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.
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