The fairy tale plot on the princess and the frog through the prism of ages. A response to the New Times’ challenges in Disney’s interpretation

Abstract

The article is focused on the dialogue with fairy tale tradition presented in The Princess and the Frog (2009), an animated film by Disney Company. The Frog Princess (2002), a book by Elizabeth Dowson Baker, an American female children’s writer, lies in the basis of the script. Baker’s work, in turn, is an interpretation of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale The Frog-King, or Iron Henry (1812). Besides the characteristics of the artistic interaction between the pretexts and cinematographic text and its features, appealing to The Princess and the Frog also allows us to bring out the specifics of significant modifications in Disney canon. The typical princess image transformation; the shift in emphasis from the expectation of Prince Charming in the role of a savior to the idea on the dream about career and independence come true; the depiction of French, Afro-American and “white” American cultures’ synthesis – all these enables us to define the material taken under study as the modern age product, acting as the visualization of certain fundamental changes in society and culture. In the analysis based on the principles of historical and literary and comparative research methods, we make a conclusion about the evolution of fairy tale tradition and archetypes with regard to contemporary heterogeneous reality, where addressing the classics functions as a peculiar platform for the implementation of relevant ideas.