Rib It!

The announcement of the release of Princess and the Frog was met with much excitement in my home. My daughter was excited for the first Disney Princess feature since 1998’s Mulan. (Though, I argue Mulan was not a princess. Therefore the last true princess film was Pocahantas, in 1995.) She was born in 1999, so we loved the idea that for the first time we would get o see a Disney Princess film together on the big screen. To top it all off, this princess would be black, and to my little girl, who has lately been finding much pride in her African American ancestry… this was gonna be good!

Before going to see it, I did some research to mentally prepare for any upsets. I wanted to make sure here wasn’t anything that would really tick me off or that I would have to rectify for my daughter. Stereotypes are one thing; they are almost endearing in a cartoon character. (Do be prepared, this movie is chock full of them. My favorite is the Cajun firefly Raymone.)

What I found was the African American community all up in arms, not so much about the stereotypes, but everything else, from the original name of the heroine (Maddy, which was changed to Tiana) to the prince’s ambiguous ethnicity, was ticking them off. The Disney animators were making concessions left and right in order to get it right.

Rumor has it that the animators even had a black model come in and act out the scenes to capture the true movements of a black woman. They didn’t want the black women to go “Oh, she’s not really a black princess. They just painted her brown; she looks like every other princess.”
It could and probably would happen; it’s just how black folks are.

With all that huffing and puffing, it amazed me that no one mentioned the most obvious problem with this film. Much of the focus is that the prince isn’t black, because he has an Indian name and a Brazilian accent. But, I found something worse.
Set in New Orleans during the 1920s Jazz Era, Tiana is not a princess, but a workaholic waitress set on realizing her dead father’s dream of owning a restaurant. She saves every penny she can and works two jobs while her best friend, the daughter of the wealthy mayor, frolics around being cute.

The buzz around town is the arrival of Prince Naveen of the fictional Maldonia. He has been cut off by his royal parents for his lazy and womanizing ways. He has to settle down and become productive before his family will endow him with his inheritance. Guided by his affinity to jazz music, he ends up in New Orleans just in time for Mardi gras. Soon after his arrival he meets up with Shadow Man, a voodoo practioner, and gets himself turned into a frog.

Also, just in time for the celebrations, Tiana earns enough money to buy the building for her restaurant. This means she gets to go to the masquerade ball at her best friend’s mansion, where Prince Naveen will also attend. At the celebration, the poor girl is all dressed up when the realtors tell her she has been out bid for the property.

This is when she meets the little green version of Prince Naveen and he coaxes her into kissing him which turns her into a frog. This is where their adventure begins. They end up in the bayou, pick up a couple of sidekicks and try to find the old voodoo witch doctor Mama Odie so she can turn then back into humans.

All frivolous and trivial descriptions of ethnicity aside, my concern lies with the type of prince the black girl got. The other princesses have princes who go through hell and high water for them. They battle dragons, slay ogres and outsmart witches just to get their woman. This Prince Naveen does nothing. Tiana gets them out of trouble, Tiana makes them food and Tiana rows them through the bayou to Mama Odie.

All Prince Naveen does is decide, ‘Hey this chick is kinda hot. She’s smart and she does everything. I think I like her.’ Somehow, she falls for it!?!?

Forget that she doesn’t get a “black prince,” this cartoon upholds old Restoration Period themes where the black women are depicted as hardworking as well as beautiful, while their male counterparts are incompetent. This image was a tool used to exploit black women during that time and is still prevalent in the black community. Too many strong black women have stuck it out with no-good black men, and for what? A handsome face?

What’s more, Tiana works her butt off to earn the money for her restaurant and somehow she still needs some prince’s lazy behind in order to get it. I worry about the self esteem of little black girls around the nation who now have implanted in the back of their minds that their prince shouldn’t fight for them because she’s just a little black girl.