Because the film was set to center around Disney’s first African-American princess, The Princess and the Frog was under close scrutiny from African-American media outlets from the time that the concept materials were revealed in 2007. Disney changed several key elements to the film after receiving numerous complaints of racial insensitivity.

Besides retitling the picture (it was originally titled The Frog Princess) to avoid the implication that the first African-American Disney princess was somehow ugly or animal, the lead character’s name changed from Maddy to Tiana, since Maddy sounded too much like “Mammy”. A subplot about her working as a maid was also dropped in order to avoid negative stereotypes.

Critics also protested some of the character choices that ended up in the final film, such as the choice to have the black heroine’s love interest be a non-black prince, and the use of a black male voodoo witchdoctor as the film’s villain. Also questioned was the film’s setting of New Orleans, which had been heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, resulting in the expulsion of a large number of mostly black residents. Critics claimed the choice of New Orleans as the setting for a Disney film with a black heroine was an affront to the Katrina victims’ plight.

Most of the objections lie in the characterizations of the african americans in the live action sequences, namely Uncle Remus and Aunt Tempy. 

However, most of the reason for the objection comes from the fact that most people wrongly assume that the movie is about slaves. The film reviewers sent to see the press screening by the NAACP (as well as many other reviewers of the time) believed the film to be set in the antebellum South (pre-Civil War), most likely because of all of the antebellum films that had come out previously (Gone With the Wind, Jezebel), and therefor believe that the african americans depicted in the film are slaves, and that Disney was depicting a rose colored, sugarcoated view of happy slaves who loved their masters. In fact, the movie is set during the Reconstruction era, after the war, and all of the african americans on the plantation are working there of their own free will.  

Based on the review given to him by the two reviewers who saw the movie,   Walter Francis White, the executive secretary of the NAACP telegraphed major newspapers around the country with the following statement about the film:

“The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People recognizes in ‘Song of the South’ remarkable artistic merit in the music and in the combination of living actors and the cartoon technique. It regrets, however, that in an effort neither to offend audiences in the north or south, the production helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, ‘Song of the South’ unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts.”

It is. After Song of the South’s last theatrical release in 1986, Disney decided not to re-release it again, most likely because of the movie’s racist stigma.  The movie had been released on video and laserdisc in various foreign countries, but never in the United States. As of December 2001, Song of the South was withdrawn worldwide.

In the original short The Three Little Pigs (1933), the Big Bad Wolf disguises himself as a Jewish peddler to try and trick the pigs into letting him in. He spoke with an thick eastern-European (most likely Yiddish) accent and “has a hook nose, wears sidelocks and a dark broad-rimmed hat similar to the one worn by some Orthodox Jews”. In 1948 for the shorts re-release, the scene was reanimated to remove the visual suggestion the wolf was Jewish, but the Yiddish dialect remained. Years later, at an unspecified date, the dialogue was changed and the character now took on a classic cartoon “dumb guy” voice.

Walt Disney admitted after the reanimation that the original scene was in bad taste.

(source: English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States, by Rosina Lippi-Green)

Walt Disney was long rumored to be antisemitic during his lifetime, and such rumors have persisted after his death. Indeed, in the 1930s he welcomed German filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl to Hollywood. Disney biographer Neal Gabler, the first writer to gain unrestricted access to the Disney archives, concluded in 2006 that available evidence does not support such accusations. In a CBS interview Gabler summarized his findings:

“That’s one of the questions everybody asks me… My answer to that is, not in the conventional sense that we think of someone as being an antisemite. But he got the reputation because, in the 1940s, he got himself allied with a group called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which was an anti-Communist and antisemitic organization. And though Walt himself, in my estimation, was not antisemitic, nevertheless, he willingly allied himself with people who were antisemitic, and that reputation stuck. He was never really able to expunge it throughout his life.”

Disney eventually distanced himself from the Motion Picture Alliance in the 1950s.

The Walt Disney Family Museum acknowledges that Disney did have “difficult relationships” with some Jewish individuals, and that ethnic stereotypes common to films of the 1930s were included in some early cartoons, such as Three Little Pigs. However, the museum points out that Disney employed Jews throughout his career and was named “1955 Man Of The Year” by the B’nai B’rith chapter in Beverly Hills

The biggest argument that I hear in defense media with racism in them is, “When it was made, it was a different time”. Coincidentally, this is also the argument that brings the most anger from the people who are offended by that same racist media.

Racism stems from cultural stereotypes. While the phrase “it was a different time” in no way excuses any kind or use of racism, it is a valid point in the fact that when these movies and cartoons were made (namely, before the civil rights movement), the stereotypes commonly found in them were much more culturally acceptable than they are now. This is mostly because the minorities that the stereotypes targeted were much smaller than they are now, and had no voice to speak out for them. Or if they did, it just wasn’t listened to.

Take shows from the “golden age of radio”. Shows like Amos ‘n’ Andy, which was about characters in an african american neighborhood, or the early days of Eddie “Rochester” Anderson’s character on the Jack Benny show. These characters were full of stereotypes, from their “crude, uneducated” speech to the fact that they carried switchblades, shot dice on the streetcorner, and were always thinking up a get rich quick scheem. At the time, this is what the mostly white american audiences thought was funny, so it was what was used. In films, the stereotypical fat, dark-skinned ”Mammy” character had been around for ages, and was particularly common in 1930s and 40s period pieces (Gone With The Wind, of course, being the classic example). Other popular stereotypes of the time included the portrayal of East Asians as very small people with huge front teeth and the portrayal of  Native Americans as dangerous savages.

At the time that they were produced, Walt Disney was not the only one using stereotypes in his cartoons. Many of Warner Brothers’ popular “Loony Tunes” and “Merry Melodies” cartoons are editied when they apear on television today, to remove things that today’s audience would find offensive or racist, such as an explosion creating what (usually intentionally) looks like blackface on a character. But, in the case of a group of cartoons that has come to be known as “the Censored Eleven”, the racist themes are so essential to the plot and so completely pervade the cartoons that the copyright holders believe that no amount of selective editing could ever make them acceptable for distribution, and they have not been broadcast on television since 1968. These included shorts like Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time, and Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears. All of the Censored Eleven can be found online, if you really want to see how truly jaw dropping they are.

While the Censored Eleven are predominantly full of african american stereotypes, there are also another ton or so of cartoons produced by other distributers from the 30s through the 50s which are no longer aired due to their stereotypes of other races, particularly ones from World War II with racist depictions of the Japanese, a very common practice at the time.

So keep this all in mind during the course of the next few posts. As Whoopi Goldberg warns the audience in the intro to each disk of Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 3, although the behavior was and is not acceptable, the cartoons depicting this are a vital part of history and should not be forgotten.

I can, but I’m going to be very carefull about it. I’ve seen others try to tackle it, and seen them get horribly bashed by people claiming that they can’t possibly understand because they’re not of that particular race/ethnicity/religion.

So, the next few posts will be about racism or the what is perceived racism in Disney movies and cartoons. I am sticking to published materials and not opinions when going about posting the next few facts. There is no intention to offend anyone in any of the following posts (or in any of my posts for that matter).