It took them HOW long to do this!?!

[DGirl]

Disney first: black princess in animated film



I still say F#ck Disney!! I grew up NOT watching those movies. I did NOT have the TOYS or the dreams of being one of their Princess's
I will NEVER buy there CRAPPY items for my future child or children either.
I still will NEVER give my money to this thing called Disney!! They are RICH enough without my few $$ in their HUGE pockets.

http://bossip.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/princess-tiana-and-paa4781.jpg?w=450&h=363&h=362

They also make sure that she can NOT have a BLACK prince to be with her..
Still have a WAY'S to go I guess? What about the little BOYS? These young Black girls that they want to target to get there parents to buy their CRAP have brothers and daddy's!! It would be NICE to have a BLACK PRINCE!!

Controversy

The movie initially sparked controversy from critics who felt that the story perpetuated stereotypes of African-Americans and had overtones of slavery. The movie was originally titled The Frog Princess in which the main character turns into a princess with the help of a voodoo fairy godmother. William Blackburn of the Charlotte Observer stated, "Disney should be ashamed of what it is trying to pass off as its first black princess. Despite all its resources and experience, it has failed to create a black princess to rival its predecessors."Telegraph: Disney's first black princess leads to race row (July 17, 2008)



disney first black princess - Yahoo! Search Results

 

[D_Amyntas Lillydong]

i agree. fuck disney.

 

[D_Tim McGnaw]

Yeah fuck Disney

 

[HellsKitchenmanNYC]

Well Disney hasn't been around as long as the country so in fact it didn't take them that long! lolol.

 

[SilverTrain]

They also make sure that she can NOT have a BLACK prince to be with her..
Still have a WAY'S to go I guess? What about the little BOYS? These young Black girls that they want to target to get there parents to buy their CRAP have brothers and daddy's!! It would be NICE to have a BLACK PRINCE!!

Well, this cuts both ways. If the prince were black, too, then the message can be (and would be by some critics, no doubt) interpreted as "black people can only be, or should only be, with other black people."

There are allegations that many years ago Disney may not have been the most socially progressive corporate culture around, but by virtue of their employment practices alone, this seems to have changed drastically.

There are many corporate villains in the world today, but I would not count Disney among them.

 

[2322]

I don't know what to make of this. I think we would have to see the movie before judging it. I see that the villain was originally named Doctor Duvalier and I find that to be in the most extreme poor taste possible. It's inappropriate to name Disney characters after actual evil people. Disney has renamed the character.

I can understand casting Tiana as a servant. Two of Disney's most famous princesses were also servants before becoming princesses. I question how wise it is to gloss over what life was like for black people living in 1920s New Orleans. It might well serve to show that the races were not equal in those days and educated kids by highlighting those injustices. Making Tiana's best friend to be a rich debutante daughter of a plantation owner just isn't remotely realistic and I think to whitewash race relations in that way demeans what the civil rights movement has accomplished since the time in which the story was set.

Talking alligators? Well fine. It's Disney, it's a fantasy, no need to get hot and bothered over it. A talking alligator is no more offensive to me than a talking blue bear, teapot, sea urchin, or anything else.

The voodoo elements have me scratching me head. Voodun is a living religion, still practiced by people today and I don't think it's the wisest thing to stereotype a religion one way or the other. I do read that an evil voodoo priest casts the frog spell while a good voodoo priestess breaks it. Perhaps that is a balanced representation of the essentially Lawful Chaotic (to use a D&D term) nature of voodoo, I don't know. I hope that Disney has hired some consultants to make sure their depictions aren't ridiculous or offensive.

