blue people

Some recent ads for an animated movie made me think about why animated or computer generated characters are often blue: smurfs, of course, but also the na’vi in avatar, and now kiva, gabby, scorch and lena in escape from planet earth (and i’m pretty sure there are other examples).

Could it be fear of offending cultural/pc rules? i took to using blue, rather than black, for little icons of people lined up in charts—isotype-style—after questions arose about whether i was depicting only black people in my graphics.

so here’s a smurf, zoe saldana’s character in avatar, those characters in escape. and also a couple of little kids wondering about their gender that i drew for richard saul wurman’s understanding children.