Princess and the Frog

In Gehlawat's article  The Strange Case of the Princess and the Frog: Passing and the Elision of Race, I found a lot of over-analyzed information. I truly think the author thought too much into The Princess and the Frog. The movie is the start of change. It shows a slow transition for Disney. This article says that by making the main characters into frogs, it avoids the racial issues. In my opinion, it's even better that Tiana And Neveen are frogs majority of the movie because it shows that race doesn't matter. Like we talked about in class, you can still tell the background of a character just by the way they are portrayed (even if they are an animal, a car, or anything else other than a human). If the movie would have shown Tiana as a black sassy character the entire time, someone would have had a problem with it being a racist movie. I think Disney did a lot of research and succeeded in both covering the issue while making sure it wasn't over-dramatic.

This article starts off over-analyzed in the very beginning. It talks about how the setting isn't properly portrayed and how the time period was before World War I where there were segregation laws on trains that were passed. Honestly, this information is useless. This is a Disney movie aimed at children. No child has any idea about any of this. Therefore, it does not matter and these parts are not fully relevant. No child will watch the movie and say this is racist because they are sitting in the back of the train! The movie did a wonderful job showing that race is not an issue (especially by showing Charlotte and Tiana as friends their entire lives). It also teaches a lot of other morals besides race which is why I think it will (and should) be considered a classic.

Encoding and Decoding Race in a Colorblind World..

     After watching The Princess and the Frog for the first time, I was shocked by how different it was from every other Disney princess movie. At first, it may have been due to the race difference. However after reading this last article I realized it wasn't the race that made it so different. It's the way that this movie captures the American Dream perfectly. It truly is the Horatio Alger story, as the article touches on.
      It's kind of shocking to think about how much this movie actually doesn't focus on race. Sure there are parts and one or two comments that could focus on racism, but for the most part it deals with our blindness to racism. I loved the way Sarah Turner used this term in the article. She specifically mentions how Disney confronted multiple people before making final decisions for the movie from the name to the job of the main character, showing that they didn't want to step on anyone's toes unlike in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I also noticed how most of this movie the characters aren't even in human form. They are frogs for majority of the film (around 50 minutes as the article says) which also shows how we are all equal. Anyone can live the American Dream.. anyone!
     While the article starts to compare this movie to other princess films, I realized that this movie has a beginning just like The Cinderella Story (a Warner Brothers film). Both movies start with a story told by their parents about working hard and going on in life but not forgetting about the most important things. This yet again shows another example of how The Princess and the Frog is a universal and colorblind movie.
     Overall I really enjoyed this article and agreed with most of the points argued. I got lost when Turner brings up the lack of historical information, but other than that it was extremely interesting and supports the success of this Disney film.