Dodai at Jezebel has a list of potential racial problems with Disney's latest, The Princess and the Frog. I take all these issues seriously. But for me, one looming objection stands over all others: the movie looks mediocre at best.
Maybe quality shouldn't trump racism. But it seems to me that a poorly-done effort to portray a non-white princess betrays a narrowness of vision and imagination. I think Disney has done a reasonable job with its non-white princess figures in the past: Jasmine's perfectly fine in Aladdin, and I really do love Mulan. But I think it's inevitable and fair that the attempt to do a historical (and ultimately, the trappings of the past are absolutely critical to making the very idea of princesshood plausible) story about a black princess set in America and aimed squarely at an audience of children, was always going to be somewhat complicated.
Slavery is hard for kids, as is sharecropping. Doesn't mean kids shouldn't have to deal with those issues as at some point, but school and parents are probably the place for those conversations, which require context, time to discuss things, and the ability to deal with some serious emotions. The Civil Rights movement is full of astonishing stories, but it would demean them to reduce them to sweet, animated love stories. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing isn't something a hero can overcome before delivering a smooch to the heroine at the end. I think it does no disrespect to these stories to say they deserve better than Disneyfication. And I'm also willing to defend the right to children to have fairytales. They may do some damage in terms of inculcating stereotypes, but hey, Disney gave us Belle, and the Beast giving her the library, so Disney giveth while Disney taketh away. In this context, I think New Orleans, and the royalty of the krewe system, were fairly creative choices.
So why am I so meh? The movie looks dopey: too many sidekicks, too many anatomical jokes (without the gender commentary that made Mulan work), and maybe this reveals me to be a heretic, but I think I'm kind of used to computer animation by now. Not that I don't get a huge kick out of watching Sleeping Beauty and her color-switching dress, but the visuals look a little old-school to me. And finally, why do they have to have Tiana fall for Prince Naveen from of all randomly-named fictional kingdoms, Maldonia? I mean, what, were the namers-of-fictional-kingdoms on strike that week? Was there an extra batch of the paint used for Aladdin's skin tone lying around and figured they'd have a random Indian-sounding character? In that case, why not just do an amazing Bollywood Disney animnated movie? Was it just too simple to have a story about two black people in New Orleans who fall in love? I don't get it. But I don't run Disney, and I'm not in the target demographic, so I suppose it doesn't really matter.