Based on this film and last year's Tangled, Disney appears to be making a fairly earnest step towards grappling with their problematic past and setting out new, less conservative, values for the children of today. If Tangled was a coming-of-age remake of The Little Mermaid, in which personal growth and independence were the main goals, with romance pared down to a sidenote, rather than the main impetus behind her desire for a new life, then The Princess and the Frog is an attempt to revise the Disney formula to acknowledge things like class differences and privilege, and the way that getting what you want may not be as easy for you as it seems for others. These bigger, messier, more difficult problems to tackle result, predictably, in a less successful distancing from the Disney of the past.
The first, of course, is the main character being Disney's first black lead heroine. It would be remiss not to call this a fairly major step in Disney's path towards something approaching The Right Direction. But as many problems as are addressed, even more seem to arise. The love interest, Prince Naveen, being a major concern. His race is, as far as I can tell, completely indeterminable. He hails from a made-up country, Maldonia, and speaks with a vaguely french accent and has dark-ish skin, which seems to suggest he would be from one of the African countries colonized by France. But his facial features otherwise look like any old Disney Prince Charming. Nothing, save his darker hair and skin, would at all suggest African descent. More strangely, it almost ignores all issues of race. If everyone in the movie were white, and Tiana was simply poor rather than poor and black, not much about the movie would change. Despite taking place in the South in the '20s, only one person says anything derogatory about her, and what he says could be construed as class-related as much as race. Her best friend is white, and while she is seen as an exemplar of rich, white privelege, this only serves to make their friendship even more nonsensical. It is, disappointingly, still ferrying in fantastical, revisionist history. This is all not to mention one of the more glaring eyesores, that of casting a voodoo witch doctor as the primary villain. Which is something of a shame, because a lot of the animation revolving around the demons and long, ominous shadows is legitimately frightening, especially if I'd been a little kid when I saw it.
There are positives, of course. The comic relief is less unbearable than it has been lately, with Disney -- better than Tangled, even, on many occasions. And the increase in female agency displayed in Tangled is still avaialable here, as the ending feels more like two people working together towards a goal than a poor girl, held back by the rich and greedy, being saved by a wealthy and wonderful prince (ala Cinderella). And, despite many problems with it, I have to admit the song and dance number Almost There, with its blatant rip-off of the paintings of Aaron Douglas, echoes the hopefulness and majesty of those paintings pretty well (though, again, it fails to address the fact that, despite his optimism, things have improved for black people in America at a far slower increment than I think he was hoping for). Speaking of the music, it is much catchier and along the lines of the Disney heyday of the late '80s/early '90s (not quite as memorable, but far less bland and forgettable than the mess Tangled has going on). And the best friend is far less villainized than, say, the stepsisters in Cinderella. Honestly, she would almost be a better choice for a main character and the idea of her coming to terms with her own rich, white privelege.
Honestly, I don't quite know what to say about it. I want to applaud the people at Disney for making a more concerted effort and, at least, it is smart enough not to go too far into the overly familiar, pretending that everything is all good so it's cool if I say something weird and a little racist cause we're all friends here (see: Easy A, lots of TV lately). But all the other stuff still weighs too heavily, and I think we're not gonna get anywhere as long as they keep resorting to exotic and "geographically related" villains. Keith David's witch doctor is certainly no less an icky caricature of all the stereotypes about voodoo than Jafar was of Middle Eastern mysticism on Aladdin.
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