Michelle: As someone who spends most of her time with books, being able to visualize concrete connections—between my own embodied identity as an Asian American woman and the historical underpinnings of these sci-fi archetypes—was incredibly powerful. The process of watching the found clips over and over made me viscerally sick about how normalized the dehumanization of Asian bodies is—whether the disposable women clones of Cloud Atlas or the quotidian workplace dismissal of Harold in Harold and Kumar.
But rather than “fighting the stereotypes,” CA and I really sought to create a film that nuances and embraces—rather than fears—otherness, and Keith, Brittney, and Crystal quite literally animated that hope for a better future.

CA: The way this production came about was really quite remarkable. After attending a talk Michelle gave back in 2018 on dystopian Japanese American internment narratives, I knew that turning her research into a film would be an impactful way to display how American race making affects minoritized peoples in different ways for the sake of U.S. empire building. The following weeks became a flurry of reading her articles and highlighting the material that eventually became Inhuman Figures' script.
To fill any visual gaps between the clips featured in our film, I immediately knew Keith, a friend I had known years before making Inhuman Figures, would be perfect for cultivating the tone and style of the film's art. But there was a catch—Keith had never done full animation before. Luckily, however, when I saw Brittney and Crystal's work on a freelancer site, I knew their hand-hewn animation style was the perfect match. The Galloways took Keith's character concepts and drew them precisely as Keith did without any notes. None. It was a virtual mind-meld with Keith as Brittney and Crystal drew his concepts to life infallibly—an inarticulably rare and special process.
But what made this production truly special for me was that the team reflected the very multiracial coalition building that Michelle's research and teaching exudes. It was her comparative practices that manifested this film into existence. If it wasn't for seeing myself—a mixed Black, Filipino, white American—reflected within her research and writing, I'm not so sure this film would have become what it is today: a vehicle for understanding each other's histories so that we can see ourselves in the racialized other.

Brittney and Crystal Galloway: There were 2 historical moments that resonated with us. First was the naming of the Iron Fish Butcher. As black women, bringing up racial issues is often met with sentiments along the lines of “why do you make everything about race?”. But then we learn about something like this where a machine was named the “Iron Chink” because it was made to replace Chinese workers. Historically in America, everything was already about race, and we need to talk about that more.
The other moment was learning about Afong Moy, the Chinese woman put on display for the public. We have heard of Sarah Baartman and knew people with physical “abnormalities” were put on display, but we had never heard of Afong Moy. It really got us thinking about how invisible Asian American issues are, and more projects like this are needed.

Keith: I remember an early meeting where CA was explaining how the CRISPR virus worked and that we needed to create an animation of the virus to visually demonstrate the section of narration Michelle had recently written—a summary of Larissa Lai's Saltfish Girl. At this point I thought, "I am in over my head! How am I supposed to picture what a microscopic virus is doing?! I'm an artist, not a doctor!" But now I can't imagine the movie without that silent, animated narrative, in which Brittney and Crystal beautifully depict these big, abstract concepts Michelle is talking about. I think it's significant that we chose to visualize the ideas in Michelle's research using animation, an art form with such a sordid history of exploiting Asian artists' labor. To me, Inhuman Figures doesn't just challenge the hierarchies of racial capitalism with its message, it also shows that it's possible to make animated stories without exploiting artists.