Dan's Papers - June 12, 2009 - DISNEY STRUGGLES TO CREATE A BLACK PRINCESS

About a year ago, the suits down at Disney decided that it was about time to make an animated movie that featured a black princess. Until this decision, all the princesses in all the Disney movies were by default white: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, the Little Mermaid, Belle of Beauty and the Beast, and, of course, last but not least, Snow White. At the time, one year ago, Barack Obama had just been selected as the Democratic candidate for president. If not then, when?

The movie was given a title and a simple plot. A black chambermaid would be emboldened to kiss a frog. But the kiss would backfire. Instead of turning the frog into a prince, the chambermaid turned into a frog. After that, the two frogs spend the rest of the movie, accompanied by a friendly alligator and a goofy firefly, trying to get themselves turned into royalty, at which, after awhile, they succeed in doing. They kiss. The end.

The setting for the movie is New Orleans in the 1920s and 1930s with all the various jazz parades and voodoo hexes. The name of the black chambermaid was originally written into the script as Maddy. Soon thereafter, it was decided that Maddy was too much like Mammy. After that it was decided that her profession as a black chambermaid to a white woman was insulting. So they renamed Maddy Tiana, and they made her a waitress in a New Orleans restaurant who wishes to become a chef. The kiss with the frog changes her decision about her future profession, of course.

Tiana, according to the glossy photos that accompany the previews to The Princess and the Frog, is going to wind up in a beautiful green gown and diamond tiara. She will sport high heels and a classy upsweep hairdo and will embrace a prince who is, uh, Latino.

Getting this movie to the theatres has produced one delay after another. Where is the black prince? Is a black person as a prince not good enough? The prince in question is from the mythical land of Maldonia. There is nothing kinky about his hair. And his voice, as this is all animation, is provided by a Brazilian actor named Bruno Campos.

There is further concern about the decision to make the setting of the movie New Orleans in its heyday. No city in America has a worse history of divisions between rich and poor and black and white than New Orleans.

I suspect further delays.

Disney, of course, has a long history of animated movies that might have been appropriate for when they were made, but today appear racist. Furthermore, when it became apparent that they were no longer appropriate, it seemed to take Disney too long before they woke up to that fact.

I am, in fact, one of the last people in America, along with my wife and four kids, to have seen Song of the South. It was a film made by Disney in the 1930s that is no longer shown because it depicts black people as illiterate slaves, field workers and worse in 19th century Georgia, and though historically accurate, it was basically hooted into the dumpster in the 1970s by politically correct critics. Nevertheless, I saw it at Disneyworld around a bonfire at Fort Wilderness in 1995, long after its banning. What had they done, taken the film out of the wrong bin?

The kids loved it however - kids love everything Disney - but I sure felt funny about it. Slaves in the old South? Well, you know what? When I was growing up in the 1950s, Song of the South was right up there with Cinderella and Fantasia as one of the greatest Disney films ever made.

I have to say that The Princess and the Frog is indeed a great challenge for Disney. I wish them the best.

Remember the song in their movie Aladdin back in 1993. The lyrics went: "Where they cut off your ear/If they don't like your face/It's barbaric, but, hey, it's home."

As I recall they re-recorded that lyric in the song without the reference even after the movie came out, thanks to the efforts of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

And how come Princess Tiana spends most of this movie being a frog? Is that Disney's way of not showing her? And what does this say about frogs?