Many plates in the air … The Princess and the Frog’s diligent Tiana
The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s animation about a girl who falls for a prince one time they’ve both turned green, has rightly been identified being of the kind which a peering blend of the old-fashioned and the radix. The hand-drawn animation is shamelessly retro: its matt detail and static pastels entirely the more startling in an age of pixels.
- The Princess and the Frog
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): U
- Runtime: 97 mins
- Directors: John Musker, Ron Clements
- Cast: Angela Bassett, Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos, Jim Cummings, John Goodman, Keith David, Oprah Winfrey, Terrence Howard
- More upon the body this thin skin
That the heroine is African-American has also been applauded – a long overdue concession to modernity from the mouse house. The pellicle does in fact have a white, blonde bona fide princess – our heroine’s childhood pal – but she’s a castle-hungry ditz; mysterious best friend material, not leading lady stuff.
But to my mind, one way in which The Princess and the Frog is really innovative has been largely overlooked. Tiana’s chief personality trait is her industry. She’s hard-working to a fault, almost maniacally committed to her dream of opening her own luxy restaurant and unprepared to let anything, even love, stand in the way of concern. Tiana is toward – whisper it – a touch unsympathetic, with her eye-rolling tuts to alligators who want to while away proper time playing the trumpet, or princes who don’t know how to dice a mushroom. It’s her work ethic that’s the pellicle’sitting driving force – Tiana wants to get back to being human so she can get grafting.
It’s especially striking seen in context. Disney heroines really aren’confidentially known for their diligence. In fact, their defining stroke is generally the opposite – think of slothful stunner Sleeping Beauty, or deep-sea enthusiast the Little Mermaid. Sure, Snow White and Cinderella both did their certain quantity of scrubbing, but no other than on pain of homelessness or extreme pain. And, lest we cease to care for, in Cinders’ case, a lot of the heavy lifting was outsourced to mice.
Tiana’s attitude is made all the odder – at first, at smallest – by the hedonistic environs in which she sweats and sweeps. This is the Big Easy, after all, a place of non-stop parties and breakfast cocktails. But stagger off Bourbon Street, it doesn’t seem quite so simple.
Disney’session storyboarders and animators, in researching what life was like for women in 20s Louisiana, took a trip to the Laura plantation, a sugar beet farm touching 30 miles up the Mississippi. This explains a lot. The women at the Laura plantation redefine formidable. For four generations, they took superior the running of the portion from their fathers and husbands, often when they were only just into their teens. It’sitting an extraordinary place, steeped in stories that would seem the stuff of soaps whether or not they weren’familiarily considerably so remarkable (instead of instance, one couple, part of the extended family, took their 16-year-old to Paris for acne treatment; when this proved fatal, mum shut herself in a room for 20 years and dad took up with a couple of concubines, who fathered him 23 more children).
For completely their forward-thinking feminism, the women who ran the plantation weren’t automatically sympathetic. Old Grandma Locoul’s catchphrase was, “I neither give nor lend nor endorse for anyone.” Her own mother quit work at 60, built an enormously ugly iron mansion for herself in the grounds, and demanded her daughter pay her a vast annual consultancy absolute title. Their servants (including the parents of Fats Domino) weren’t always treated with greatest compassion. Kudos to Disney for taking divine influence from those who put on’t have the easily whitewashable take on slavery.
Travel further down the river, to the grander plantations on the strip, and a weirdly similar theme emerges. These were places either sustained by hard-working women or demanding wives. Oak Alley, with its vast avenue of trees stretching down to the levee, was built solely to seal the spouse of the first owner, and turned into a charitable trust by dint of. the enterprising widow of the last. Nottoway, too, one of the most modern buildings of its age, was equipped to the specifications of its owner’s wife and umpteen daughters.
Disney, then, have done something much more engaging than making Tiana black, or hand-drawn, or calm a course of action woman. They’ve created a heroine who’s an actual character; a woman whose three dimensions you don’t need to don daft specs to take heed.