What I do NOT get is why they even bother with this scenario at all when Africa has such rich potential just as Europe did for Disney's earlier princess stories. Make her a Princess from the era of Mali or Zimbabwe or Lunda and not only give her an all-black cast, but an entire continent of exotic animals and peoples to travel through on her quest. Why not show Americans, black and white, who are so ignorant of history, just what the great empires of Africa were like? I know it's the tradition of fairy tales to be set in far away places of indeterminate time, but I think this would be a great opportunity. Show Tiana as an infant daughter of Mansa Musa, returning from his legendary journey to Mecca, and she gets lost or kidnapped and then is raised as a peasant only to discover she's a princess. Or you could make her a warrior princess of the Dahomey or you could make her a Luba queen or ANYthing! The story would be authentic, romantic, exotic, and educate kids about a different culture IF that's the route you're going to take if, as Disney has in this case, you want to set the story in a real place and time.

 

[Bbucko]

What I do NOT get is why they even bother with this scenario at all when Africa has such rich potential just as Europe did for Disney's earlier princess stories. Make her a Princess from the era of Mali or Zimbabwe or Lunda and not only give her an all-black cast, but an entire continent of exotic animals and peoples to travel through on her quest. Why not show Americans, black and white, who are so ignorant of history, just what the great empires of Africa were like? I know it's the tradition of fairy tales to be set in far away places of indeterminate time, but I think this would be a great opportunity. Show Tiana as an infant daughter of Mansa Musa, returning from his legendary journey to Mecca, and she gets lost or kidnapped and then is raised as a peasant only to discover she's a princess. Or you could make her a warrior princess of the Dahomey or you could make her a Luba queen or ANYthing! The story would be authentic, romantic, exotic, and educate kids about a different culture IF that's the route you're going to take if, as Disney has in this case, you want to set the story in a real place and time.

Timbuktu would have made an excellent jumping-off point, I agree.

 

[ZOS23xy]

To me, far better than the pickaninny centaurs that were in FANTASIA. Disney is trying to evolve. The story lines are getting better since Pixar has taken a big hand in the company.

 

[vince]

Or, it might be better if Disney were to stop encouraging the fantasy that little girls can be Princesses if only they find the right boy, altogether. There are lots of other plot lines for making fantasy movies and Disney has done it many times. The whole Princess wins Prince and they live happily ever after scenario is one of the less appealing movie lines.

Luckily, my kid own preferred Dumbo and his "pink elfawents" to Cinderella. So I had no worries there.

 

[2322]

Timbuktu would have made an excellent jumping-off point, I agree.

Wouldn't it though? Let's say she gets lost in Egypt. She travels through Egypt, to the Mountains of the Moon, and everywhere she goes people tell her, "... from here to Timbuktu!" She has a necklace or something which nobody but a wise priestess knows means she is really a princess of Mali. The rest of her trip she meets-up with animals who join her on her quest, maybe a Berber boy (who is actually a prince himself) can accompany her, and together they journey through the desert following the path her father took back home by finding pieces of gold and jewels along the way. They encounter the warrior women of Dahomey, the pirates of Tripoli, the Hausa of Lake Chad. Meanwhile she's persued by her Bedouin kidnappers determined to find her before she gets to the safety of home. It would be romantic and fun and exotic and just all around African in a way we haven't seen since Lion King. And nobody in the US even knows about these places and kingdoms and people!! God it would be amazing!

ARRGGHH!!

 

[Flashy]

and let's face it...Disney is not in the race empathy business...they are in the entertainment business, and there job is to make money off creating entertainment.

the facts are for much of Disney's time since it began creating animation, (it was found in 1923 strictly focused on animation), the black community was not a target audience.

that is not mean, it is just a business fact... the black community was not a viable or large market.

for financial reasons, Disney simply did not bother with african americans...

early on, (1946) they produced "Song of the South", which had racial elements that have caused its banning due to fears of insensitivity...

but, until the late 60s, the black community was simply not a large entertainment dollar market to be counted on.

in the early days of cinema and animation, production was incredibly expensive (not unlike today) and from 1937-1949, Disney only produced a total of 16 films, so they were incredibly expensive, and, they only had 1 shot to make money for the year...the overseas markets were not viable at the time, there was no home video, no television market, no DVD, little viable merchandising...

