TONIGHT

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Young Voices
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

E-mail a friend

• TOPICS
• Hurricane Katrina
• Movies
• Entertainment

 

Tiana, Disney's first African American princess, who will be in theaters this December in The Princess and the Frog, is already stirring up a bit of controversy.

Critics are not happy that Disney, which has a record of racial faux-pas, chose a prince who is not also African American, selected New Orleans as the animated film's setting and includes some characters who might be racially insensitive, including a witch doctor, characters who play the banjo and shuffle when they dance, a jazz-playing alligator and a firefly with missing teeth.

If we allow for the fact that A) every princess can't be expected to pair with a mate of the same ethnicity, B) the creators might have chosen New Orleans to celebrate the historical beauty of the hurricane-damaged city, C) a witch doctor might be more of a culturally insensitive character than a racially insensitive character, D) characters who play musical instruments and dance are quite the norm in musicals, E) an alligator who plays jazz makes sense in New Orleans and F) fireflies just might be missing teeth, then we are left with just another Disney princess movie.

Then, if we put aside the fact that Tiana is Disney's 9th princess, and they might want to hold off on making any more female characters who are ... well ... princesses (even if Queen Oprah provides the voice for the lead character's mother), that leaves us with one thing that made my hair stand on end when I heard it in the trailer. A character, whose species, race and/or gender I could not determine, exclaims “'Dis Gon' Be Good!”

Not sure who, but someone, somewhere is going to complain about that line.