Disney's kidding me, right?

Next year, Disney will be releasing an animated musical version of the old fairy tale "The Frog Prince." The company's original plan was to (1) use the title The Frog Princess; (2) make the girl an African-American servant to a young white woman; (3) name the girl "Maddy"; and (4) set the film in 1920s New Orleans.

First of all, recall that the girl in Walter Crane's "The Frog Prince" was a king's daughter. She was the youngest of three daughters, and she was the most beautiful. While the Brothers Grimm don't include siblings, in both versions, it wasn't the princess who had frog-body-image issues. But Disney, which apparently has been living under a rock since Song of the South, the intervening year of 1964, and Condoleezza Rice's becoming Secretary of freaking State, modernized and improved the story by making the girl a black chambermaid and using the working title of The Frog Princess.

Imagine pitching that with a straight face. She's a servant, see, and she's Disney's first African-American princess. It worked for Cinderella, right? An evil stepmother keeping her stepdaughter from going to the ball is just the same as a young white American woman ordering around her black servant, right? It's not like we're setting this during the antebellum era or anything.

So someone fussed that the girl's name, "Maddy," was too close to "Mammy," and now she'll be named "Tiana." Someone else must have fussed that, in the source story, the girl starts as an actual princess, not a servant, so now rumor has it that Tiana will, in fact, be a princess. Only she'll be from another country, since we don't have titled nobility here.

Query why Disney imports royalty for its version of the story, rather than make Tiana the daughter of a wealthy Creole family in New Orleans. Or why not put our heroine in the Harlem Renaissance? (Though, of course, using the word heroine begs the question of whether Disney ever creates heroines, as opposed to princesses.)

Don't get me wrong. It's great that Disney, for the first time in its 85-year history, is giving the princess role to an African-American girl. I mean, leaving the issue of the character's anorexic-Barbie proportions for another day, it's nice to see the studio recognize the largest ethnic minority in the country, now that they've portrayed brunette, blonde, redhead, auburn, American Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern princesses. And then, when they've strayed into non-princess stories, they've gone with dysfunctional Hawai'ian sisters without parents, orphaned witches, and, and, well, I was going to reference The Emperor's New Groove, but not only does it have only a vague ancient Incan setting, but also it's about a prince, not a princess. I'm left wondering how many other ethnicities Disney was afraid to snub before they decided it was time to give an African-American girl a tiara.

If nothing else, imagine the economic opportunity loss in the past 10-odd years since the characters have been marketed as a group of princesses!

Apparently, the next princess movies scheduled to come down the Disney pipeline are Rapunzel and then some Scottish tale. No Latino or -- forgive me -- Jewish princesses in sight.

One last point. Disney also changed the film's title to The Princess and the Frog, because apparently The Frog Princess -- and remember, in the source story, it was never the princess who was turned into a frog -- is offensive to the French. Is it just me, or is that only offensive to the French if you think the French are too stupid to understand that the word frog in this context is referring to a fairly tale first published by Crane in 1874 -- and the Brothers Grimm in 1812? The French know the story as well as we do, after all. France, being right next to Germany, has had access to German literature since long before a German invented the printing press. They call it "Le Prince grenouille," and it's so commonly recognized a title that someone's even named their hotel after it.

But I digress. Dig the teaser trailer for The Princess and the Frog:




Jumping Jehosaphat on a pogo stick -- that firefly! It's the toothless love child of Jiminy Cricket and Uncle Remus! This is "respect and sensitivity"?