The Princess and the Frog and the Critical Gaze
The last thing that concerns me about The Princess and the Frog might be termed Esmeralda’s Eyes syndrome. In the Disney movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which had its own racial problems, the Romani woman Esmeralda, in the film referred to as a gypsy, has deep brown skin, black hair, and bright green eyes. Now I know that people whose skin isn’t beige, including those among the Romani people, don’t necessarily have brown eyes – my own great-grandfather was a golden skinned man with lovely baby blues, but Esmeralda’s eyes didn’t have the naturalness of Sharbat Gula’s. The vivid aquamarine shade of Esmeralda’s eyes jarred distractingly with her skin. As a child watching the film I was struck by how my sister and I would have had a heroine, or at least a hero’s love interest, with exactly our features if only Esmeralda’s eyes had been brown. So many girls, whether they were Romani, black, Pacific Islanders, or South Asians, could have finally seen themselves reflected in a Disney leading lady if that one small detail had been changed. I felt, rightly or wrongly, as though Disney had made Esmeralda’s eyes green to keep girls like me from identifying with her, to thwart us, to show that in order to be beautiful or worthy of headlining a Disney film you had to have at least one European feature, and animators were determined to provide Esmeralda with one even though it clashed alarmingly with her other features. I felt as though Disney were saying to whites, “Yes, Esmeralda is non-white, but not really.”
How does this relate to The Princess and the Frog? When I read the plot of the film I felt disappointed to learn that the heroine spends a significant chunk of the movie not as a black princess at all but as a frog. After decades of waiting, would it be too much to actually see an hour and a half of a black princess on the screen? I can’t help but think that Disney would never hide a non-black princess away in animal form for a large part of a film – maybe because they never have. This is a fairy tale with a white prince and a black princess who, for much of the movie, isn’t a black princess at all. Perhaps in the scenes where Tiana is hopping around in her toady body whites in the audience will forget how melanin-endowed she was in the movie’s opening and identify with her. Still, I can’t help but wonder if The Princess and the Frog came down with a case of Esmeralda’s Eyes syndrome – if this was Disney’s way of saying to white audiences, “Yes, Tiana’s black, but not really.”
(Source: racialicious.com)
