15 Note that Buena Vista is an umbrella term used for all aspects of
Disney’s business entities.
16 This reversal also occurs in The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
Quasimodo, the son of two dark-skinned Romani (gypsies), has the
milky complexion of a red-headed Irishman. A hero may be physically
disabled, but he must also be Anglo, and his speech must sound Anglo.
17 Princess certainly represents an improvement over The Lion King in
terms of stereotype and language markers but other patterns are still
there, if muted. Critics have questioned the fact that the young African
American main character spends about three-quarters of the film as a
frog:
To make the first African American princess a frog, then, seems to
literally conflate her with animality. Tiana, mixing her dreams of
success with a lack of intelligence and reason, is a black girl who
must hop around like a frog in the way early twentieth-century black
actors had to don blackface and hop around like dogs.
(Gehlawat 2010: 418)18 Characters of an age to pursue a partner who do not do so in the story
line are usually portrayed as awkward, fat or ugly (examples include
the stepsisters in Cinderella, the witch-like Cruella de Ville in 101
Dalmatians, and LaFou in Beauty and the Beast).
Suggested further reading
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2009) Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of
Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Do Rozario, R. (2004) The Princess and the Magic Kingdom: Beyond Nostalgia, the Function of
the Disney Princess. Women’s Studies in Communication 27(1): 34ff.
Fouts, G., Callan, M., Piasentin, K. and Lawson, A. (2006) Demonizing in Children’s Television
Cartoons and Disney Animated Films. Child Psychiatry and Human Development. 37 1: 15–
23.
Nazzi, T. and Gopnik, A. (2001) Linguistic and Cognitive Abilities in Infancy: When Does
Language Become a Tool for Categorization? Cognition 80(3): B11–B20.
Quintana, S. (2008) Handbook of Race, Racism, and the Developing Child. Hoboken, NJ: John
Wiley & Sons.
Sayers, F. C. (1965) Walt Disney Accused. Horn Book. 41: 602–611.
Van Ausdale, D. and Feagin, J.R. (2001) The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.