The Princess and the Frog and the Critical Gaze [Essay]
by Guest Contributor Shannon Prince
Two years ago while I was studying abroad in Paris, my younger sister called me from the U.S. giggling that she had delicious news to share with me. She announced breathlessly that Disney was creating its first black princess movie. Despite the fact that I was a sophomore in college and my sister was a senior in upper school, we all but swooned.
Oh, I had my reservations – as someone who is African American, Native American, Asian American, and English American, it seemed that Disney had misrepresented the better part of my various heritages. I’m not even talking about the crow named “Jim Crow” in Dumbo or Peter Pan explaining that sexual attraction “makes the red man red” – I’m talking about superficially pro-multicultural films such as Pocahontas whose moral seemed to be that the indigenous warriors who fight in defense of sovereignty are just as wrong as imperialists fighting wars of conquest and Mulan which taught the valuable lesson that Chinese people are cool, if misogynistic, but the Huns are a mass of gray-skinned, barely human, rampaging savages. (The Huns were even seemingly identical in many frames, lending credence to the stereotype that the individual members of some Asian ethnic groups cannot be told apart.)
Given Disney’s history, it’s no surprise that criticism of The Princess and the Frog began early. Some elements of this criticism I found more valid than others. At first I saw no problem with protagonist Tiana’s original name “Maddy,” although some people said it sounded too similar to “mammy.” However, once I learned that “Maddy” was a maid, the phonetic similarity between her name and the slave title did seem as though it could be unwieldy. A voice actor’s tongue wouldn’t have to slip very much to say “mammy” while ordering Maddy to do a chore, and in such a context, the name “Maddy” seemed both deliberately inappropriately evocative and easy for the audience to mishear. On any account “Maddy” struck me as decidedly less whimsical and resonant than “Ariel,” which is of Shakespearian provenance, and “Jasmine” which is a treasured flower in the Middle East, but I’m not quite willing to label as Disney racism what might just be my own cynicism. (Disney did not have to name its other six princesses as they had names already from their original fairy tales i.e. Cinderella or from history i.e. “Pocahontas” was the real nickname of Matoaka.)
Just as Disney changed the name of its protagonist to “Tiana” (which, to me, sounds much more appropriate for a fairy tale princess) it has also changed her from being a maid to being a prospective restaurateur. I had been on the fence about our heroine’s role as a southern belle’s maid. Yes, it’s cannon for fairy tale protagonists to begin their stories having low status, but a black heroine who is a domestic could be legitimately read not as a fairy tale trope but a reinforcement of real world racial denigration. Some may claim that it would be historically accurate for a 1920’s black woman to be a maid, but Disney doesn’t even care about historical accuracy when animating actual history (for example, Pocahontas.) Disney films often include generic European landscapes and eras and anachronistic details and social conventions. Let’s consider Beauty and the Beast. Did French peasants like Belle’s dad really have the time and resources to invent complicated gadgets? Should Belle have had access to so many books or even have been literate? If Disney allowed history to delimit their characterizations, at her age Belle should have been out of her father’s home and in her own thatched roof house with a husband and a couple kids– and had far less teeth. Deciding to suddenly be historically accurate while telling a fairy tale about a black princess seems a little suspect. Not to mention after decades of singing candlesticks and flying carpets, it’s a little late in the game to start claiming a commitment to realism.
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