the cinematic release was it...so if you are making one film a year, that is expensive to make, and you want it to make as much money as possible in the 1930s to 1950s, who are you going to gear the characters in the film based on the potential market towards?

primarily white people or characters, and, neutral characters such as animals.

in 1940, there were only 132 million americans and only 13 million were African American...today there are 300+ million americans and 13.5% are black (roughly 40 million)


in 1910, roughly 90% of African Americans lived in the South, and through the first great migration (1910-1930) this lessened that imbalance a bit, but by 1940, the first decade of Disneys rise to prominence, roughly 75% of all African Americans lived in the South.

due to Segregation, poverty and discrimination, the chances of African Americans going to movie theaters was very low at the time.

the spread of movie theaters in and of themselves were still a relatively new cultural phenomenon at the time...

the first nickelodeon was 1905, and once Birth of A Nation came out around 1914, that signalled the beginning of large scale feature film, movie viewing house potential, and theater construction exploded around the country in the 20s and 30s


as such, focusing any Disney Feature film on African Americans would have been incredibly unwise, considering they usually had only one, very expensive chance a year to make a hit film, and their films were released by the huge RKO.

of Disney's first 7 films, from 1937-1942, the five most successful were:

Snow White
Pinoccio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi



this continued on throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s etc...

there has never been a racial element to Disney's choice of its characters, since the main element is business, and their business was built on fairy tales, animals and bringing those things to light on a large scale.

in terms of the domestic and global marketplace for films up through the 90s and still today, the overwhelming market for Disney type films is white, because the primary areas of film release in the largest markets are north america, europe and asia now, and, in an overall sense, black people make up only a very small amount of that total population, and fairly or not, make up a smaller and less economically reliable base to market the larger product to.

the thinking always was, well, anyone can relate to Bambi, he is a deer...but Snow White, Cinderalla, Alice in Wonderland, Peter pan, et. al are all white...and, aside from the fact that they were written that way, it made sense from an economic logic standpoint...

it was highly unlikely that in a country of 130 million people,110 million of which were white (roughly) in 1937, there would have been much business for the film had Snow White and the Seven Dwarves been black.

it is not racial, it is economical.

this may not be a very "nice" lesson, but it was more about money, than race...

once the black community began to be a large and growing market, with disposable income and an interest in seeing programming that had more african americans in feature films starring whites, and then more afrocentric programming in general, Disney immediately set about investing in films and programming that could tap in to that.


that is my 2 cents.

 

[2322]

Or, it might be better if Disney were to stop encouraging the fantasy that little girls can be Princesses if only they find the right boy, altogether. There are lots of other plot lines for making fantasy movies and Disney has done it many times. The whole Princess wins Prince and they live happily ever after scenario is one of the less appealing movie lines.

Luckily, my kid own preferred Dumbo and his "pink elfawents" to Cinderella. So I had no worries there.

That's why I think she should be a princess herself in her own right. West and central Africa has a very rich history of female-led kingdoms and empires where women were actually the empowered sex compared to men. When she finally gets back to Timbuktu and is reunited with her father and mother, she marries the Berber prince and then he goes to live with her helping to administer her principality and their marriage brings peace between the two peoples AND it's a demonstration of interracial marriage.

 

[2322]

Song of the South is a real problem. It hasn't been banned, which makes it sound like a government took that action, but it's under a release moratorium in the US by Disney itself. Song of the South is available in Europe and Canada. You can buy it there and bring it home if you like.

