Disney’s “Jungle Sound”: Jazz and Wildness in Disney Animation

ABSTRACT

From the 1950s to the 2000s, Walt Disney Animation Studios have used jazz to import specific sociocultural meanings into their films. Through an examination of the feature-length animated Disney films that incorporate “jazz” idioms—namely Lady and the Tramp (1955), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), The Jungle Book (1967), The Aristocats (1970), and The Princess and the Frog (2009)—this article will explore how Disney has consistently used jazz to depict wildness and “Otherness” and will consider how the films effectively typecast those characters associated with jazz, which meaningfully impacts Disney’s portrayals of social morality, race, and gender in these films.

KEYWORDS:

• Jazz studies
• popular culture
• soundtracks
• film
• Disney

The “jungle sound” was a style of jazz developed by Duke Ellington and his collaborators at the Cotton Club in New York during the late 1920s and early ’30s. This style of playing featured “screeching woodwinds or vocal-sounding plunger muted brass … heavy, often low-pitched percussion, and a strong emphasis on blues-derived language” (Teal 130). This sound became associated with the “jungle” because the Cotton Club entertained its “whites only” audiences by costuming black performers as either Southern plantation workers or exotic African savages.¹ Given the racism inherent in the Cotton Club’s performances, one might expect that Ellington would have jettisoned this “jungle sound” as quickly as possible after leaving the nightclub and establishing a career that allowed him to create his music—and frame his identity and experiences—on his own terms. But that was not the case. Ellington cultivated his “jungle sound” into the 1970s with works like “La Plus Belle Africaine” (1967) and Togo Brava Suite (1972), maintaining the sound’s primitivist associations with programs that conjured an imagined Africa (Teal 126–27). In the words of Joshua Vincent and Lydia Lindsay, Ellington used the “jungle” aesthetic “as an expression of his relationship to the African Diaspora” (169). Ellington believed that jazz music was itself African (Teal 124) and so echoed with the sounds of an exotic African past.

While Ellington was playing his “jungle” music to audiences at the Cotton Club in the early 1930s, Walt Disney was building his animation studios, founded in 1923 with his brother, Roy O. Disney. The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio (later Walt Disney Animation Studios) grew up with jazz; it is no wonder, then, perhaps, that the studio’s first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), featured songs by Frank Churchill and Larry Morey that reflect something of the harmony and chromaticism of the jazz age (Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, and Miles Davis all capitalized on the harmonic potential of Snow White‘s “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” establishing the song as a jazz standard). But the early “Disney sound” was certainly not synonymous with jazz: To Walt and Roy Disney, jazz was likely as exotic, wild, and racy as it was to the white patrons of the Cotton Club. In 1930s America, jazz was popular with white audiences, but it was still the music of the racial “Other,” and those whites who got too deeply involved with it risked sailing on the windy side of social respectability: Harlem’s jazz clubs were marketed to white audiences as venues that promised the opportunity for sexual freedom and revelry.² Jazz has long since been displaced as the dance music of America’s wild youth. Nevertheless, it has been used consistently in Disney animation to characterize and depict “Otherness” and wildness—from the 1950s through to new releases from the past decade.

This article will explore the role of jazz throughout the history of Walt Disney Animation Studios, examining the five feature-length animated Disney films that engaged with jazz music and jazz culture: Lady and the Tramp (1955), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), The Jungle Book (1967), The Aristocats (1970), and, last but certainly not least, The Princess and the Frog (2009).³ It will consider how jazz is used to typecast those characters associated with it, focusing particularly on how the use of jazz impacts Disney’s portrayals of social morality, race, and gender in these films.⁴

Who’s the Tramp?

The first notable use of jazz in a Disney feature-length animated film can be found in Lady and the Tramp (1955). Set in an idyllic American town, the story centers around a young cocker spaniel named Lady, who is given by “Jim Dear” to his wife “Darling” as a puppy on the Christmas of 1909. Lady grows up adored by her owners, but the arrival of a baby not long thereafter complicates her living situation—particularly when Aunt Sarah and her “Siamese twin” cats come to look after the baby while Jim Dear and Darling go on holiday. Lady finds herself muzzled after she is blamed for the cats’ destruction and runs away. Finding herself in trouble on the streets, she is saved by a good-hearted stray named Tramp, and the two fall in love. In the course of their adventures, Lady gets separated from Tramp and ends up in the pound, from which she is taken home—but not before she learns from the pound’s residents that Tramp is something of a womanizer. Tramp later finds Lady tied-up at home, but she wants nothing to do with him. When a rat threatens the sleeping baby upstairs, however, Tramp comes to the rescue, and then—injured—is taken to the pound to be destroyed. When her owners return, Lady shows them the rat in the baby’s room, and Tramp is adopted into the family.

