Disney screwed up this week.  Big Time.  Twice.  Retailer Barneys has announced a holiday display featuring the Disney character Minnie Mouse, who has a disturbingly disproportionate and unhealthy body at 5’11” and a size 0. Wow.  But wait, there’s more!

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This week Disney also announced their newest princess Sofia is Latina, but only after a blogger asked executive producer Jamie Mitchell at a press conference why Sofia’s mother has darker skin than any of the other characters.  When Disney first announced their new show Sofia the First, there was no mention of her race.

(via FeministDisney)

Six decades after unleashing persistent NAACP bugaboo Song of the South (1946), and two after firmly suppressing it, that peculiar cultural institution known as the Walt Disney Company has made a symbolic reparation by creating its first African-American princess—and plunking her down in the middle of Jim Crow–era Louisiana! A patronizing fantasia of plantation life in post–Civil War Georgia, Song could at least be understood—if hardly excused—as a product of its time (18 years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act). But is Disney’s latest, The Princess and the Frog, the Obama-era fairy tale that anyone other than the “birther” crowd has been waiting for?

The Princess and the Frog again: white folks that I know come to me in confessional and tell me they think the film was racist and they know it but like/saw it anyway and let their kids watch it. They still take their kids to Disney World at least once a year. Disney can’t get it right, so when are we going stop wanting and feeling like we need to be included in Disney’s fantastical, wonderful world? And when are our so-called allies going to join our staunch allies and just say NO?

Why does it have to be “I love Disney, but….”? You could just as easily flip that sentence around and say “Disney is racist, classist, and sexist but I still love it”. Those statements are alarmingly similar if you ask me.

Continuing with our analytical look at The Princess and The Frog, an insightful two part response to the film from Black feminist blogger Ms Queenly, deconstructing aspects of Tiana’s image and asking why reviewers consider “not entirely racist” to be an acceptable media standard.

Read Part One and Part Two

What’s especially unfair about those who condemn blacks who criticize The Princess and the Frog is that whites, as a race, are not condemned as ungrateful or otherwise for critiquing the numerous white Disney princesses (or society at large.) Whites have taken Disney to task over white princesses’ independence, agency, body size, beauty, and intelligence among other things. There are academics and writers who have built a discipline out of critiquing Disney – particularly its princesses. While some whites now paint Disney as a desperate corporation scrambling to alter Tiana and assuage the endless demands of blacks, they fail to note how Ariel was the headstrong response to white complaints about obedient Cinderella and Belle was the feminist response to white criticism about willing-to-give-up-her-voice-for-a-man Ariel. Whites have made countless demands about their heroines, and Disney has altered their creations in response to those demands. Yet whites also know that if any given princess isn’t pleasing, in a few years another will be created. This is the first and most likely last black Disney princess.

Since the Disney’s Dolls article was a little out of date, here are some thoughtful points on race, expectation and entitlement that were written in response to the trailer for The Princess and the Frog. Over the next few days I’ll post some bits and pieces of the conversations which arose from that movie, and from Disney’s overall handling of their first only black princess.

Disneyland recently updated their employee dress code to allow men to sport beards for the first time in company history. Prior to the change, only neatly trimmed moustaches were permitted (they became allowable in 2000, in case you were wondering).

The dress code is an arcane and fascinating look into the rigid conservatism that informs Disney’s carefully controlled image. Among the provisions are:

Male:

• Hair must be neatly cut on the back and sides, forming a smooth, symmetrical appearance so that it does not extend beyond or cover any part of the ears or the shirt collar. The overall style must be neat, natural and balanced proportionally.

• All facial hair must be fully grown in, neatly groomed and well maintained at no longer than a quarter of an inch in length. Mustaches may extend below the corners of the mouth to meet with the facial beard.

• Shaping the mustache or beard to a particular style is not permitted. Mustaches (without lower facial hair) must not extend onto or over the upper lip and must extend to the corners of the mouth, but not beyond or below the corners.

• Cast Members without a mustache, beard, or goatee are expected to be clean-shaven every day.

Female:

• Hair should be neatly combed and arranged in a classic, easy-to-maintain style. Extreme styles are not permitted

• Conservative braided hairstyles without beads or ornamentation are permitted.

• The Disney Look does not permit extremes in dyeing, bleaching or coloring. If the hair color is changed, it must be natural looking and well-maintained. Subtle highlighting or frosting is permitted, as long as it creates a uniform look over the whole head and meets all of the previously listed guidelines.

• Fingernails should be clean. If polish is used, it should be an appropriate, neutral color. This includes deeper, richer shades of polish. Polishes that are not permitted include: black, gold, silver, multicolored or neon. Charms or decals on fingernails are not permitted. Fingernails should not exceed one-fourth of an inch (approximately 6 mm) beyond the fingertip.

And of course, lest we forget:

Often it’s the seemingly little things that detract from our guests’ enjoyment – chewing gum, having poor posture, using a cellular phone or frowning.

The skin colour of the female characters in Disney’s recent animated films
may be different and the marketing more sophisticated. 

But Kathi Maio argues that underneath all the buckskin and the scales
they’re still happy homemakers looking for a man.

It is more than a little ironic that the Walt Disney Company’s current animated feature, Mulan, retells an age-old legend about the Chinese successfully fighting off a foreign invasion. The American media giant chose to make this particular story into its 36th animated feature precisely because it was the perfect vehicle for a strategic incursion into the Chinese film market.

The legendary woman warrior, Hua Mu-Lan, who bravely fought off alien onslaughts has now herself become an agent of a US conglomerate’s ambition to dominate the culture of Asia – and the entire globe.

It’s a heavy burden for one young, doe-eyed heroine to bear. But so it is for all of the young women Disney has co-opted for the screen. They aren’t simply cartoons. They are symbols of the times – and one company’s measurement of how their target audiences want to see women.

An excellent (if rather old) article about Disney’s heroines - the negative messages in their stories, and how little they’ve really changed. I would certainly say that these problematic themes have carried over into more recent films. Disney still require every heroine to settle down with a man, still try to placate critics with token ‘independent woman’ traits (look, she has an ambition, she’s a feminist now), still capitalise on the perceived exoticism of non-white characters, and still present idyllic, whitewashed accounts of history.

What does everyone else think?