The latest film from the Disney factory has just been released: Mufasa, the Lion King. This is a prequel to The Lion King (1994). The new movie boasts impeccable production, a well-crafted script, various nods to the previous film, and the usual Disney movie themes: courage, friendship, solidarity, love, cooperation, family, trust... Sprinkled with other omnipresent themes in any good story: betrayal, revenge, violence, evil, deceit...
The new movie is entirely made with hyper-realistic computer-generated images of impressive quality, which contrast with the classic drawings of Disney's creations from two decades ago. Once again, animals that talk and sing, as if they were people, take center stage. Whether we like Disney stories or not, it must be acknowledged that it is entertaining.
However, there was something that concerned me when watching it and inspired this article: in the movie (attention, a spoiler is coming), a pride of white lions led by a great white lion named Kiros appears. They are “white as ghosts,” outsiders, abandoned at birth by their parents for being different, rare, lacking pigmentation, and with blue eyes. The worst part is that they are the villains of the movie, extremely evil, full of hatred, ruthless. They lack mercy and intend to eliminate the rest of the lions, killing them all.
A story of very good good guys and very bad bad guys from a book that, although works cinematically very well, has another less favorable interpretation: the association of albinism with evil. It reminded me of the stigma and discrimination that many times people with albinism, who also lack pigmentation, have to endure over the years, being subjected to mockery and insults, being singled out as different, as oddities, and being called “grandpas” or “ghosts” because of the white color of their skin.
And it's that, even though it may seem unbelievable, it has been established in the collective imagination that the white color of the skin (in people) or the fur (in animals) is a symbol of evil. There are multiple movies or books that label characters with albinism as killers or evil criminals. Take, for example, the albino monk and assassin Silas in The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, the movie Village of the Damned where children with albinism cause terror in a town, or the albino killer whale Moby Dick.
Prejudices
Albino amulets
White lions are the result of a natural mutation of the South African lion
Discrimination and stigma against people with albinism is unfortunately common in Africa, where even families abandon or disdain their children born with albinism. There, an inexplicable and irrational magical tradition of witchcraft, relatively recent, associates the possession of body parts of a person with albinism with fortune, health, or good luck in life. This has led to many people with albinism being kidnapped, mutilated, and murdered to be sold off in pieces.
These unjustifiable and despicable attacks cause people with albinism in Africa to tend to live in groups, protecting themselves, and therefore forming couples and having children among themselves, which increases the percentage of albinism in the population.
White lions do exist. They carry a characteristic mutation in the tyrosinase (TYR) gene. Mutations in this gene in humans are responsible for OCA1 (oculocutaneous albinism type 1). This gene can contain many different mutations, which can lead to a range of outcomes, from minor pigment alterations (as seen in white lions) to severe vision deficits.
White lions are not considered albinos, although they may exhibit very mild albinism, with significant depigmentation of the body but without obvious vision problems. But what they certainly are not is evil, murderous, malignant, or ruthless, as portrayed in the Disney movie. They are lions like any other, just with whitish skin and fur.
Surely the screenwriters of this movie were not aware of the negative impact of once again portraying white animals as evil instead of choosing any other pack. Associating the color white with evil may work for a movie script, but we have to be aware that by doing so, we perpetuate the stigma, discrimination, and attacks suffered by people with albinism, especially children. It would be much better not to link any skin color or fur with being a villain.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Lluís Montoliu is a research scientist at CSIC, National Center of Biotechnology (CNB - CSIC).