ARTICLES After 75 Years of Magic: Disney Answers Its Critics, Rewrites African American History, and Cashes In on Its Racist Past Richard M. Breaux # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract This paper explores representations of the historical intersection of race and gender in Disney’ s The Princess and the Frog and black women in animated film in the USA. It examines how Disney and Pixar studio executives and animators attempted to use The Princess and the Frog to respond to its critics’ claims about the perpetuation of sexism and racism in its animated features. It has three major sections which explore how: (1) Disney attempted to answer criticism about the absence of African Americans and mothers in its films, the presence of physically over-sexualized and emotionally prince-dependent maidens in distress; (2) repre- sentations of animated black women in the history of film and Disney’ s rewriting or sanitizing of African American history and denial of its and our nation’ s racist past; and (3) Disney’ s attempt to cash in on this denial of its racist past and its use of The Princess and the Frog as reconciliation. Keywords African American women . Animation . History . Racism . Disney Introduction In March 2007, Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar films confirmed that its animation studios had started production on its animated musical fairytale—“The Frog Princess.” This announcement to Disney shareholders was unique in that one of the title characters, Maddy, was drawn as an African American girl living in New Orleans, Louisiana in the 1920s. 1 Originally, Maddy was to be a chambermaid, and cultural critics were quick to pounce on the phonetic similarities between―Maddy and―mammy. Maddy’ s occupation smacked of the ubiquitous mammy, the happy J Afr Am St DOI 10.1007/s12111-010-9139-9 1 “Disney First: Black Princess in Animated Film,” MSNBC.com, March 12, 2007, http://www.msnbc. msn.com/id/17524865/; accessed 7 January 2010. R. M. Breaux (*) Colorado State University, 365 SE Aylesworth Hall, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1790, USA e-mail: Richard.Breaux@colostate.edu