Bet You Didn’t Know: Secrets Behind The Making Of “BeBe’s Kids”
In Defense
I’m not the only one who thinks white audiences might not have identified this movie because they didn’t understand it, an animator, Lennie Grave, said: “In my opinion, everybody in the black community knows everything about everyone else. The young know about the old, men know about women, and vice versa. Frankness is very common. But it’s a difficult world for whites to empathize with. In this film we broke a lot of barriers. We tried to create a climate of empathy instead of a climate of opinion.”
While I wouldn’t argue that all black people understand each other, I would say there’s a closeness that we share that can’t be denied; and perhaps that lack of understanding from white audiences made them virtually unable to relate to the movie.
