Caution: If you haven’t seen Princess & the Frog yet, you might not want to read further, because I am spilling the beans and revealing it all –about the plot that is!
Trailer: Disney's Princess & the Frog
Anyway, where was I? Yes! However… What the trailer doesn’t give away is that the lovely and pretty Tiana is not a princess at all! She is a waitress/ cleaner in a cafeteria run by a Black guy who won’t give her a break. A double-slap in the face, this cartoon kicks straight off with the tired stereotypes. Black person in low-paid job and Black person not helping another brother or sister. To make matters worse, some guests were still arriving stereotypically late. Thus I could not really watch much of the intro and the slaps-in-the-face.
Thankfully, Tiana was not stigmatically ‘loud and angry’. She proved to be a strong-minded, independent lady with ambitions to open her own glamorous restaurant. She works her socks off to pay off the building’s deposit, but a higher bidder could possibly spoil the party if she doesn’t pay the full sum by the next day. Unfortunately, there is another stereotype luring around the corner. The only way the lucky star in the sky can grant her all the money, is if she gets herself a rich man. Why can she not just have a good entrepreneurial head on her shoulders and come to an agreement with the sellers?
What is also weird is that most of the other characters in the animation are not Black. The only ones are her mother, late father, the voodoo lady and… the animals. All others are White or Hispanic-White. It would have been far more interesting and educational to our children if there were more serious Black characters. And the prince could have been a lovely Black man too. If they can draw a pretty Black female, why not vice versa? But I guess that would just be too much and Disney would lose more of its White audience –if not all. The film industry policies for distributors would never allow it. Examples are comedy spoof-film Scream where the Wayans brother were the only two Black lead persons allowed to appear on the cover and posters. Not to mention Couples’ Retreat where the only Black couple was completely removed and deleted on British posters, unlike the American posters on which they DO appear.
The rest of the film is merely a continuous chasing, escaping and running like many other Disney animations. There are a few wonderful songs as well like "Almost There", but some others are so cheesy that I could have ran out of the cinema.
To my surprise Tiana’s ghetto-esque best friend does not mind at all that Tiana hooked up with her former prince charming. In real life she would have probably squashed both frogs like meaningless bugs.
The film ends when Tiana becomes a real princess after marrying and kissing the prince. Hereafter they both transform back to their human bodies.
After the film there was also an interesting Q&A in which both children and adults participated. Like me, the adults had their ‘moan of the week’ on the and picked the animation apart. Nevertheless, the children apparently did not notice the stereotypes. They commented on their favourite characters in Princess & the Frog and about the loving and kissing! Children watch movies with innocent eyes, but when does this innocence disappear for them to detect what the real world is indirectly telling them?
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