Princess Maddy repairs Disney's racist reputation

[- Femme -]

 

Don't you guys find the Princess ugly drawn, the story completely uncreative and uninteresting and they took too damn long coming up with this. They only made this addition after years of pressure from African American groups. Now they want to half *** on the job. That is the ugliest drawing of a princess coming from Disney. My little brother can do better. And what he hell kind of ugly name is Maddy?

 

Walt Disney is rolling out its first black princess in a new big-budget animated feature set for release in 2009 - the latest in many attempts by the company to prove its multicultural bona fides and ward off the spectre of racism that has lurked since its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s.

 

The company chose its annual shareholders' meeting to announce that it had started production on a film called The Frog Princess, set in New Orleans and featuring an African American princess called Maddy. Thursday's meeting also took place in New Orleans - which gave Disney an extra opportunity to show its solidarity with the Crescent City in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

 

Company executives gave away next to nothing about the plot or characters in the film. Disney's studio chairman told reporters only that it would be scored by Randy Newman, who has worked extensively with the Disney subsidiary Pixar on the Toy Story films, A Bug's Life, Monster's Inc. and Cars. Cook added: "The film's New Orleans setting and strong princess character give the film lots of excitement and texture." The choice of a black princess is part of a long-term marketing strategy to give Disney characters as much "diversity" as possible. In 1993, Disney rolled out its first non-white princess in its animated version of Aladdin - and promptly ran into a wall of angry protests from Muslims and Arabs who said the film was racist in its depiction of a Middle East riddled with casual violence.

 

"I come from a land, from a faraway place," ran one notorious song lyric, which was eventually changed because of the lobbying pressure, "where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face; it's barbaric, but hey, it's home." Disney followed that up in 1995 with Pocahontas, a retelling of the encounter between an English settler and a Native American princess so radical it spawned whole seminars at university history departments. Disney's animators also came under fire for modelling Pocahontas on the supermodel Naomi Campbell, although they countered they had in fact used Native American faces as their inspiration.

 

The Frog Princess is written and co-directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, responsible for Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. Perhaps more significantly, the film fits into Disney's princess-oriented marketing strategy. Since 1999, the company has rolled out toys, books, clothing and other merchandise based on its eight existing film princesses - Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Jasmine from Aladdin, Pocahontas and Mulan.

 

Maddy will fit right into that product line. And she is almost sure to raise the hackles of the usual anti-Disney suspects.

 

The days when Walt Disney was accused of blatant racism are long gone. (One particularly egregious example of that being The Jungle Book, made at the height of the civil rights movement in 1964, in which Mowgli is told he can't live with Baloo the bear because different species need to keep to themselves.)

 

But it is still regularly accused of offering a bland, corporate, patronising vision of different ethnicities and cultures, . "Disney's message of inter-racial harmony is clear," Marlene Wurfel wrote in a tough - and funny - essay in Z magazine a few years ago. "It doesn't matter what color your skin is. What matters is that you are beautiful, good, submissive, materialistic, and willing to play the game. If you are racially other than white, you can either be a princess in 'your own country', or you can conform. You can do either of these, while celebrating your deference to the natural order of things in song."

[FatB]

maddy is a nice name... i like maddy, wats rong with it!

[Xalimopatra]

Maddy?Are ya mad?!

I kinda like the animation,it's not bad at all.

 

Edit;

Also if they did make her look like the other European-esque Princesses i.e-Cinderella then a debate will surface too.She has a elegant realistic beauty about her and it is a healthy representation that many little black girls will eventually relate and be happy to.In the midst of all the hoohaa of that black/white doll test and the sad results this is positive in some respects.

[Ariadne]

Disney!

 

Ah Disney!

 

I think within evey secter of our lives there is

some kind of force that tries to condition us in some way or another.

Dominating for children's entertainment is Disney.

The sad thing is a lot of parents, not being aware of semitiocs and symbols in language as well as messgaes within it. Sit their children down in front of a Disney movie and that's where they get a break.

 

The sobering truth is not only is Diseny blatantly racist, but a misogynist as well.

 

a briliant example of this ism is very clear in the litle mermaid. Let look at this movie as a semitioc visual and the symbolism used.

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So the little mermaid is a young , she lives under the sea with her siblings and father.

 

(The sea as a symbol is the murky f.a.n.ta.s.i.e.s of adolescent s in relation to this movie.)

 

She sees the boy. She falls in love with the boy

and she wants the boy, but can't have him.

So she needs to get legs.

 

(Now, here's the interesting part. She can't be with the boy because she has her legs permanently crossed as fins.... she's a virgin....

In order to get the boy she has to get two legs

and what's between them.

Her dad gets mad when he finds out becuase daddy wants his little to have crossed legs.)

 

In order to get the legs from the witch she gives up her voice.

 

(Because men don't care if you have a voice...opinion in other words... all they care is that you have a pair of legs and everything that goes with it.)

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That is one distubing example of a disney princess. Not to mention the fact that in one way or another all the princesses are disempowering to little s.

 

 

The newest one

being no different from the others...her character is a chambermaid for crying out loud!

 

I mean what was the share holder meeting like?

 

"who here know any black people?

Oh come on, one of you must!"

 

"Sir, I don't know any, but I heard of some a while ago."

 

"Do you know what kind of jobs they do, Wilson?"

 

"Yeah, the one I heard of where chambermaids"

 

That's excellent, Wilson, chambermaid is our new ethnic characters position. Now they will never accuse us of being racist "

[Som@li]

The name Maddy and the drawings is fine with me, I guess it all depends how you percieve ugly or pretty, maybe you were looking for the princess to have a fairer skin.

[- Femme -]

^The drawing style is ugly. The colour is ugly too, dull and listless...maybe you should watch a couple of cartoons and come back.

 

KK: I don't think alot of us sit down and analyze disney cartoons. It's just entertainment for a couple of hours and thats it.

[Ariadne]

It's good to question what kind of entertainment you are taking into yourself though....