zukosfieldtrips:ursulatheseabitchh:waltdisneyconfessionsrage:maymaisiemae:waltdisneyconfessions:&ldq
zukosfieldtrips:ursulatheseabitchh:waltdisneyconfessionsrage:maymaisiemae:waltdisneyconfessions:“Tiana’s concept art is so gorgeous. It’s funny that Disney didn’t put more effort into her hair when they were so proud of their work on Rapunzel and Merida’s hair…I’d wonder why but it’s probably the same reason that the one black princess is the princess that’s a frog for 85% of the movie”So, you think that Disney is racist, and are so racist that they think that black people can’t have loose hair? Uh, no. Rapunzel’s hair is a HUGE part of her story and character development, of course they’d work hard on that. Merida’s hair was a huge factor of her in the advertisements, and is kind of a metaphor for her wild personality. As for Tiana, I doubt, I so highly doubt that her hair is up for most of the movie because Disney is racist. Tiana keeping her hair up shows her personality too, her hard-working personality, as it shows that she doesn’t want loose hair in her eyes or hair falling in her food when she cooks. And also, Merida and Rapunzel are CGI, and CGI hair usually has way more detail than 2D hair.Finally, I still get annoyed when people hate on how Tiana is a frog for most of the movie. I honestly don’t see the racism in that, and I think it’s as good a story for their first black heroine as any.Black hair (particularly black women’s hair) is stigmatized in Western society as dirty, or unkempt. Most ethnic styles of hair are frowned upon, such as Afros, twists, braids, puffs, and dreadlocks. This is subliminally carried into Princess and the Frog with the artists choosing (operative term) to keep Tiana’s hair back or up during her few minutes as a human on screen. There’s honestly no reason she could not have had her hair down, especially near the end.And while computer animation can give you more details (one of the major pros of the medium), that doesn’t magic away the fact that the animators didn’t want to animate Tiana’s hair beyond a few bobs of her ponytail. Detail is not the issue here. Past Disney women whose hair also did not factor into the plots of their stories had very competently animated hair. And those were all hand-drawn.So the medium has nothing to do with competent animation.And I guess it’s good enough that the first black heroine (and only one as far as Disney is concerned) is not even human for nearly 85% of the her movie? Yeah, because that’s a respectful portrayal of a black woman: to have her be a frog for the majority of her film. And that’s especially memorable compared to her white counterparts whose screen time is never compromised and are able to keep their humanity throughout them.INVISIBLE DIVERSITY IS NOT REAL DIVERSITY.Tiana has the most lazily animated hair of any disney princess. It’s in a bun, it stays in the bun. No movement, no body whatsoever. Any disney heroine, period. And to suggest that that doesn’t have anything to do behind the stigma surrounding black hair then you aren’t paying attention.Also, if you do a Google image search for “natural hair updos” or “natural hair styles” you will see plenty of options that would keep Tiana’s hair out of the way when she’s cooking.look at the possibilities. look at them. and what did disney go with?and i speak as someone who finds elaborate hair wildly impractical, but since when has impracticality ever stopped a disney princess from looking fabulous? hell, if you wanted to talk about impractical hair, Rapunzel’s should have been a hopeless rat’s nest even with her brushing it all out twenty million times a day. but’s it’s disney, it’s fantasy - except when something problematic crops up, then suddenly everyone’s a realist and Tiana can’t have loose hair because she’s a busy entrepreneur, not because hey maybe just possibly this negative stigma about black hair might have influenced things.but i think what gets to me the most about this is that disney animators are sort of renowned for playing around with the interesting aspects of whatever subject they’ve got on their plates. you know how they talk about the detail and effort that they put into stuff like designing the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, or studying lions for the Lion King, or, yes, animating the hair on Rapunzel and Merida. those kinds of things where artists look at something and go ‘gosh that’s awesome, i want to figure out how to make that work’. and so i look at tiana’s concept art (and concept in general) and see so much potential, that, yeah, it is a problem that the first (and maybe only) black disney princess spends most of her movie as a frog and the rest of it sporting kind of an average stock-princess-y look. that, to me, says that the producers and animators and everyone else who made the major decisions for the final production saw more interesting potential in a frog than in their first goddamn black princess. -- source link
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