Songwriters Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke provided three very memorable songs for Lady and the Tramp. The first, “The Siamese Cat Song,” is sung by Lee herself in an “oriental” accent; the second, “Bella Notte,” is sung in the film by Tony, the kindly owner of an Italian restaurant, and his assistant chef, who provide Lady and Tramp with their iconic candlelit supper and serenade. The portrayals of race and culture in these two songs have been discussed at some length by Daniel Goldmark and Utz McKnight, but for our purposes the most interesting song in the film is the third: “He’s a Tramp.” Curiously, this song is the only “jazzy” number in the movie, even though both of the film’s songwriters were predominantly jazz musicians. But, as this study will find, jazz means something quite specific in the Disney sound world, so it is not an appropriate idiom for all the songs in a Disney animated film—and certainly not in the 1950s.

“He’s a Tramp” is also sung by Peggy Lee, now in the character of the eponymous Pekingese Peg (whom she voices). Through the song, Peg tells Lady about Tramp’s reputation as a “scoundrel” and a “cad:” understandably, the song is as well received by Lady as Leporello’s catalog aria was by Donna Elvira. Not only is the song in the style of a jazz ballad—with its gentle swing, brushed cymbals, double bass, and piano accompaniment—it is also paired with visual indicators that confirm one is listening to “jazz.” Peg, who the audience learns “used to be in the Dog and Pony Folly,” sings with a dog backup group on harmony and percussion while performing a saucy dance under the limelight.

The use of jazz in Lady and the Tramp sets up something of a model for future Disney films in three ways: (1) it uses jazz to musically describe a male rake who is nevertheless accepted as lovable; (2) it uses jazz to depict a free-living, decaying, or wanton woman; and (3) it detaches jazz from blackness—while still relying on associations between blackness and the “uncivilized” to convey extramusical meaning. To expand upon the first point, the medium of jazz is used as a musical indicator for the subject Peg describes in her song: Tramp is a rake, so jazz is the best musical idiom to describe him, because it had become associated with sexual looseness—in American culture in general, but also specifically in early animated cartoons, as described by Grant. But Peg does not simply describe Tramp’s behavior. She also insists that he is “lovable.” In other words, he may be a cad, but “we” (all female dogs? all dogs in general?) will continue to love him as his faithlessness is not an essential fault—though it would be in a woman. The lovable and oftentimes (but not always) womanizing rogue becomes a standard character type for Disney animated features after this, from Baloo and Thomas O’Malley to Flynn Rider and Prince Naveen. Coincidentally, the majority of these characters are also directly associated with jazz.

But the true irony of this song is that while Peg is telling us that Tramp is indeed “a tramp,” what her performance communicates to us is that “I am a tramp.” Peg has blonde, unkempt hair revealing only one sultry eye, which appears baggy and worn, despite her blue eye makeup. Her debauched appearance brings to mind the alcoholic jazz singer Rose Hopkins, whom Peggy Lee played in the live-action film Pete Kelly’s Blues (also released in 1955), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In its G-rated way, Disney also shows audiences the danger of women being involved with jazz and makes the point that wild living does not wear as well on females as it does on males. Peg’s identity as a loose woman is reinforced through the lyrics of her song: Though she says Tramp is a “cad,” her ending tagline is “I wish that I could travel his way.” Peg is a sympathetic and well-meaning character—though Lady finds her description of Tramp shocking—but she nevertheless expresses a willingness and even wish to be led astray by rakish males. She is a jazz singer after all—not like Lady, who, as the dogcatcher says, is “too nice a girl to be in this place” (the pound).

