What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

The Princess & The Frog

Last night, I finally watched The Princess and the Frog - the first Disney film to feature a black princess.And it was… disappointingly problematic. On the positive side of things: Tiana was a fantastic, hard-working, believable character, and I loved that her friendship with Charlotte was sweet and genuine rather than competitive. It was great that she had an actual ambition beyond being royalty and that Naveen joined her in making it happen, and I’m far from being insensible to the power and importance of Tiana’s addition to the Disney princess lineup. It’s a fun, sweet film that makes for quick and easy viewing.

But.

For a film that’s meant to showcase Disney’s belated sense of racial equality, it doesn’t seem insignificant that both Tiana and Naveen spend vastly more time as frogs than they do as people. In a film that’s meant to be about a black princess, the black character who gets the most screen-time as a black person is actually the villainous Shadow Man, whose villainy stems entirely from his role as a voodoo practitioner (which, yeah, no), while the female character who gets the most screen-time as a princess is the blonde, pink-wearing Charlotte. Which, for me, massively undercuts the sincerity and effectiveness of Disney’s efforts: Tiana is still a black princess, but one whose status as such is counteracted by the presence of an offensively stereotypical black villain and a stereotypically blonde-and-pinkified princess - as though the presence of such stereotypes were a necessary apologia for the apparently radical character of Tiana. 

Throw in the fact that the other two main ‘black’ characters in the film - Louis the alligator and Ray the Cajun firefly - are both animals, and it seems starkly obvious that Disney is uncomfortable with making an animated film where non-villainous, human black people are onscreen for the majority of the time, and so has tried, quite literally, to dehumanise them. 

I don’t have much more to say, really. I just… sometimes I really hate everything. 

  1. actualqueencersei reblogged this from heixicanxdragon
  2. heixicanxdragon reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
    Yup.
  3. fozmeadows posted this