Tumblr Artists Diversify Disney Because Disney Won't Do It Themselves

Annoyed that Disney has chosen to portray yet another white, blonde princess in their newest animated feature Frozen (an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen), fans have taken diversifying Disney’s latest heroine into their own hands with This Could Have Been Frozen, a Tumblr featuring Anna — the film’s protagonist — and the other characters re-imagined as Inuit, Indian or any other non-white culture that you could possibly think of. Unsurprisingly, this crowdsourced artwork makes Anna (who — before fan intervention — looked almost exactly like this other white blonde Disney princess) a whole lot more interesting than she was originally.

Some of the Tumblr’s critics are claiming that Frozen — being based Hans Christian Andersen story and set in Scandinavia — should feature a white princess if only for historical accuracy, but as the blog accurately points out, not all Europeans (even the most northern ones) are white. Realistically, they could have easily portrayed the characters of Frozen as people of color.

Even if that wasn’t the case and the world was perfectly color blocked (again, it isn’t), why would it be a big deal to relocate a Hans Christian Andersen story to another part of the world? Disney has been relocating fairy tales since they started releasing them as film adaptations and it’s not like most fairy tales, having started off as oral traditions, make it easy for you to pinpoint their origins anyway. For the few that do, that origin is often far outside of Europe. (For example, the first known recorded version of Cinderella — one of Disney’s whitest, blondest princesses — appears in a book from China.)