While some claim Jasmine is Arab because the movie opens with a song called Arabian Nights, others believe that the architecture in Agrabah is clearly based on the Taj Mahal, making Jasmine Indian. It's a debate that has fueled speculation that in Hollywood, Indians and Arabs are interchangeable.
The casting of Naomi Scott, who is of English and Indian descent, upset some fans and critics who believed the role should have been played by a Middle Eastern actress. Some accused Disney of reinforcing “notions of “Oriental interchangeability,” pointing to the fact that name Jasmine has Persian roots, not Indian.
However, in terms of etymology, the word jasmine is of Persian origin (in Persian: Yasmin). It entered the English language through Old French. Today, Jasmine is one of the most popular names in the Western world and has numerous spellings.
And he's no foreigner abroad either: he's a native Chinese boy, not an Arabian youth who's ended up in China. (Nor is he an orphan: in the earliest versions of the story, Aladdin is not an orphaned street urchin but a lazy boy living at home with his mother.)
As for whether Elsa and Anna are white … the Northuldra are modeled on the Sami, an indigenous people scattered across northern Scandinavia and northwestern Russia who have faced a great deal of discrimination, but there's a lot of disagreement about the genetic and linguistic origins of Sami to this day.
Rapunzel is a German fairy tale about a young woman named Rapunzel with impossibly long hair and who lives alone in a tower, held captive by a witch. It's also the German name of a vegetable commonly used in salads.
Inspired by Polynesian mythology, Moana is depicted as the strong-willed daughter of a chief of a Polynesian village, who is chosen by the ocean itself to reunite a mystical relic with the goddess Te Fiti.
Moana is the fifth non-Caucasian princess. Moana is also the second protagonist to be Polynesian descent, after Lilo Pelekai from Lilo & Stich.
In the original tale, both Jafar and the unnamed jealous vizier were of African ethnicity, with Jafar being from Maghreb.
Princess Ananya, has been confirmed by the team, but they have also added that it's quite in the early stages and the team isn't even close to launching her. Having grown up with Ariel, Elsa, Rapunzel, and Snow White, having a Disney Indian princess is a big step towards cultural representation.
One of the most common is the conflation of Middle Eastern ethnic groups. Many people continue to believe that “Persian” and “Arab” are interchangeable terms, when, in reality, they are labels for two distinct ethnicities. That is to say, Persians are not Arabs.
In the original story, Aladdin is born to a poor tailor in “the capital of one of China's vast and wealthy kingdoms”. The Chinese setting of the story, however, has in most recent iterations, notably the Disney animated film of 1992, been almost entirely rewritten.
If Ritchie's film was based on the original story, the entire cast would be Chinese - apart from the sorcerer, who would be North African - but as it's said to be a faithful remake of Disney's animation, Aladdin and Princess Jasmine should really be Middle Eastern or South Asian, despite the film not being an authentic ...
“Fantasy middle Eastern”. He is neither identifiably Persian nor Arab in fact, he is really just an orientalist pastiche of vaguely “Middle-Eastern” background.
So it all works out in the end: Moana is not from Hawaii, and neither is she from New Zealand. She has to come from Tonga or Samoa, the two first archipelagoes where the Polynesian People was born. They were the only Polynesian islands with a population at the time…
Although Moana is from the fictional island Motunui some 3,000 years ago, the story and culture of Moana is based on the very real heritage and history of Polynesian islands such as Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, and Tahiti. In fact, once you start looking for ties to Polynesian culture in Moana, it's hard to stop!
She is a Scottish princess from the kingdom of DunBroch, the daughter of Queen Elinor and King Fergus, and the older sister of Harris, Hubert, and Hamish. Headstrong and intrepid, Merida challenged her kingdom's longstanding traditions to live a life of independence.
But Tiana, Disney's first Black animated protagonist, would be onscreen for just about 40 minutes. More shockingly, she would be drawn as a Black woman for just 17 of those minutes. Most of the time, as you probably know, Tiana is a frog.
Her name is Elena, and she hails from Avalor — a fictional place that draws from several real-world cultures. Elena is Latina. Which makes her the animation giant's first-ever Latina princess.
Elsa of Arendelle is a fictional character who appears in Walt Disney Animation Studios' animated film Frozen (2013) and its sequel the animated film Frozen II (2019). She is voiced mainly by Idina Menzel, with Eva Bella as a young child and by Spencer Ganus as a teenager in Frozen.