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Abstract This paper examines the negotiations of race in The Princess and the Frog within the dual contexts of its setting and release. Central to these negotiations are Tiana's racial identity and her passing as a frog, as well as the film's attempt to pass as an African American princess narrative. In the process of excavating the film's racial contexts, this paper also addresses its reception by American critics, as well as how Disney, in its hypersensitivity to racial issues and its desire to fulfill so many competing agendas, has paradoxically created an animated feature which generally elides race, even as it redeploys multiple racial stereotypes. This paper concludes by (re)considering the implications of a black Disney princess who spends more time onscreen in green and embraces a hyper-ethos of hard work, as well as how the simulated selves on display renegotiate notions of racial identity in the twenty-first century.
Keywords Segregation * Passing * Transformation * Miscegenation * Disney * Racial fantasy
One does not quite know what to make of The Princess and the Frog (Clements and Musker 2009), Disney's recent film and first animated feature with an African American princess. Given the amount of hype and anticipation preceding this film, one might assume that Disney paid close attention to its racial dynamics which, paradoxically, makes them all the more perplexing. In this story of the young Tiana, a working-class African American girl who strives to open her own restaurant in New Orleans in the 1920s, race, indeed, goes unmentioned or, as Manohla Dargis (2009) claims in her review, is strenuously avoided. As Brooks Barnes (2009a) recently put it, "We finally get a black princess and she spends the majority of her time on screen as a frog."
One does not quite know what to make of The Princess and the Frog yet much has been made of it. Alternately praised as "an instant classic" (Corliss 2009b) that has "reviv[ed] the moribund animation form" (Corliss 2009a), and a "first" in Disney animation history (Barnes 2009a) featuring "the princess I didn't know I had been waiting for my whole life" (Sarasohn 2009), Disney is being lauded as "finally" producing "something that all little girls, especially young black girls, can embrace" (Murray qtd. in...