The Waitress and the Frog, a Marxist Lens of Princess and the Frog
The Disney movie Princess and the Frog is a modern retelling of the classic fairytale where a princess finds a gross frog, she kisses it, it turns into a handsome prince, and they live happily ever after. Disney’s Princess and the Frog is a little different. The story takes place in New Orleans in the 1910s. The main character Tiana is probably the opposite of a princess, she works two jobs as a waitress so that one day she can achieve her dream of opening up a restaurant. The prince, Naveen, comes to New Orleans because he was cut off from his parents since he was partying too much. However, that doesn’t stop him from continuing with his luxurious lifestyle and he is still helped by a servant, Lawrence.
In the first musical number of the movie, Tiana is depicted as being exhausted and oblivious to all the fun partying that is going on around her as she makes her commute to her cafe waitressing job. While Naveen is on the other side and is running around dancing with everyone until he is reminded that he does not have any money to keep up his lifestyle and he either has to get a job or marry a rich girl. Since getting a job is out of the question for Naveen, who has never worked a day in his life, he sets his sights on marrying Charlotte La Bouff, whose father Big Daddy La Bouff is very rich and is hosting Naveen while he is in New Orleans. Charlotte also happens to be Tiana’s childhood best friend, even though they come from very different social backgrounds. Before Charlotte and Naveen meet, Naveen meets Dr. Facillier who is a Voodoo man. Despite Lawrence’s protests Naveen goes and meets with the Voodoo man who then reads Naveen’s and Lawrence’s cards. Naveen’s problem is that he needs money to fund his lifestyle and Lawrence’s problem is that he has been pushed around all his life. So they make a deal, Naveen makes a deal for more green and Lawrence to become the man he’s always wanted to be.
Naveen is turned into a frog and Lawrence is turned into Naveen. The Voodoo man wants Lawrence to marry Charlotte for her money. So Lawrence (looking like Naveen) goes to Charlotte’s house where there is a large party in Naveen’s honor. At that party Charlotte had Tiana cater “her man catching Beignets”. Unknown to Charlotte, who is a little ditzy, when she pays Tiana for catering she just hands her a wad of cash which is enough for Tiana to finally open her restaurant. Because of Charlotte, Tiana is finally able to save enough to buy the place she and her father dreamed about owning.
However, at the party she learns that she was outbid and she loses it to someone else and she is told by the landlords that it would be hard for “a little woman of [her] background” to run a business. This movie takes place in New Orleans during the 1910s which is when segregation was still in affect and this scene is the largest example of when Tiana, a black woman, is being affected by that. The movie overall glosses over racial issues and focuses more on Tiana’s fight to get her business. This scene could also be the landlords looking down upon Tiana because of her lower class. Which ultimately ends up with them giving someone else the restaurant.
After that, Tiana meets Naveen while she is dressed in a princess costume. They kiss to hopefully turn him human because he promises that he is rich and will buy her the restaurant. However, since she is not actually a princess she turns into a frog too.
They then end up in the Bayou and try to survive until they find an alligator named Louis who says that Mama Oodie can turn them human. So they try to find Mama Odie and along the way they meet a firefly named Ray. They meet Mama Odie, a blind Voodoo lady living with a snake alone in the Bayou, and she tells them in a song to “dig a little deeper”. According to Mama Odie “they want to be humans but they are blind to what they need” like how Tiana needs to work less and learn to have fun like her dad and Naveen needs to learn how to work because having his riches back will not make him happy. Mama Odie also talks about how it does not matter about how rich you are or who you are, meaning to her everyone is equal. Eventually she tells them that Charlotte will be a princess on Mardi Gras because her father is king of the Mardi Gras parade, so if Naveen were to kiss her then they would turn back into humans.
They make their way to the Mardi Gras parade on a riverboat and Naveen wants to propose to Tiana but he stops because he would not be able to afford to get her her restaurant unless he married Charlotte. They get to the parade and Naveen gets captured by the Voodoo man. Ray breaks Naveen out and they destroy the necklace that makes Lawrence look like Naveen. Naveen tells Charlotte about how he loves Tiana and about her dreams of a restaurant and Charlotte says that she will buy it for Tiana without marrying Naveen. The movie ends with Tiana and Naveen getting married and once they get married they turn into humans, and then they buy and renovate the restaurant together.
Throughout the movie we see Tiana go from an exhausted waitress to a perky restaurant owner. She worked really hard and made her dream come true and she was also able to change her class. Now that she is part of the higher class is able to have fun and sing and dance with her husband. Before she could only work and in the song Almost There she said she did not “have time for dancing” and according to her that is just considered messing around. Even in the song Almost There, Tiana had fantasies of what her life would be like if she had her restaurant. With a lot of glitz and glamour, Tiana had big dreams for what her restaurant would look like and who would come to it. She said “people gonna come here from everywhere” because her restaurant will be the place for people to come to but only the rich people because her restaurant is fancy.
Naveen is the opposite of Tiana. Throughout the movie he is shown as kind of dumb and lazy. He tries to get money the easy way by going to the Voodoo man and then he gets turned into a frog. He has admittedly never worked a day in his life and he said that his servants did everything for him. He is first seen getting off a boat and he immediately starts going on with his galavanting ways while Lawrence struggles to carry his bags. Lawrence gets his head stuck in a tuba and Naveen does nothing but laugh, Naveen even makes Lawrence dance and jokes about how fat he is. Naveen treats people of a lower class terribly which is also shown when he gets mad when he finds out that Tiana is in fact not a princess and that she is a waitress. However, all of his arrogance and laziness seems to disappear when he gets to know Tiana better. She teaches him how to mince mushrooms which is the first time that he ever works for something and throughout their journey Naveen realized that he wanted to marry Tiana instead of marrying Charlotte. By the end of the movie Naveen is willing to get multiple jobs to pay for Tiana’s restaurant.
The other characters in the movie also follow this pattern. The lower class characters such as Lawrence and Tiana’s mom and dad are portrayed as hardworking and persistent. Lawrence keeps working for Naveen even though he clearly hates his job and Tiana’s parents were able to support Tiana so that she could save money. The upper class characters are portrayed as dumb and lazy, Charlotte gets all of her money from her father who is a wealthy sugar baron and she never has to work for it she just asks. She is also portrayed as a typical Southern Belle who is very sweet but a little ditzy where she does not notice a lot that is going on around her and she only has one goal, which is to marry a prince. She is a very 2D character, her only motivation is to become a princess, which she simulates by wearing fancy dresses and tiaras and she eventually gets close to achieving her dream by almost marrying Naveen. There are some outliers to the typical characters such as Big Daddy La Bouff who is very rich, but he is wealthy because he worked and sold sugar cane.
Despite Princess and the Frog being a modern fairy tale it very much perpetuates capitalistic stereotypes and the American Dream, that people should work hard to achieve their goals and that people who work and are in the upper class are better people. Since that is exactly what Tiana does by working hard as a waitress and achieving her dream of owning a restaurant. The movie does say that a person should work hard but also to remember to have fun. However, Tiana is not shown dancing and partying until after she has a successful restaurant and she is in a higher class. So it is really saying that people should work hard to achieve their dreams and move up socially, and then they can dance and have fun.
