“We Don't Die, We Multiply”: <em>Bebe's Kids</em>, Hip-Hop Aesthetics, and Black Feature Animation

Abstract

Bebe's Kids (dir. Bruce Smith, 1992) was the first animated feature film specifically by, about, and (arguably) for African Americans, bringing together two trends in early 1990s Hollywood: the resurgence of feature animation and the emergence of hiphop cinema. Despite its ambitious intentions, the film was a commercial and critical failure, and its attempts to bridge black cinema and animated media have largely gone neglected by scholars in these fields. This article offers a history and analysis of Bebe's Kids not only to chronicle the history of this intriguing media failure, but to discuss an important moment in hip-hop history where nascent white-owned media companies seized upon hip-hop—and blackness in general—in an attempt to legitimate themselves as producers of quality content. Indeed, Bebe's Kids represents a marked departure from the nihilism and violent realism of "the urban ghetto film cycle" toward a light-hearted hip-hop cinema that not only showed a different vision of urban black life, but also proved to white audiences that hip-hop was edgy, exciting—and safe. Like the Hudlins' House Party (dir. Reginald Hudlin, 1990), the animated Bebe's Kids offers a generative counterpoint to the standard perceptions of the tone and worldview of early hip-hop cinema.