LOS ANGELES — For most of the last century, the Disney cartoon heroine was as white as, well . . . Snow White, the studio's first feature-film superstar, who marked her debut in 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
It would take some 60 years for the Disney artists to begin painting their leading ladies with all the colors of the wind, including the American Indian Pocahontas (1995), the Chinese Mulan (1998) and the Hawaiian Lilo (2002).
Only now, with "The Princess and the Frog," have Disney animators put a black female front and center. Ironically, the inspiration for the new film, which opens in Japan on Dec. 12, came from two Caucasian men: current Pixar- Disney chief John Lasseter and the late Walt Disney himself.