In the movie, Princess and the Frog, it is set in New Orleans and we see a young black woman named Tiana. Tiana lived her whole life working hard to make enough money to open up her own restaurant. One day everything hit a bump in the road when Prince Naveen shows up in her life. The only problem is that Prince Naveen has been turned into a frog by the evil Dr. Facilier. Naveen mistakes Tiana for a princess and kisses her, thinking he might defeat the curse put upon him. Only to find out he turns Tiana into a frog as well. The two of them thus go on an adventure through the bayou in search of finding a way to reverse the spell put on them. Throughout this movie we see a lot of problems with race and gender. if we look outside the story line and focus on the movie itself, we can see that Princess Tiana is one of the first main character in a Disney movie to be Black. This movie depicts the black community in New Orleans and how they live their day to day lives. The problem with this movie is that we see Tiana, a black woman working a minimum wage job as a waitress, and this girl named Charlotte. Charlotte is a white woman who comes from a very wealthy family. In this movie we see people of wealth being white and we see the poorer community as black. Tiana works insanely hard to get what she wants out of society while charlotte, who is friends with Tiana, does not have to work at all. This can be seen as a problem with power and injustice because the black community is depicted as less than the white community. I think that this movie expects us to take away that no matter where you come from or what you’re going through, you can achieve amazing things. Tiana started out barely making and ends the movie rich and achieving her dreams. We can reflect this back to some other works we have read in class, like “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. We see the author talk about women of color who ultimately are not the same level as men, meaning they are of lower rank in society. We see this in the Princess and the Frog because Tiana starts off the movie making ends meet, while Prince Naveen and even Charlotte’s dad, have lots of money and are of higher social class.
