majorly creepy in possibly-future-villain ways.
Samuel Jackson was actually a completely new thing for the movie! He doesn't exist in the books at all (the first book has nobody specified as nonwhite, I think), and I'm pretty sure that Tim Burton's reasoning for including him particularly was that he'd never worked with Samuel Jackson and really wanted to. I'm actually willing to go a little easy on this movie for racial representation, since it's mainly set on a tiny, isolated, insular island in the UK the 40s, but I wwwwant to say the books maybe do a little better as they expand in books two and three. I read it all very quickly, but there are a number of rroma characters, and at least one I can think of who read to me as indian. And in the original book, most of the mains are constricted by which old timey photoshop pictures the author could find to match the scenario, and I'm not sure I've actually seen many of those old photomanips with non-white people period. I mean, it would definitely have been nice to see more diversity, but especially when big chunks of the story are set in older time loops in a predominantly white island nation, I can see why it didn't quite happen.
