Orlando, Florida – A new attraction starring Disney’s first black princess is opening at the company’s U.S. theme parks, and some Disney followers see it as a suitable replacement for a previous attraction based on a film that contained racist tropes.
The theme park’s new attraction updates Tiana’s storyline from the 2009 animated film “The Princess and the Frog” and will open this year in the space formerly occupied by Splash Mountain. The water ride was themed “Song of the South,” a 1946 Disney film filled with racist clichés about African Americans and plantation life.
Tiana’s Bayou Adventure maintains Splash Mountain’s DNA as a canal ride, but is infused with music, scenery and animatronic characters inspired by the film set in 1920s New Orleans. It will open to the public later this month at Walt Disney World , in Florida, and at Disneyland, in California, later this year.
“For black girls, Tiana meant a lot. When a child gets to see someone who looks like them, it matters,” said Neal Lester, an English professor at Arizona State University who has written about Tiana.
Disney’s announcement that it would transform its former Splash Mountain ride into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure was made in June 2020, following the social justice protests sparked by the murder. of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. At the time, Disney said the change was already underway. But this happened when companies in the US were reconsidering or renaming brands with decades amid worldwide protests.
The film “Song of the South” is a mix of live action, cartoons and music featuring an older black man who works on a plantation and tells fables about talking animals to a white city boy. The film has been criticized for its racist stereotypes, has not been released in theaters in decades and is not available on the company’s streaming service, Disney+.
Disney has been criticized for racist tropes in films made in previous decades. The raven characters in the 1941 film “Dumbo” and the character King Louie in the 1967 “The Jungle Book” were seen as African-American caricatures. The depiction of Native Americans in the 1953 film “Peter Pan” and Siamese cats – often considered Asian stereotypes – in the 1955 film “Lady and the Tramp” were also ridiculed.
Not everyone believes that opening an attraction based on Tiana’s story resolves Disney’s past problematic racial representations.
In turning Splash Mountain into Tiana’s Bayou adventure, rather than completely dismantling the attraction, Disney linked “Song of the South” to “The Princess and the Frog.” Both are fantasies that are mostly silent on the racial realities of the segregated eras they depict, said Katie Kapurch, an English professor at Texas State University who has written widely about Disney.
“We can see the impulse to replace, rather than dismantle or build anew, also as a metaphor for structural racism,” Kapurch said. “Again, this is not intentional on Disney’s part, but the observation gets to the heart of how Disney reflects America back to itself.”
The imagineers who design Disney attractions are always trying to look at attractions with new eyes and ways to tell new stories “so everyone feels included,” said Carmen Smith, senior vice president of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products.
“We never want to perpetuate stereotypes or misconceptions,” Smith said Monday. “Our intention is to tell great stories.”
It’s also important that Imagineers tell a variety of stories to their global audience, said Charita Carter, senior creative producer at Walt Disney Imagineering.
“Society changes and we develop different sensibilities,” Carter said. “We focus our stories differently depending on the needs of our society.”
Splash Mountain’s transformation into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is one of several recalibrations at the entertainment giant’s theme parks for attractions whose stories are considered dated or offensive.
In 2021, Disney announced that it would remodel the Jungle Cruise, one of the Disney Parks’ original rides, which had been criticized in previous years for being racially insensitive because of its depiction of animatronic indigenous people as savages or headhunters. Three years earlier, Disney eliminated the “bride auction” scene, considered offensive because it depicted women lining up for the auction, in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” attraction.
It’s a positive step for Disney to have a ride based on a character from a setting not seen in previous versions of the Disney princesses, replacing an attraction from a film steeped in racist tropes, as “representation is important,” Lester said.
“Disney is first and foremost about money and getting people to the park, and you can make money and still have representation and be aware of the history of social justice and make everyone feel like they belong there.” ,” said Lester.
___
Mike Schneider book“Mickey and the Teamsters: A Fight for Fair Unions at Disney,” was published in October by the University Press of Florida. Follow him on Xold Twitter.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
