Why Tiana is the best Disney Princess

Tiana is my favourite Disney Princess and she should be featured more often. So I’ve mentioned I like Disney movies - I’m on the committee of the Disney Society at uni! And I have a lot of opinions about Disney stuff. Opinions like the fact that Tiana is the best Disney Princess and I just wanted to do a post sharing my reasons.

‘Fairy tales can come true, you gotta make 'em happen it all depends on you.’ Tiana has such an admirable attitude to life that I find genuinely inspiring. Yes it’s great to have dreams but you have to be prepared to work to get them. That’s such a great moral for a Disney Princess to be teaching kids but it’s also something that inspires me.

And her dream isn’t love, it’s running her own successful business - which is part of why I think she deserve more appreciation. Unlike other Disney Princesses Tiana is not content to wait for something to happen, she knows that a good relationship and marriage isn’t all there is to life.

Disney didn’t cheat with her ending. It would have been so easy for her to just happily marry Naveen and that was the end of the film but Disney didn’t do that. Sure she marries him but then Tiana goes off with him to open her restaurant. Tiana gets what she wants and what she worked hard for as well as getting married.

The Princess and the Frog does everything a Disney Princess movie should. With the Princess movies there’s a certain set of expectations that other Disney movies – like say Zootropolis – don’t have. In a Princess movie I’m expecting adventure, romance, fun songs, a cool villain and a gorgeously animated setting. For me Princess and the Frog is the only one of the princess movies that delivers all of that and delivers it at a high standard. I could easily fill a blog post with reasons that I enjoy The Princess and the Frog!

Tiana is a well realised black character. I apologise if I say something wrong here –bear in mind that I am a white man writing this. But in my opinion Disney did a great job at depicting a black character with Tiana. Her race never defines her but there are moments in the movie that acknowledge the prejudice and racism a woman of colour would have had to deal with in 1920s America. Her character and costume designs avoided using stereotypical ‘black attributes’ that Disney could have so easily used and left Tiana as a caricature. Yes she is ‘the black princess’ and that is a part of who Tiana is but it’s not something that defines her.

I think most importantly though Tiana is driven. There are many great aspects to her but I think her drive and motivation are - for me – what makes her such a compelling and interesting character.