Friday, December 4, 2020

Cinderella Married a Pharaoh - December 4, 2009

 

Next Friday, Walt Disney Animation Studios will release its first animated princess movie since Mulan debuted at the box office in 1998. The Princess and the Frog is the first Disney movie to feature a Black princess, and follows in the vein of the company's recent tradition: attempting to make amends for more than 50 years of blatant homogeneity.

It's no secret that the studio's films, despite their nostalgic charm and fairy tale appeal, have been glaringly Euro-centric until the 1990s. Since the release of Snow White in 1937, Disney princesses have looked remarkably similar, only changing hair and dress color from one movie to the next. It wasn't until 1992, with the introduction of Jasmine in Aladdin and Pocahontas soon after, that the trend started to shift.

Sure, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen created fantastic fairy tales (and provided Walt Disney with an enormous collection of free stories), but they weren't the only ones spinning tales about princesses in distress. There's the Indian heroine in The Ivory City and its Fairy Princess; Princess Otohime from the Japanese tale Urashima, about a fisherman who rescues a turtle; and the kind-hearted princess in the Swahili fairy tale, The One-Handed Girl.

As for those classic European fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm weren't even the first to tell Cinderella's enchanted tale. Long before Charles Perrault recorded her story in The Tales of Mother Goose, even before Giambattista Basile wrote The Pentamerone, Cinderella wasn't a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty -- she was Egyptian. Rhodopis, as she was called, was a Greek slave under an Egyptian master. Instead of two wicked stepsisters, she was treated harshly at the hands of her fellow servants and married a pharaoh instead of a prince.

So if there are so many multicultural fairy tales out there to draw from, why did it take Disney so long to get around to telling The Princess and the Frog? Sure there are cultural sensitivity issues, but Mulan, the story about a young woman who disguises herself as a man to fight in her father's place, was released with little controversy

With the shift toward CGI and away from the classic 2D style of animation that Disney's fairy tales are known for, African-American and Hispanic princesses got lost in the shuffle. But whatever the reason, this princess diversity is long overdue, and Princess Tiana is sure to make girls of all shapes and colors happy.

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