Disney's The Princess and the Frog marks the studio's long-overdue return to hand-drawn animation, and those hands belong to Ron Clements and John Musker -- two animation veterans responsible for later-era classics like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. From the beginning, Disney proudly trumpeted that Frog would feature their first African-American princess with Tiana, a gesture that would go a small way towards righting the wrongs of all the yarn-spinning uncles, jive-talking crows and Neverland savages that came before her.
But as scenes trickled out, there were murmurs of concern. Princess Tiana would be paired with Prince Naveen -- a royal of seemingly South American lineage, voiced by Brazilian-born actor Bruno Campos -- raising eyebrows and ire among a segment of the African-American blogosphere. Then we were introduced to Mama Odie -- a blind, swamp-dwelling voodoo witch doctor. Dated caricature? Lovable sidekick? Both?
Movieline had an opportunity to talk to Clements and Musker today at a series of Disney Animation roundtable interviews at Comic-Con. Both are chipper, unassuming men with a cute tendency of finishing each other's sentences. Telling us the film is close to finished -- just digital coloring is all that's left in the animation process -- we then broached concerns over its minority representations. Here is what they said:
MOVIELINE: Have you heard any of the race-related criticisms about The Princess and the Frog, that Disney's first African-American princess has not been paired with an African-American prince, and that Mama Odie comes across like a stereotype? How do you react to that?
RON CLEMENTS: The first thing is that all the criticism of the movie has been from people who have not seen the movie, who don't know the context of the movie, who don't know the story. From the very beginning, when the project was first announced, there have been these issues. From the very beginning I think we wanted to be certainly as sensitive as possible with what we were doing. I mean, really early on it was clear that this was a major, major thing.
So we did a lot of consulting, and our co-writer on the film Rob Edwards was African-American, and we talked to many African-Americans. We took them through the story, we showed them things, and we've since previewed the movie. The reaction we've gotten from everyone who's actually seen the movie, and knows the story, has been very, very positive, and that's been very encouraging to us. We've gotten notes and we've addressed some things, but I say overall people who know the context of the movie --
JOHN MUSKER: And that includes multiracial audiences -- African-American and otherwise. And in fact the numbers coming out of our preview are high across the board -- it didn't matter.
MOVIELINE: You have Oprah Winfrey's stamp of approval.
RC: Oprah's a character, and she does a great job. Terrence Howard did a great job. So it's been kind of tough for us, and the Internet is at a place where it wasn't necessarily a few years ago. Speculation tends to run rampant, but the only thing I can say is that if people have concerns, just see the movie and I think a lot of the concerns will go away.
The issue with the Prince, the Prince is not African-American, and he's not white. He's played by a Brazilian actor and he's definitely a person of color. Again, it's the context of the movie, and the context of the story -- that's very important in terms of how the story works, and how things sort of work out...
When people will see the movie, the reasons for things will be more clear. Not that there won't be issues. I'm sure many people will have issues, but we feel good about the movie, and I think we feel that it works for all audiences the way we hoped it would. Because certainly you don't want to do this kind of movie and have it divide people. You want to bring people together. That's always been the intention. ♦