Disney abandoned Princess Tiana — until it needed what she represents

Disney’s newest attraction, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, replaces the controversial Splash Mountain — but Disney doesn’t want fans comparing the old ride to the new one. These days, Disney doesn’t acknowledge Song of the South, the movie Splash Mountain was built around. The film has never gotten a digital release and isn’t officially available for streaming. But until 2020, Splash Mountain was a huge, unignorable, concrete reminder of the movie, a surprisingly big tear in Disney’s usually thorough wallpapering over questionable moments in its history.

Now it’s gone, and we don’t have to wonder what it means to have a Song of the South ride at Disney parks anymore. But since Disney won’t explicitly say why it replaced Splash Mountain, we have to discuss a different question: what it means to have a Princess and the Frog attraction in 2024.

Amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, multiple petitions circulated online demanding that Disney retheme Splash Mountain. Variations of the log-flume ride appeared in Walt Disney World, Disneyland in California, and Tokyo Disneyland, and it periodically ranked high on informal polls of Disney parks’ most-loved attractions. But some Disney fans bridled against its connection to Song of the South, the 1946 Disney live-action/animation hybrid movie best known for its racist caricatures and rosy glorification of life in the Reconstruction-era South.

The Splash Mountain controversy isn’t new…

Pushback against the movie didn’t start in 2020: The film was derided all the way back to its original 1940s release, with protesters gathering at its downtown Oakland premiere. By the time Disney announced the Song of the South-themed attraction in 1987, the movie’s reputation as a racist vestige of an earlier time had already been cemented.

Michael Eisner, Disney’s CEO at the time, was concerned about that legacy, and allegedly insisted the ride be named “Splash Mountain,” rather than something tied directly to Song of the South. (According to Imagineer Tom Baxter, who came up with the ride, that was to cross-promote Splash, the Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah mermaid flick.) Yet according to an LA Times article published around the ride’s release, Disney officials were fairly confident that guests wouldn’t oppose the ride, because the attraction only used animal characters from the film’s animated segments, and none of the movie’s Black human characters.

When the petitions to dismantle or replace Splash Mountain came to a head in the summer of 2020, Disney announced it was overhauling the ride, and had been planning to for a while, thank you very much. The 2020 press release hinted at the attraction’s contentious past, but didn’t actually spell it out: “The retheming of Splash Mountain is of particular importance today. The new concept is inclusive — one that all of our guests can connect with and be inspired by, and it speaks to the diversity of the millions of people who visit our parks each year.”

That new concept? One of Disney’s last traditionally animated films, and also the first (and only) to star a Black princess.

…but Disney’s support for the movie that replaced it is new

2009’s The Princess and the Frog was supposed to revitalize traditional animation for Disney. The studio had been turning away from 2D animation after a string of box-office blunders in the early 2000s, amid an industry-wide push to CG animation. Walt Disney Animation Studios’ then-chief creative officer John Lasseter, who’d come over from Pixar, particularly pushed for the change. According to the Independent, he felt that Disney’s choice to scrap traditional animation had been a mistake.

In spite of solid reviews, though, Disney’s experiment with reaching back to its 2D days didn’t reach company expectations at the box office. The studio only made one other 2D animated movie after The Princess and the Frog — 2011’s Winnie the Pooh — before pivoting entirely to CG.

“I was stunned that Princess didn’t do better,” Lasseter told Variety in 2016. “We dug into it and did a lot of research and focus groups. It was viewed as old-fashioned by the audience.”

Like other movies deemed unsuccessful by Disney standards, The Princess and the Frog faded into the background. Tangled and then Frozen took up more of the cultural landscape, and Disney enjoyed a bit of a second renaissance. Focus shifted toward supporting and expanding on the company’s new crop of hit animated movies, this time produced in CG. Tangled and Big Hero 6 got animated TV shows. Zootopia got a theme park expansion, announced in 2019. Wreck-It Ralph got a sequel. Frozen got a sequel, a Broadway show, several spinoff shorts, and multiple theme park meet-and-greets and attractions, just a few years after its release.

None of that love extended to The Princess and the Frog.

Stripped of the cultural context of 2020, a huge ride based on this animated film contradicted the company’s previous approach with the film. The Princess and the Frog, compared to its princess-movie siblings, was treated like a novelty.

A Disney Parks cast member dressed as The Princess and the Frog’s protagonist, New Orleans restaurateur-to-be Tiana, occasionally appeared around the park, along with other characters from the film. Tiana was still included in official Disney Princess merchandise. But like Mulan and Pocahontas, she was often an afterthought to the more popular characters. (The fact that all three are princesses of color is probably not a coincidence.)

