Walt Disney will soon have a new heroine — a black princess.

After years of criticism for alleged white bias and African- American stereotyping, the company responsible for Snow White will release a film in 2009 entitled The Frog Princess, starring a black animated princess called Maddy.

Like her white Disney sisters — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, the Little Mermaid, and the beauty from Beauty and the Beast — Maddy will also get her own product line of toys, books, clothing, DVDs, furniture and other merchandise, sold under the Disney Princess brand.

Disney Princess toys, aimed at girls aged 3 to 8, have generated $3 billion (£1.5 billion) of sales. Disney hopes that by creating a character who appeals to African Americans, sales will increase even further.

The company lags behind other children’s brands in its conversion to multiculturalism; Mattel introduced the first African-American Barbie doll, Francie, a friend of Barbie, in 1967. After criticism that Francie shared the same body features as the white Barbie dolls, a new, more ethnically accurate doll called Christie was introduced a year later.

Disney, founded in 1923 by the brothers Walt and Roy Disney, announced plans for a black version of The Frog Princess at its annual shareholders’ meeting in New Orleans.

“The film’s New Orleans setting and strong princess character give the film lots of excitement and texture,” said Dick Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, which said it was holding its meeting in New Orleans to give support to the city, still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city in 2005.

Maddy will not be the first non-white character from Disney, which has been trying to distance itself from the image of Walt Disney as an antiSemitic Nazi sympathiser, union-basher and FBI informant — not to mention heavy drinker and smoker. Nevertheless, some of the accusations made against Disney in books such as Marc Eliot’s Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince, have been challenged, and critics have pointed out that some black Disney characters, such as the crows in Dumbo, are sympathetic.

It has also been suggested that Disney may have attended meetings of the American Nazi Party simply to get his films into Nazi-occupied countries before the war.

Disney’s most famous character, Mickey Mouse, was later shown fighting Nazis as a member of the Secret Service, and the Nazis accused Disney of using Mickey as part of an American-Jewish plot to make vermin acceptable (the same argument was used recently by an Iranian official, this time in reference to Tom and Jerry). Disney’s first non-white animated heroine, a Middle Eastern princess named Jasmine, appeared in 1992, in Aladdin. Then came Pocahontas, the Native-American princess (criticised for resembling Naomi Campbell), and the Chinese heroine Mulan.

But Disney’s efforts to be multicultural have not always gone according to plan. In 1993 there were protests from Muslims who said Aladdin depicted the Middle East as barbaric. One lyric, which included the line, “I come from a land . . . where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face,” resulted in a complaint from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The offending lyric was later changed.

Top dolls

– The first African-American Barbie, called Black Barbie, appeared in American shops in 1980, at the same time as a Hispanic version. Her features were modelled on blonde Barbie, but with curly afro hair and dark skin. More recent versions, above, have adapted to fashions

– The Royal Shakespeare Company cast David Oyelowo, a black actor, in the role of an English monarch for the first time in 2001. He played Henry VI

– Halle Berry was the first African-American winner of an Oscar for Best Actress, in 2001, for Monster’s Ball

– Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America in 1983, representing New York. She was forced to resign her title in 1984 after it emerged that she had posed nude for Penthouse magazine

– Sales of Disney Princess toys, which are aimed at girls aged 3 to 8, have generated $3bn

Source: Pageanthistory.com, Times Archives

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