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Musical fairy tale The Princess and the Frog features Disney’s first black princess. (DISNEY)

TORONTO — The movie  The Princess and the Frog  represents a return to tradition for the animated Disney feature in almost all facets — save one.

A variant of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale relocated to early 20th-century New Orleans, the movie is an unapologetic musical along the lines of The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. And like those two animated classics, it utilizes hand-drawn animation, in defiance of the computer-animated default setting established when Disney and CG pioneers Pixar effectively joined forces in 2006.

But the movie breaks with tradition in a big way in its choice of princess. Disney previously offered up a Persian princess in Aladdin and an aboriginal princess in Pocahontas. The Princess and the Frog is the first time the studio has given audiences a black princess.

Appropriately for a Broadway-friendly musical, the film cast Anika Noni Rose in the role of Tiana, a would-be restaurateur whose dreams of success are diverted when she encounters the cursed Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos), trapped in the body of the titular amphibian as a result of a voodoo spell.

Rose, 37, made her Broadway debut in 1999 opposite Winnipegger Jeremy Kushnier in the musical Footloose and subsequently won the 2004 Tony Award for her role in Caroline, or Change.

Recognizable to TV audiences as Grace Makutsi in The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and to movie fans as backup singer Lorrell Robinson in Dreamgirls, Rose is sensitive to the fact that Disney's first black princess has already aroused sensitivity and suspicions in the blogosphere, where critics have complained about everything from the character's original name (Maddie) to the fact that the first black princess spends the bulk of the movie incarnated, like her prince, in the body of a frog.

"There's a lot of misinformation out there," Rose says over a cup of tea and honey in a suite at the Park Hyatt Hotel. "But you're also talking about a fear of people who have not been treated well in the land of animation, in the many years animation has been around."

Indeed, even in the relatively benign Disney realm, the funhouse mirror of animation has given us the shucking SSRqn' jiving crows of Dumbo, while more overtly racist images were common in the cartoons of the SSRq40s and SSRq50s.

"Black people have been represented as bad, evil, scary, ignorant, so there has always been a fear out of that history," Rose says.

"I think once people see the movie and they take the movie in for what it is, the fear that was generated will disappear, because it was done with an amazing amount of love and care and respect," she says. "What kind of person would I be to be in something that was disrespectful of me?"

Respect was paid to the extent that animators modelled Tiana after Rose herself, at least while she's in human form.

"I was very, very honoured to see my face on that screen. I was shocked and in a bit of awe when I realized how much she looks like me," she says. "I had seen many renderings of what she might look like so it was amazing to me.

"(I was) able to look at it and say: Oh my goodness, they lifted that expression right off my face," she says.

And did that recognition extend to Tiana in frog mode?

"Depends on the time of day," Rose says with a laugh. "Generally, the frogs look like frogs.

"But my frog has great lashes," she adds. "I was glad about that."

The Princess and the Frog opens in theatres next Friday, Dec. 11.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 4, 2009 D1