Drag Harlan (1920)

This powerful story shines with poetic animation, an exploration of deeper truths, and the protagonist's complex search for identity.

Cartoon Saloon is an animation studio that should be appreciated more. They tell unique stories with unique animation, proving that 2D animation is still alive and well.

White audiences saw Peola’s mixed-race passing as a Black woman’s struggle to be white. Black audiences saw it as the rebellion of a Black woman trying to gain privileges only given to white people.

Perhaps the most amazing and groundbreaking quality about The Birdcage is how removed it is from both illness and insensitivity. Whereas films preceding it were often somber stories about the tribulations of being gay in a conservatively straight world, Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May expose the fallacies of conservatism as traditional values are thrown into a more open-minded space. They don’t care how far the community has fallen so much as how high they can rebuild themselves.

Moonlight is a film that will certainly be remembered for how it won Best Picture, but the movie itself should be known for its excellent representation of one of the most underrepresented groups in film: Black, gay men.