Close Reading

Close reading is no new concept for me, but looking at certain things in this class helped me realize that you can read even closer into texts than I would have thought to do. We looked into some things in high school, but that was mostly just the basic lesson that was supposed to be learned from stories, not other aspects that we could have looked at. When we looked at the Beauty and the Beast example in class, and how Belle was supposed to be an intelligent girl, kind of the first of the Disney Princesses to be, I immediately thought of Princess and the Frog. Disney now considers the main character, Tiana, as one of the Disney Princesses now. I’m sorry but I grew up with them and she is not one of them. The only reason that Disney made her one, and made that movie was because they needed an African American Disney Princess. The movie itself was also very stereotypical. At the beginning of the movie she was in a castle with a rich white girl, and Tiana’s mom was their seamstress, working for the rich white family. Then they go home to a poor neighborhood and cook for their neighbors. Even when she is older she is working hard and needing to say every penny that she gets. She also lives in New Orleans, and the music is very “soulful”. All of these things bothered me, Disney just amplified all the stereotypes of African Americans and people in the south, and threw them in one movie. They could have done this a lot different than they did. This movie was not meant to be set in modern time, but more of the past. I think they did that so it could fit in more with the classics. Overall I just did not enjoy this movie because they could have gone about the story in a completely different way, and I did not like the way that they wrote it. 

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