Disney's Peter Pan & Wendy Completely Rewrites Tiger Lily, Ditching The Racist Stereotypes
The numerous live-action Disney remakes released over the last decade have been pretty hit-or-miss, with most of them being forgettable at best (and "The Lion King" at worst). The Disney classics are classic in part because of their incredible animation, and trying to make that magic work in live-action can be truly challenging.
The other big challenge with adapting some of Disney's earlier films is that they're often, well, pretty racist. The 1953 film "Peter Pan," based on the plays "Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up" and "Peter Pan & Wendy" by J.M. Barrie, features an extended sequence where the Lost Boys of Neverland encounter a tribe of Indigenous people, who sing a song about "What Makes the Red Man Red." Almost every racist stereotype about Indigenous people is present, reducing them to caricatures who smoke peace pipes and threaten to burn the Lost Boys. The only one who helps the child heroes is Tiger Lily, the chief's daughter, and she's pretty one-dimensional too.
Thankfully, director David Lowery ("The Green Knight") and Toby Halbrooks, his co-writer on Disney's upcoming live-action "Peter Pan & Wendy," were able to do something a little different with Tiger Lily. Instead of quietly removing the character from the story, they expanded her role in the hopes of replacing racist stereotypes with authentic Indigenous representation. In an interview in the latest issue of Total Film magazine, Lowery explained how Tiger Lily has been completely rewritten in this latest version of the Peter Pan story.
Reconciling a messy legacy
Figuring out how to make a live-action Peter Pan story that abandoned the racist tropes of the original text and the 1953 Disney film, while still "keeping in mind the legacy" of Disney's "Peter Pan," was tricky. Ultimately, Lowery explained, they completely rewrote Tiger Lily's history to include elements from the culture of Cree actor Alyssa Wapanatâhk, who plays the character:
"The challenge for us was: how do we take this character who, going back to the original text, was problematic, and give her a role that is not only supporting, but integral to the entire movie? There was nothing from the past that we needed to hang on to when it came to Tiger Lily. The version of the character in the movie, who is so strong and vibrant, it's incredible. There should be a Tiger Lily movie!"
The early drafts hewed closely to Barrie's original works, but Lowery felt that that the book(s) had already been adapted "perfectly" in the 2003 live-action "Peter Pan" film directed by P.J. Hogan. They looked then to the animated Disney film, and found that combining both sources made something new and more interesting. Though "Peter Pan & Wendy" will have plenty of familiar landmarks ("I would often say: if it's in the ride at Disneyland, it needs to be in the movie") Lowery also aimed to preserve the "anarchic, adult spirit" of Barrie's writing.
In an interview with Native Viewpoint last month, Wapanatâhk said that Lowery encouraged her to bring her own Cree background to the role. She in turn consulted her grandmother, who grew up Cree and speaks the language fluently, and her grandfather, who is an elder and medicine man.
"My thoughts on Disney's past is that I hope they leave it where it is," said Wapanatâhk. "And I think they will ... I really felt like they were trying."
"Peter Pan & Wendy" will premiere on Disney+ on April 28, 2023.