In 2018, Ralph Breaks the Internet’s big princess crossover sequence got Tiana’s appearance so wrong that Anika Noni Rose, Tiana’s voice actress, penned a letter on Instagram saying that she and her team “immediately” reached out to Walt Disney Animation Studios about the decision. After being given a (frankly disappointing) excuse about how CG sometimes does “different things,” Rose expressed how important it was that “her skin tone stay as rich as it had been, and her nose continued to be the little round nose […] on many other little brown faces in the world that we so rarely get to see represented in fantasy.” Disney rapidly revised the version of Tiana in the movie.

But when 2020’s movement for racial justice became impossible for Disney to ignore, the studio was suddenly eager to hold up Tiana and The Princess and the Frog as a key example of its approach to diverse storytelling. The movie that was once “old-fashioned” for Disney suddenly became its lifeline.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is an important step

For longtime fans of both the film and its 2D hand-animated medium, Disney’s newfound interest in Tiana is vindication. The Princess and the Frog is a gorgeously animated movie with infectious music that deserved way more attention and celebration than it got on release. Tiana is a Disney heroine with actual tangible goals and dreams, with flaws and faults to overcome. She has compelling relationships with her mother, her best friend Lottie, her love interest Naveen, and the host of critter characters she meets along her journey. Seeing her shine at long last is validating — a full theme park attraction is an honor rarely given to even the biggest Disney hits.

But the fact that it took this long after the movie’s release — the fact that it took place alongside a national reckoning for restorative racial justice — feels like Disney has been caught in a backpedaling posture. The company is celebrating diversity, but also pandering to avoid well-earned criticism.

Disney does incorporate its more popular, newer movies into its parks, usually in the form of temporary attractions like shows, parades, and meet-and-greets. Or they manifest in themed areas, like the Tangled bathroom space in Magic Kingdom, the Moana water trail in Epcot, or the Big Hero 6 shopping area in Disneyland’s California Adventure. But the new rides, at least stateside, tend to focus on IP like Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar — or on legacy movies, like the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train.

Frozen is the only other Disney (not Pixar) animated movie made past the year 2000 to currently have a ride in America. Frozen Ever After opened in 2016, just three years after Frozen’s premiere — and it’s similarly a rethemed older attraction (in this case, the Maelstrom ride in Epcot’s Norway pavilion).

So why is there a Tiana ride now, 15 years after the movie? Because there was a Song of the South ride, built years after Disney moved away from distributing the film, and decades after its initial controversy. And that ride lasted for decades. Only at the peak of a national discussion on racism — particularly the history of the nation’s legacy of mistreatment of Black Americans — did that ride’s justification collapse under the weight of public opinion.

Disney won’t say that part out loud. It doesn’t have a compelling answer about what made the company move The Princess and the Frog from the lower tiers of its animated movie collection to the top. Nor has the company’s leadership spoken out, full-throated, about what was wrong with Splash Mountain. Disney refuses to even hint that there was something wrong with the original attraction.

During an interview with a Disney Imagineer at an early preview for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, I asked about the ride’s legacy, and a PR spokesperson stepped in to interject, insisting that everyone at Disney was focused on the future and on championing Tiana’s story going forward, with no comments to be made on Splash Mountain. Likewise, panel discussions at the preview focused on how the retheme was all about celebrating Tiana, and nothing else.

This approach — focusing on the now, concealing the past — feels like a very Disney way to approach unsavory associations the studio doesn’t want to acknowledge. In American Disney parks, at least, Splash Mountain will be locked in the metaphorical Disney Vault, like Song of the South itself — and the company will spend future decades pretending it never happened.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure brings the princess into the spotlight. She is the epicenter of the ride, not just in name. She’s there via animatronic, voice-over, and video. Even when the log flume goes deep into the bayou to introduce a band of suspiciously merchandisable critters that aren’t in the movie, she still pops onto a screen to check how the riders are doing. And she has the correct rich skin tone and “little round nose” that Rose found so important. It’s a far cry from the original ride’s tainted legacy.

It’s been a long road toward giving Tiana her big moment, to give a once-forgotten Disney movie the hype it deserved 15 years ago. It’s gratifying, but we shouldn’t just forget exactly why Disney is making her a star all these years later. The studio is trying to distract us with the next shiny new thing, but no amount of post-production cleanup can truly cover up a badly animated frame. The new ride is great. It’s groundbreaking. But I’m hesitant to give Disney credit for this monumental step forward, when it was done specifically so we wouldn’t look back at its past.