The Princess and The Frog: The Hidden Complacency Dilemma of Audience (Brought to You by The Magical World of Walt Disney)

A major discovery I took away from Walter Ong’s essay The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction is that many of his ideas point to a glaring truth: understanding readership and enforced roles can be used to explain complacency. Complacency even among the most informed and educated readers to accept ideas that when spewed by an ignorant person, those readers would object. Yet, when those same readers are presented with a familiar situion, a story, the readers are comfortable with doing what they as academics are supposed to do: analyze what the author is doing or what they are trying to do instead of thinking about how people may receive the writing and what enforced roles the work will continue to entrench in society. This can be done by understanding what Ong is interested in studying, what new discovers this frontier of readership study presents, and how using the case study of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog can show how these ideas manifest in real cultural examples.

To start, Ong is interested in what role or responsibilities readers are given or undertake when interacting with written word instead of oral traditions. Ong argues people are affected by the media they consume, whether that is literature, mass media, or in this case study a children’s movie (Ong 9). As well the idea that there is a definite before and after reader, one who has not interacted with the piece and the person who has been affected by the interaction. Thus, Ong is arguing that if we consider writing to be an interactive activity between a “writer” and a “reader” then all of the focus should not solely be reserved for one participating party (the writer) and instead we should start to conduct actual studies understanding how readers process text (Ong 10). 

An excellent way to see how the ideas of Walter Ong play out in reality is with the case study The Princess and the Frog and especially its important background, the party that precedes Catholic Lent: Mardi Gras. Disguised under the piles and piles of Mardi Gras beads lies bigger issues especially of class, race, and representation. For instance, those incarcerated (an unproportionate amount men of color) who are not allowed to enjoy the actual celebration are forced to clean the streets at four in the morning following the celebration to make sure the parade paths are cleared again for the following day.

Therefore, according to Ong some people of New Orleans accept the audience position of trashing the streets in the name of Fat Tuesday because they are “familiar with the projection” (Ong 9-10) but the dilemma lies in that people are encouraged to have fun without realizing the consequences of their actions on their surrounding environment. Plus, they rely on the fact that other people separated from their experience will take care of the current situation and it is romanticized as a tradition rather than an actual occurrence affecting people.

Even more importantly, Princess Tiana is Disney’s first African American princess but instead of celebrating her unique worldview, Dodai Stewart highlights in her work 5 Possible Problems With The Princess and the Frog that for most of the movie Princess Tiana is a frog.

Moreover, Ong’s discussion on the difference between “the oral performer, writer” and the “recipient of the message” is actually more complex than one or the other when considering the societal impacts of writing. The case study of The Princess and the Frog illustrates this phenomenon because not every single person in the United States of America is going to watch the animated movie but generalized messages about the city of New Orleans and misconceptions due to the shallow portrayal of the African American identity—again because Tiana is only shown in her human form at the very beginning and very end of the movie—can spread to other recipients and thus there becomes a chain from recipient readers to recipient non-readers. Leaving more room for misconstrued meanings and shallow understanding of the ultimate goals of the content creator.

“Masks are inevitable in all human communication, even oral” (Ong 20). Just like people celebrate Mardi Gras with extravagant masks and parades, it is still a subdued form of personal expression for the sake of group enjoyment. Disney definitely still has a long way to go before they attempt to accurately portray a character as worthy as Tiana or even use the setting of Mardi Gras to dissect the masked nature of the event (Ong 20).