Billy Dee Williams played one of Batman’s many enemies, Harvey Dent (aka Two-Face), in the 1989 film “Batman” and Michael Clarke Duncan played the murderous ape Colonel Attar in the 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes.” Including Oogie Boogie, when Black men play characters in Burton’s films, they are almost always relegated to the role of an antagonist. Ken Page, who voiced the devious Oogie Boogie in the 1993 film “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and Deep Roy, who voiced General Bonesapart in 2005’s “Corpse Bride” are a couple of the slim number of exceptions.
Even in these films with no actors seen on screen, the catalog of voice actors is mostly white. Seven of his 26 features are at least partially, if not fully, filmed with CGI (computer-generated imagery) or stop-motion animation. “But if your film then has no critique of that whiteness - just celebrates this fantasy of an all-white world - then that's white (supremacy).” “If you make a film which doesn't ‘call for’ anyone other than white people to be on screen, then that is a film explicitly about whiteness,” Twitter user Imran Siddiquee wrote.
The internet immediately latched onto this snippet and responded in a series of scathing calls that pointed out the racist implications of what he had said. “Things either call for things, or they don’t.”
“Nowadays, people are talking about (diversity in film) more,” Burton said.