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.
Suggested Sites...
- The Princess and the Frog - official site for the upcoming movie.
- Disney Princess - official site for all the Disney princesses.
- SurLaLune - a collection of fairy tales and illustrations from around the world.
- World of Tales - fairy tales, author biographies, and audio recordings.
- Folktexts - a collection of texts from folktales across the globe.
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