Disney unveiled the cartoon image and the doll of their new black princess about a month ago. Tiana, the cartoon “princess”, works as a waitress, and then she kisses a frog and then she becomes a frog… then there’s a swamp and a voodoo curse, and maybe she becomes a princess and her frog friend becomes a prince, something like that. But all hell is breaking loose!

Amongst the issues: Tiana’s hair (straight), her original name (at first is was Maddie, but that drew “slave name” complaints) and one of the biggest issues – Disney’s first black princess doesn’t have a corresponding black prince! The prince is being voiced by a Brazilian actor, and the cartoon image (and description) of the prince as “neither white nor black, but portrayed with olive skin, dark hair and, need we state the obvious, a strong chin. The actor who plays him, Bruno Campos, hails from Brazil”.

Long ago and far away, she was an unnamed little princess in a little story called the “The Frog Prince.” She and her amphibious friend lived in a very small, mostly forgotten corner of the fairy tale universe.

Many years passed.

And then one day, through the magical powers of Disney animation and commercial marketing, the forgotten little princess was transformed into Tiana, a beautiful black princess from New Orleans. She became the star of “The Princess and the Frog,” a movie set to premiere in November. Her doll and toy set were unveiled last month, and the Disney promotional machine is already humming, for Tiana is the first Disney princess in more than a decade, and the first ever to be black.

[While] Disney has brought us nonwhite princesses before (see “Mulan,” “Pocahontas”), Tiana is a first. The implied message of Tiana, that black American girls can be as elegant as Snow White herself, is a milestone in the national imagery, according to a range of scholars and cultural historians.

Her appearance this holiday season, coming on the heels of Michelle Obama’s emergence as the nation’s first lady, the Obama girls in the White House and the first line of Barbie dolls modeled on black women (“So in Style” debuts this summer), will crown an extraordinary year of visibility for African American women.

But fairy tales and folklore are the stories that cultures tell their children about the world around them, and considering Disney’s pervasive influence with (and marketing to) young girls, Princess Tiana might well become the symbol of a culture-changing standard of feminine beauty.

On its most basic level, “The Princess and the Frog” is a vintage Disney princess fairy tale, in hand-drawn (2-D) animation, a Broadway-style musical. It draws inspiration from an 18th-century fairy tale from the British Isles, and “The Frog Princess,” a 2002 teen novel from Maryland writer E.D. Baker. Disney transferred the story to 1920s New Orleans and changed her name, race and almost everything else.

In the Disney version, Tiana is a young waitress and talented chef who dreams, like her father, of owning her own restaurant. She eventually kisses a frog and is transformed into one. She must journey into the dark bayou to get a magical cure from a good voodoo queen. She is aided by a goofy firefly and a trumpet-playing alligator. The frog turns out to be handsome Prince Naveen, from the far-off and fictional land of Maldonia.

The stills released by the studio show Tiana in full princess regalia: a powder-blue gown, tiara and hair in an elegant upsweep.

Tony Award winner Anika Noni Rose voices Tiana. Other parts are played by Oprah Winfrey, John Goodman, Terrence Howard and Keith David. The music is by Oscar winner (and New Orleans veteran) Randy Newman. It is directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, the same team behind “Aladdin” and “The Little Mermaid.”

[Disney stresses] Tiana will be one of the “strongest” Disney heroines yet. The criticisms the film got over the character’s name in early drafts (“Maddy,” short for Madeline, was perceived by some to sound like a “slave name”) were only hiccups on the way to a finished product, he says, noting that one of his most popular creations, Buzz Lightyear in “Toy Story,” was named “Tempest” at one point.

The message that Tiana learns in the film — Disney characters always learn something by movie’s end — is that balance is important in life. Jazz Age woman that she is, Tiana needs both love and a career to find happiness.

Tarshia Stanley, a professor of English at Spelman College in Atlanta who often writes and teaches about portrayals of black women in film, says that the character’s hair — straight and pulled back in early images released by the studio — seems to be the appropriate, middle-of-the-road bet, too.

“They might as well make it straight so little girls can comb it when the doll comes out,” she notes, wryly. “We as African American women haven’t fully dealt with how sensitive the subject of our hair can be, so I certainly wouldn’t expect Disney to know what to do with [that issue].”

(Prince Naveen, for the record, is neither white nor black, but portrayed with olive skin, dark hair and, need we state the obvious, a strong chin. The actor who plays him, Bruno Campos, hails from Brazil.)

[From The Washington Post]

I don’t really mind that Disney’s first black princess doesn’t have a corresponding black prince, but I do wonder why Disney did that. Would it have been so weird or strange to have a frog turn into a black prince? Voiced by an African-American actor? Why didn’t it occur to anyone at Disney to change the story? Originally, the rumor was that the prince would be totally white, not even a whiff of “olive skin”, so obviously changes were made at some point.

You know what’s weird? No one is raising a ruckus about the voodoo. That really surprises me. The conservative Christian community might raise a stink about that, considering they had issues with the magic in Harry Potter movies and books. Or is voodoo acceptable? Doubt it.