I don't think Song of the South was meant to be racist. I actually think they saw it as being progressive for the time:

According to Neal Gabler, one of the reasons Disney had hired Rapf to work with Reymond was to temper what Disney feared would be Reymond's white Southern slant. Rapf was a minority, a Jew, and an outspoken left-winger, and he himself feared that the film would inevitably be Uncle Tomish. "That's exactly why I want you to work on it," Walt told him, "because I know that you don't think I should make the movie. You're against Uncle Tomism, and you're a radical." -Wikipedia

Disney publicist Vern Caldwell wrote to producer Perce Pearce that "The negro situation is a dangerous one. Between the negro haters and the negro lovers there are many chances to run afoul of situations that could run the gamut all the way from the nasty to the controversial." -ibid.

Of course, in a perfect example of why the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, the NAACP responded to the film by saying, "...[the] impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship."

Despite Disney thinking they had worked to not be, "Uncle Tom-ish," they didn't quite get it right. Nevertheless, James Baskett, who portrayed Uncle Remus received a special Academy Award for his portrayal of the role. It was only the second time a black person had won an Oscar for any reason and the first time for a black male. That's no small feat in 1947 and it worries me that this accomplishment gets lost in the rest of the controversy about Song of the South.

 

[Bbucko]

That's why I think she should be a princess herself in her own right. West and central Africa has a very rich history of female-led kingdoms and empires where women were actually the empowered sex compared to men. When she finally gets back to Timbuktu and is reunited with her father and mother, she marries the Berber prince and then he goes to live with her helping to administer her principality and their marriage brings peace between the two peoples AND it's a demonstration of interracial marriage.

That kind of clear thinking is why neither you nor I has a future as a Hollywood producer, amigo mio: that and the ability to raise hundreds of million of dollars, of course.

 

[2322]

That kind of clear thinking is why neither you nor I has a future as a Hollywood producer, amigo mio: that and the ability to raise hundreds of million of dollars, of course.

It's not that the job would suck, it's the people you'd have to work with.

 

[DGirl]

I was reading another site that I go to.
These folks are so stupid!
Why because it is has a BLACK face they are willing to go LOOK..
I did research before I voted.. and yes I know who I voted for..
He is in office..
But, no way in HELL will I give my $$ to Disney because, they FINALLY give Black folks the time of day.
I liked the idea of the Africa story line though!!

 

[jnj4play]

i see the "controversy" but im passing it off as hype and thus not giving it any importance. im not a fan of disney by any means but i will side with them when i say no matter how they went about this project they were doomed from the beggining. there is few, if any, routes they could have gone that wouldnt get some group talking shit about them for doing so. if you fall into the group that was waiting for a black princess THERE U GO. dont go getting all butt hurt about it now. i personally think disney knew it would get shit for doing something like this regardless of how they did it, someone somewhere was gonna flip out over it and make a big deal. which im interpretting as a double standard but whatever, this really isnt such a big deal so quit trying to blow it up.

 

[DGirl]

eventhough they have a BLACK whatever, I still will never buy into them!

 

[ZOS23xy]

Song of the South is a real problem. It hasn't been banned, which makes it sound like a government took that action, but it's under a release moratorium in the US by Disney itself. Song of the South is available in Europe and Canada. You can buy it there and bring it home if you like.

I don't think Song of the South was meant to be racist. I actually think they saw it as being progressive for the time:





Of course, in a perfect example of why the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, the NAACP responded to the film by saying, "...[the] impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship."

Despite Disney thinking they had worked to not be, "Uncle Tom-ish," they didn't quite get it right. Nevertheless, James Baskett, who portrayed Uncle Remus received a special Academy Award for his portrayal of the role. It was only the second time a black person had won an Oscar for any reason and the first time for a black male. That's no small feat in 1947 and it worries me that this accomplishment gets lost in the rest of the controversy about Song of the South.

I've seen it recently, and it isn't racist. It does present a family with slaves who treat them well, feed them well, and allow them the ability to talk to their kids...

racist? Not all slave owners were Simon Legree. Some of them understood the humanity of the person they "owned".

Onj the other hand it really isn't that good of a movie.

 

[Guy-jin]

I felt the same way about "The Little Mermaid".

Fish-folk got feelings too, ya know.