I don’t know if y’all have seen any promotion for Elcano & Magellan: The First Voyage around the World, but boy does that look like some historical revisionism. The first thing you find when you google it are arguments on how Filipinos are ‘unjustified’ in their outrage. A few days ago, @asianpocunite created a thread about the movie saying that “It’s 2019 and we’re still making movies that glorify colonization. The Spanish colonizers were never ‘brave seafarers.’ They were violent, racist and misogynistic monsters. This movie is produced by Dibulitoon Studios, a Spain based production house, to celebrate 500 year’s of Spain’s expedition from Spain to Indonesia. Once again, we have colonizers celebrating the murders, rapes and thefts they committed against hundreds of thousands of people. The colonizers are back at it glorifying their violent history. This movie portrays colonizers as protagonists, Filipino national heroes (Lapu-Lapu) as violent savages, and Filipino women as docile sex objects for the white man. This movie reeks of racism and imperialism. What’s particularly horrifying about this movie is that it’s an animation; it’s a movie for children. This goes to show how this sort of racism and imperialism is taught to us from an early age. The movie is being shown in the Philippines in early 2020. Colonization isn’t something of the past, it’s an ongoing progress, and part of it is psychological subjugation, which is what a racist and imperialist movie for young children is trying to achieve. From a young age Filipino children are shown movies of their people being portrayed as savages, and Spanish children are shown movies of their colonizers being portrayed as heroes. This is how the cycle of colonization continues.” They recommend going to @dibulitoon‘s account to comment and make sure your voice is heard.
oh No