Decoding Disney: Princess and the Frog Review

Today I watch Disney’s Princess and the Frog for the first time. Upon announcing that I was going to watch the film, everyone I was with spoke highly of the movie and decided to watch it with me. Here are some of my initial takeaways from the film:

Given the title of the film, this movie is considered to be a princess movie. The film had a classic fairy tale styled approach and focusing on the relationship between a princess and a prince. However, this princess movie is very atypical, because the “princess” is not even a princess until the end of the film. Perhaps this is used to show viewers that anyone can be a princess.

I was pleased with the ending of the film. The characters all had to prove their worth and the characters developed greatly over the course of the movie. At the end of the movie I was happy to find that the prince and princess would have a happily ever after regardless if they were humans or not. I was quite surprised by the brutal death of Ray, even though he did have a happy ending of sorts.

I was interested to see how the film included both of Tiana’s parents. Disney princesses and protagonists generally are without parental figures but Tiana has both. Although her father dies early on in the movie, he has a great impact shaping her life even after he is gone. Additionally, Tiana has a living mother throughout the entire film who is able to give her daughter guidance and support.

Unlike most Disney films, The Princess and the Frog is set within our world in 1920’s New Orleans. Without doing any research, I am unsure why this time and place were chosen for the film, and I would be interested to learn the reasoning behind it.

Like most of Disney’s more recent films, the film connected with viewers across many different age groups. As one of the more mature viewers, I was intrigued by the movie’s contrast between human “wants” and human “needs.” I was also interested by Tiana’s conflict in fulfilling her dream to create a new life for herself. I also appreciated the film’s message that wishing is not enough to realize dreams; it requires a lot of hard work.

I was surprised by the darkness and power of evil in the film. I have found that Disney often focuses its evil into a single villain, who uses his evil powers against the protagonist. In this film, I felt as though the dark magic was a power much greater than the Shadow Man; evil “controlled” the villain instead of the villain harnessing evil. The Shadow Man himself was ultimately destroyed by this evil magic, and this made the darkness more frightening as it is never destroyed at the end of the film.

Tiana is Disney’s first black protagonist and princess, and this makes race a very important topic within the film. Personally, I think the film did a very good job of portraying African American characters, certainly much better than many of the early Disney films did. The film integrated black culture through many musical numbers, accents and dialects, but I never saw the film as racially offensive. I think that a key to this success was that a majority of the characters in the film were black. This made it so that race was not represented by a single character; rather, it showed the many different forms a race could take. From Tiana’s virtuous father, to the evil Shadow Man, to Tiana and Prince Naveen, blacks are not represented in a single way.

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Decoding Disney