The latest instalment in Disney’s animated canon, The Princess and the Frog (2009), has been hailed as many things. It perpetuates the American fable of the self-made hero and celebrates the triumph of American ingenuity and industry during the worst of the Global Financial Crisis. Most significantly, The Princess and the Frog introduces Disney’s very first African-American ‘princess’. The film ostensibly pays long-overdue tribute to America’s racial plurality, and, fittingly, was released in the first year of Obama’s presidency. As a Disney spokeswoman declared, “Princess Tiana will be a heroine in the great tradition of Disney’s rich animated fairy tale legacy, and all other characters and aspects of the story will be treated with the greatest respect and sensitivity.”[1]

But notable for its absence in the promotion and criticism of the film is its role in the construction of a post-Katrina New Orleans. Its 1920s Louisiana setting is one of Disney’s few geographically and temporally specific settings, and reflects the post-Katrina development of a New Orleans mythology that romanticises the city into an exotic paradise of ethno-cultural ‘Otherness’ within the American interior. This is indicated by the film’s fetishisation of New Orleans culture, such as its denouément during Mardi Gras, jazz soundtrack, Tiana’s skill at Louisiana cuisine, and, most significantly, its fixation on voodoo spirituality. The film is at considerable pains to assure us that “dreams do come true in New Orleans”, and evades the tragic knowledge that its lush settings and characters were obliterated so recently in America’s national memory.

This paper considers the specific “Americanness” of The Princess and the Frog and its construction of a new “Disney-fied” national memory of Louisiana and the ruined city of New Orleans.

[1]  "Protests Come Early to Disney's 'Princess'". IMDb. May 11, 2007. http://www.imdb.com/news/sb/2007-05-11/#3.