Revisiting Disney: The Princess and the Frog Didn't Need to be Historically Accurate, but it Could've Done a Little Better

Sunday, April 12, 2015

The Princess and the Frog Didn't Need to be Historically Accurate, but it Could've Done a Little Better

http://www.buzzfeed.com/kmallikarjuna/7-disney-characters-dressed-in-stunning-period-costumes?sub=2416459_1355727#.jamDdpQlm

So recently we watched the Princess and the Frog and read some scholarly articles that discussed the historical accuracy of the movie which is, to put it lightly, somewhat lacking. One of the scholarly articles we read was a piece called "After 75 Years of Magic: Disney Answers Its Critics, Rewrites African American History, and Cashes In on Its Racist Past" by Richard Breaux, and while I don't agree with him that we should have made Princess and the Frog entirely historically accurate, I definitely think that the story could be more explicit when it hints at the racial struggle of the time. While the 1920's South was definitely not a welcoming environment for Blacks, I don't think that a Disney movie is the proper place to make entirely accurate representations, for example there need not be a lynching or anything in Princess and the Frog. However, I don't think it would've been entirely out of the story to have the bus driver tell Tiana and her mother to go to the back of the bus, or to have Tiana's mother be a seamstress or a laundress rather than a dress-maker, and even to have the men selling Tiana the warehouse that eventually becomes her restaurant, to initially deny her the space and explicitly say that it is because of race. While those are hurtful, subjugating images, they're true to history, and in my opinion if Tiana overcame those struggles, opened her restaurant, married her prince, and still and the same happily ever after, the ultimate message of the movie would be preserved if not made more significant. Had they made the movie slightly more historically accurate and had Tiana faced that kind of racial discrimination at the beginning of the film, her achieving her ultimate goal of owning her own restaurant would have been all that much more empowering, I think. Also, I think that, much like how Frozen was dubbed the feminist Disney movie to end all feminist Disney movies, the Princess and the Frog could have been that movie for Disney concerning race. Not only would more families have brought their children to see the movie because of the shock value of more explicit historical accuracy, I think it would be well received as a story of triumph against all odd.

There could, however, be negative response because one of the only princess in the Disney canon who had to overcome this kind of racial adversity would be Tiana. However, my counter to that would be Pocahontas who was literally called a savage and had her people murdered by English settlers -- if Disney can step on all those Native American toes and get next-to-no backlash, they should be just as comfortable semi-accurately representing Black history in America. Pocahontas' story is essentially the kind of historical accuracy I'd be hoping for with the Princess and the Frog, broad strokes, not specificity. Pocahontas certainly didn't delve into the smallpox riddled blankets that were absolutely present at that time. Or that the English settlers initially tried to enslave the Native Americans before bring over Africans to be slaves. Or that the English absolutely massacred the Native American population to take their land and natural resources. I'm not asking Disney to 100% take down the rose-tinted glasses of fairytales through which they tell these stories, but they could be at least a little more accurate and still be profitable.

PS: The link above shows princesses in their historically accurate garb. Even that I think is a little romanticized because if Tiana comes from the "ghetto" of New Orleans, she sure as anything would not be wearing such a swanky flapper dress. That's my last piece, here I will rest my case.

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Disney's as a Boys' Toy Too

I rarely remember that little boys, as well as little girls, watch Disney movies and look up to some of the characters. In many of the earlier films, the men/princes aren't really a significant piece of the story, but more recently males are playing a greater and greater role in Disney and Pixar movies. Males like Chang, Sebastian, and Wasabi serve as role models for young boys just as the princesses do for little girls. Because of this, it's just as important that little boys of all appearances and personality types appear in animated films. The Feminist community has been more outspoken about female representation than the male community, perhaps because women tended to be placed in a subservient position to the men of the stories in earlier Disney movies. However, if you try to closely examine the character of the men or male characters in the early Disney movies, they tend to just be place holders that allow the princess to achieve their happily ever after. In later films they are hyper masculine and tough, even sometimes emotionless, if they want to be attractive to the females in the story. The non-human characters like Sebastion, Timone, and the like can be more sensitive because they aren't the male protagonist trying to win the girl and save the world. If we're going to work to build up strong, independent girls, we should work equally hard to help develop sensitive, thoughtful boys. This begins with providing more complex characters for them to look up to and more representation in the male characters in Disney films.

Identity and Disney

Disney Characters' Race Breakdown

Although Disney is often criticized for its lack of diversity in the characters in its animated and live action films, the statistics are fairly close to those of the US census. Although in Disney, about 75% of the characters are White, and so minorities are somewhat underrepresented, the statistics are fairly close to the true proportions. In America, about 62% of the population identifies as White, while 17% of the population is Hispanic, 13.2% is Black, 5% is Asian, and 3.8% of the population identify as multiracial, Native American, or Native Hawaiian. While more diversity would be nice, especially regarding Latinos considering they are 17% of the US population and only one single Disney character is identified as Latino, the statistic is less drastic that I would have anticipated.