Like Imentioned the other day, Disney is featuring the first black princess in the animated movie adaptation of “The Frog Princess,” set to premier in 2009. According to the Wiki article about the movie, it will be set in New Orleans in the 1920s Jazz Age (does this mean no zydeco?!). All I know about the main character Maddy is that Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys are competing for the title voice role and that she will be part of the grossly saccharine Disney Princess franchise, the “fastest-growing brand for the company’s Consumer Products division.”
No doubt there will be some extra attention paid to the race and class issues in this movie, what with the timeliness of choosing New Orleans as a set and the lack of timeliness in choosing an African-American girl as a lead character. More, considering the, uh, unfortunate representations of an amalgam of “barbaric” Middle Eastern culture in Aladdin, and that they’re reprising the same story production crew that did Aladdin, I wonder how they’re going to represent a black princess considering that in most of the original fairy tale she’s a frog.
The king sets his three sons (or an old peasant woman, her sons, in Lang’s version) to marry, and tests their chosen brides. The king may set them to shoot arrows and find their brides where the arrows land, and the youngest prince’s arrow is picked up by a frog; the two older sons may already have girls picked out, but the youngest son — Ivan Tsarevich in the Russian — is at a loss until a friendly frog takes pity on him and offers to marry him. In Calvino’s version, the princes uses slings rather than bows and arrows. In the Greek, the princes set out to find their brides one by one; the older two are already married by the time the third sets out
The king then assigns his three prospective daughters-in-law various tasks, such as spinning cloth and baking bread. In every task the frog far outdoes the lazy brides-to-be of the older brothers; in some versions, she uses magic to accomplish the tasks, the other brides attempt to emulate her and can not do the magic. Still, the young prince is ashamed of his froggy bride, until she magically is transformed into a princess.
Considering the movie title, this might be a riff on “The Frog Prince” with the sexes reversed. When I did research on fairy tales in college, I saw several versions of the same story from various cultures. Sometimes the lead was male, sometimes female.
I do enjoy the princess movies for whatever reason, nostalgia perhaps, if only because I like a good story and I like a story that’s focused on girls and women even if these stories are lacking in the feminism department. That said, there are aspects of the Disney princesses in recent years that diverge from the Cinderella and Snow White model. One, we have princesses of color including Mulan to Jasmine to Pocahontas, and two, there are feminist aspects to many of Disney’s animated movies starting with The Little Mermaid. The women have agency, they seek their princes instead of being sought after, Jasmine for one scoffs at the idea of an arranged marriage, Mulan cross-dresses and wields a sword in battle. Lilo of “Lilo and Stitch” was a pretty cool character whose end goal was friendship, saving her female-headed family, and saving the world, nevermind that she wasn’t a princess. Face it, these characters may not be Veronica Mars or Agent Scully, but they’re far better icons than I had in my youth.
That doesn’t mean the characters aren’t problematic. Securing a prince or other love interest (like strangely benevolent white man John Smith) is the highest priority, and the women only “achieve” status and security when at the end of the movie they are made “beautiful” and marriagable and crowned princesses, thus when I look at the upcoming “Frog Princess” I’m of two minds. Finally Disney will tell a story whose characters are black and who come from a primarily black culture that is historically associated with brilliant black musicians and authorship. Little black girls in America get a black icon that could potentially be associated with some awesomely positive things. However, note the arc of the original story:
The king then assigns his three prospective daughters-in-law various tasks, such as spinning cloth and baking bread. In every task the frog far outdoes the lazy brides-to-be of the older brothers; in some versions, she uses magic to accomplish the tasks, the other brides attempt to emulate her and can not do the magic. Still, the young prince is ashamed of his froggy bride, until she magically is transformed into a princess.
Ashamed until she’s a princess, armed with all the femininity baggage that goes with princesshood. Charming, Prince Charming.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for progressive or feminist representation here. Considering the national conversations about New Orleans and Katrina, poverty and African-Americans in the United States, long-lived stereotypes of blackness, and especially considering that this movie takes place during Jim Crow, Disney had better tread very, very carefully. The cynical side of me believes that the addition of a black princess to the Disney Princess line, which has “generated $3 billion in global retail sales since 1999,” is an attempt to cure a bad business model that has overlooked a major demographic of sales potential.
