When The Princess and the Frog came out in 2009, I wanted to like it. I prefer the look of traditional hand-drawn animation to the CGI stuff that we’ve had for the last 30 years, so I was hopeful.
There was a lot of buzz about how Tiana was going to be the first black1 Disney Princess in the pantheon. I knew a couple of people who were excited about that, and I was happy for them to get some “inclusion” in their media.
Unfortunately, The Princess and the Frog, by any metric, is so intellectually stultifying it boggles the mind. To say they “loosely based” the movie on The Frog Princess by E.D. Baker is giving the too much credit; the book was charming, witty, and had an interesting plot.
I don’t want to waste very much time trashing this movie because I have better things to do this morning, so I’ll just list some bullet points:
Every single white character is an idiot. Every. Single. One. If you can’t build someone up without tearing other people down, you need to re-evaluate your strategy.
I’m surprised actual adherents of VooDoo didn’t complain about the black-magicky portrayal of their religion.
The songs were forgettable.
The plot spent too much time making everything about race to present anything interesting in the character development.
Far from being full of “heart” and soulful, the philosophical moments came across as cringeworthy and saccharine. This is what fake moralizing looks like.
I think Disney must have forgotten that this movie did poorly at the box office that year. If it had been any other movie, they would have buried it so deeply in the Disney Vault that only archeologists 400 years in the future would have even heard about it. But that’s not what happened.
Why? Because Tiana is the first black Disney Princess. Even though her movie is awful, Tiana gets as much merchandizing power as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, whose films were made when Disney knew how to make good films.
This is the ugly side of DEI, that “diversity” has become synonymous with incompetence and poor quality. Good luck having any reasonable discussion about it. “You should be happy with your crumbs, peasant!” We’re not even allowed to say that Tiana’s movie is a bad movie. You just have to eat it.
Pretending that The Princess and the Frog is anything other than one of the worst films Disney ever made represents willful blindness to reality. Or maybe it’s not blindness, and the Disney Princesses of Color (DPOC?) are held to a different standard than the European-descent princesses, a standard that suggests excellence for that demographic is an unrealistic expectation.
Shouldn’t ethnic minorities be outraged by that instead of celebrating it?
not going to capitalize that, sorry.