Check out Russell Moore’s review of the new Disney film “The Princess and the Frog.” It’s really good. He lists five things he likes about the movie and four things that he really hates. Here’s my favorite part:
‘Disney is embarrassed (and rightly so) now by the racial stereotypes present in at least one of their earlier movies. No one now would market crude ethnic caricatures in an animated film, and that’s a good thing. Why then is it okay to use the most derogatory and cardboard stereotypes of rural working southern people? The cajuns in the bayou are presented as characters from “Deliverance.”
‘Wendell Berry rightly warned us against the “acceptable” bigotry against “provincial” country people (whether white, black, or what have you) who are presented as backward, despised, and even scary simply because they seem “other” in our monotonously pseudo-cosmopolitan televised American culture. The filmmakers here would have done well to have heard him.’
Read the rest here.
