It seems as though we can never get away from the stereotypes that have dogged blacks in America for eons. Well, Walt Disney has joined the fray with its latest animation film. I actually never heard of this latest project, but on first glance, I was heartened that the company was casting its first black princess, a heroine who could be a positive role model for little girls and a very ambitious marketing plan. But alas, that was shortlived. The film studio now finds itself fending off a chorus of accusations of racial stereotyping in the forthcoming, “The Princess and the Frog: An American Fairy Tale.”
The film is a musical set in 1920s New Orleans, and was supposed to feature Maddy, a black chambermaid working for a spoilt, white Southern debutante. Maddy was to be helped by a voodoo priestess fairy godmother to win the heart of a white prince, after he rescued her from the clutches of a voodoo magician. Sounds stereotypical to me, don’t you think so? Isn’t this a throwback to slavery?
According to the Independent, Disney’s original storyboard is believed to have been torn up after criticism that the lead character was a clichéd subservient role with echoes of slavery, and whose name sounded too much like “Mammy,” which is an unwelcome reminder of America’s Deep South before the civil rights movement swept away segregation.
The heroine has been recast as Tiana, a 19-year-old in a country that has never had a monarchy. She is now slated to live “happily ever after” with a handsome fellow who is not black – with leaks suggesting that he will be of Middle Eastern heritage and called Naveen. The race of the villain in the cartoon is reported to have also been revised. The film studio began making changes a year ago, first to its title, The Frog Princess, which some had interpreted as a slur. Amendments to the plot followed.
To put it bluntly, we have dreams and stories like everyone else and it we would like to be portrayed positively, though, I must add that there are elements in our community whose actions are contrary to the majority of blacks in the United States. Why do we always have to be portrayed as subservient to someone else?
Disney now says that the rewritten tale “takes place in the charming elegance and grandeur of New Orleans’ fabled French Quarter during the Jazz Age… Princess Tiana will be a heroine in the great tradition of Disney’s rich animated fairy tale legacy, and all other characters and aspects of the story will be treated with the greatest respect and sensitivity.”
Disney’s efforts to be multicultural have not always gone according to plan. In 1993, there were protests from Muslims who said the animated film Aladdin depicted the Middle East as barbaric. One lyric included with the line: “I come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face; it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.”
Filed under: Black Princess, Princess Maddy, Princess Tiana, Walt Disney
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