Opinion: The racial and religious politics of Disney’s new theme park ride

Race is at the center of the dramatic transformation of Disney’s popular Splash Mountain ride, which was based on the 1946 movie “Song of the South.” The film, long beloved by many white Disney fans but deeply offensive to many African Americans, became a new water ride on Friday, featuring the studio’s first African American princess.

The made-over log flume ride now is called Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, based on the 2009 animated feature “The Princess and the Frog.” Set in New Orleans’s French Quarter, the movie focused on voodoo as a central narrative component. Years in the making, the new ride cost an estimated $150 million.

Splash Mountain drew criticism for its connection to “The Song of the South.” The film presented an idealized, historically inaccurate portrayal of African Americans in the region before and after the Civil War. It was also criticized for its cultural appropriation — the white 19th-century author Joel Chandler Harris first heard many of the Black folktales about Br’er Rabbit that informed his novel in a Georgia plantation cabin that housed enslaved people. Disney withdrew the film from circulation in 1986.

Discussion of the ride’s new incarnation has so far — justly — focused on the dramatic racial symbolism for Disney theme parks. While it is the first Disney theme park ride based on an African American character, it may also represent a retrospective effort to sanitize “The Princess and the Frog.”

In mass popular culture, very little of what appears on screens or in theme park rides is there by accident. The same holds true for what doesn’t appear.

Not content with erasing racism from its theme parks, Disney has apparently sought to use its magic to make the film’s positive but controversial rendering of voodoo in “The Princess and the Frog” disappear.

Literally out of sight, in typical Disney fashion, the company has virtually eliminated the film’s voodoo portrayal, which offended some evangelical Christian theatergoers. In fact, the dark voodoo depiction, central to the plot of “The Princess and the Frog,” appears almost nowhere on the 10-minute ride.

The new ride’s inclusive premise has Tiana, the princess, organizing a band of swamp animals for Mardi Gras for her home, where “Everyone is welcome!” It features a bouncy jazz and zydeco soundtrack.

But Mama Odie, the “voodoo queen of the bayou” in the film, makes only fleeting appearances in the ride and, in the words of the New York Times , has been transformed into a benign “bayou fairy godmother.” Her only spell is shrinking riders to firefly size.

Implicitly — and conveniently — Disney promotional material explains the new ride’s absence of voodoo by stating that the ride and the new series pick up the story after the movie ends. An animated small-screen series — pointedly based on the ride, rather than the original movie — is slated to follow on Disney’s streaming service.

When “The Princess and the Frog” was first released, many hailed its obvious racial breakthrough. Yet it also drew praise for further expanding the faith palette presented in animated features, long Disney’s signature product. For decades, under Walt Disney and his immediate successors, the studio’s movies reflected an implicit faith template: generic, white Christianity.

Then, beginning in 1984, under leaders Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg — both Jewish — the template gradually expanded. Over time, the new regime added other explicit faith tradition representations: Catholic (“The Hunchback of Notre Dame”), Confucian (“Mulan”), Islamic (a rare stumble, with “Aladdin”) and animism (“Pocahantas,” “Brother Bear”). That tradition continued with 2016’s “Moana,” under Disney CEO Robert Iger, who is also Jewish, adding a positive view of Polynesian cosmology .

However, for many evangelical Christians, already uncomfortable with these changes, this was a step too far in religious diversity and inclusion. Culture warriors denounced “The Princess and the Frog” for its normative, even positive voodoo portrayal. As I noted at the time in the Wall Street Journal, “Hollywoodjesus.com said the animated feature’s preoccupation with voodoo, black magic, bloody amulets and Ouija boards was ‘too dark and extreme for this kind of kids’ film.’” Other evangelical sites characterized it as “offensive,” even “demonic.” Christianity Today magazine concluded the movie was “disturbing,” with a “hollow, thoughtless core.”

In addition to mollifying religious conservatives, reframing “The Princess and the Frog” with the new ride may also represent the latest step in the rapprochement between Iger and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The two have been at loggerheads for over two years, ostensibly over the company’s critical response to DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. In response, DeSantis used what he called Disney’s “woke” agenda as a political punching bag in his abortive presidential run and acted to seize control of the company’s local governmental agency.

But since then Disney has dropped its litigation against Florida for attempting to punish the company for its exercise of free speech and has announced plans to continue its massive Orlando parks expansion, which had been paused after the controversy erupted.

In April of this year, Iger told Disney stockholders on a live-streamed meeting, “I’ve always believed that we have a responsibility to do good in the world, but we know our job is not to advance any kind of agenda … For as long as I’m in the job, I’m going to continue to be guided by a sense of decency and respect, and we’ll always trust our instincts.”

Mark I. Pinsky is author of “The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust.”

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