Sanjay’s Super Team: Pixar’s upcoming Short Film tackles South Asian identity

Who hasn’t ever experienced an identity crisis?

Whether intentional or not, the need to belong fuels our daily decisions – from the clothes we wear and the way we wear them to the way we speak and the words we use (for this generation, that would include YOLO or speaking in hashtags).

For people hailing from South Asia – a region with incredible diversity, idiosyncrasies, languages and history – one’s idea of identity is immensely multi-faceted. So, what is the identity of a person whose heritage is South Asian, but calls another country home?

For decades, myths and misconceptions perpetuated by mainstream media, film, television and literature have reinforced narrow stereotypes about South Asians in the United States, including the Indian-American community.

Take accents, for example.

While English and Australian accents are usually heralded as cool, sophisticated and sexy, thick South Asian ones are often associated with being “foreign,” less credible, and even humorous. To avoid ridicule, Rega Jha, editor of Buzzfeed India, says many people find it easier to learn to adapt to fit in rather than attempt to “reverse centuries of internalized racial paradigms.”

“It’s difficult to tolerate being assumed as less educated, less intelligent, less valuable, all on the basis of longer vowels and harder T’s. It is straight-up exhausting, in fact, to have your thoughts and feelings and opinions ignored, filtered into the backseat by the way the words sound, before they had a chance to mean anything,” she added.

In TV shows and films, some roles shine in the spotlight while others are alienated as “exotic” sidekicks designed to serve as light, diverse, stereotype-ridden characters for a few laughs or plot twists.

Still, a league of Indian-American actors have managed to push through, go mainstream and work prime-time slots including Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project), Hannah Simone (New Girl), Dev Patel (Newsroom), Archie Panjabi (The Good Wife), Aziz Ansari (Master of None) and Priyanka Chopra (Quantico.)

In the process, they are doing more than just representing a community. They are replacing stereotypes with relatable examples that serve as more than a punch line.

Indian-American animator Sanjay Patel hopes to channel that momentum through animation as well.

Patel, who has worked at Pixar since 1996, has directed their upcoming short film Sanjay’s Super Team featuring an Indian-American family. Not only is it the first Pixar short film to be directed by an Indian-American; it is also the first to feature an Indian-American family as its main cast.

The film, to be released along with Pixar’s upcoming The Good Dinosaur on November 25, was inspired by his own childhood experiences.

The story focuses on a boy torn between Western pop culture and his family’s religious traditions.

SST kicks off with a young boy sprawled in front of the TV watching morning cartoons while his father starts his morning prayers. Both characters are engrossed in their respective shrines, until the father’s religious act of ringing the bell interrupts the boy’s cartoon show. The young boy, in defiance, turns up the volume to drown out the sound resulting in a tug of war that forces him to reluctantly join his father’s morning rituals.

The young boy’s mind soon wanders and daydreams of a world where his faith combines with cartoons in an ‘Avengers-like’ fantasy of Hindu God fighting crime as superheroes. As his imagination progresses, he grows to understand and appreciate his father’s world through his own child-like perspective.

The seven-minute short film tackles the issues of dual culturalism and identity for third culture kids.

Raised by Gujurati parents in San Bernardino who immigrated to the US in 1980, Patel was also a third-culture kid straddling his own Indian and American identity. Like many kids in America in the 1980s, he grew up watching Looney Tunes and playing with Transformers. But unlike his friends, his mornings also consisted of daily Hindu rituals of prayer and meditation (called pujas) with his father.

“If I could, I would go back to the Eighties and give my younger self this short,” he said. “I want to normalize and bring a young brown’s story to the pop culture zeitgeist. To have a broad audience like Pixar’s see this … it is a big deal. I’m so excited about that.”

“I missed seeing someone that looked like my parents … that looked like me, growing up in the cartoons that I watched as a kid, in the shows that I watched. And I felt that as I discovered more about my roots, there was such cool stuff here that I want to tell my friends about,” voiced Patel.

It is inevitable for children to grow up identifying with broadcast personalities. There is also a need for balanced and accurate portrayals of varying ethnicity that can be identified with, embraced and celebrated.

Patel’s new film is a brilliant and long overdue example of that.