In his book Multiculturalism and the Mouse, Douglas Brode argued that Walt Disney was himself progressive for his time on issues of racial integration (50–113), while Goldmark and McKnight argue the opposite, drawing attention to the use of racial stereotypes in Lady and the Tramp in particular (see also the documentary Mickey Mouse Monopoly). Interestingly, at the back of Tony’s restaurant, there is a poster for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s highly influential abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)—a feature of the film that neither Brode nor Goldmark and McKnight have noted but which would seem to be a political statement by the film’s production team. Apart from this unexplained poster, however, blackness is not defined or described in the film at all—an omission that is particularly notable given the film’s inclusion of a jazz number. Peg the dog is very clearly white: Not only is her fur literally blonde, but she is blue-eyed. This is clearly a case of jazz music being “whitewashed” to make it more acceptable to white audiences, but there is more implied here: The moral implications of Peg being a jazz singer are created in part by the fact that she is white. As the article will find in The Princess and the Frog, there is a particular moral disapprobation reserved by Disney for white (or nonblack) people who choose to transgress racial lines by indulging in black music.

Jazz in Spots

One of Disney’s most famous “jazzy” songs is from an animated film that is actually not a musical: “Cruella de Vil” from One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). Disney’s film was based on the 1956 children’s book by English writer Dodie Smith, in which two pairs of dalmatian parents search for their puppies after they are stolen by the evil Cruella de Vil, the wife of a furrier who intends to kill the spotted puppies for their coats. Disney made some alterations to Smith’s story for their animated adaptation, including streamlining the plot and trimming down the canine cast. For the purposes of this article, the most impactful change they made to the original story was switching the career of Roger (the main male dog owner, “Mr. Dearly” in Smith’s original) from that of a financier to a jazz songwriter. Roger is an English, white, blonde, vest-wearing, pipe-smoking bachelor with quaintly monastic habits (according to his dog Pongo, who finds their “bachelor” lives unacceptably dull). It is ironic, then, that this very conventional white man is the source of jazz in the film.

Soon after Roger and Pongo meet their other halves at a park—Anita and Perdita, respectively—we find the four settling into their marriages (Perdita now pregnant) in a small house in London with their housekeeper, Nanny. Roger is laboring over a new song, working out the melody and harmony before turning to what he might do with the song’s lyrics. As Anita and Roger sit down for a tea break, Anita’s ghastly old school friend Cruella de Vil drives up in her villainous red-and-black motorcar.⁵ Roger is inspired by her arrival to put lyrics to his new song: “Cruella de Vil, Cruella de Vil, if she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will!”

The song was written by Mel Leven, who was likely inspired by Thelonious Monk’s song “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues Are” (1957), an homage to Pannonica de Koenigswarter. The so-called “Bebop Baroness” was a member of the Rothschild family and became a prominent hostess of a jazz salon at the Bolivar Hotel in New York that was frequented by Monk and Charlie Parker (who in fact died in her suite at the Stanhope Hotel in 1955). The first two bars of the songs are all but identical, suggesting that Mel Leven’s song may have drawn both melody and meaning from Monk’s real-life homage to a powerful heiress who sat above, rather than under, society’s expectations for femininity—and was known for drag racing in her Bentley (Kastin). But, while Monk’s song was written in tribute to a valued friend, Leven’s song for One Hundred and One Dalmatians describes a wild, wicked woman who uses her riches and power to do exactly as she pleases. As in many Disney movies, the film’s villain is a woman. She is characterized as evil by being depicted as (1) powerful and (2) blatantly unfeminine. Cruella is the image of washed-up, smoke-tainted decadence. She is a flapper hangover who drives her own luxury car at reckless speeds, wears outrageous furs, and is accompanied wherever she goes by a waft of green cigarette smoke. The melody of her eponymous song is as jarring and angular as Cruella is herself: chromatic, creeping, and devilish. As already seen in Lady and the Tramp, jazz does not adorn women well. Any woman involved with it must be morally questionable. Interestingly, while this jazz song becomes a symbol of its subject in the film, it is all but dissociated from its creator—Roger—whose trappings of conventionality (and masculinity?) seem to save him from jazz’s racier connotations.

Jungle Harmony

The most troubling usage of jazz in a full-length Disney animated feature can be found in The Jungle Book (1967). The first three chapters of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) provided the plot and characters for the film adaptation—namely, “Mowgli’s Brothers,” “Kaa’s Hunting,” and “Tiger! Tiger!” Disney took considerable license with the original materials, telling the story of an abandoned baby “man cub” called Mowgli who is found by the black panther Bagheera and subsequently raised by a pack of wolves. When the tiger Shere Khan makes it clear that he wants to eat the boy, Bagheera proposes taking Mowgli out of the jungle to the Man-Village, where he would be safe—much to Mowgli’s dismay. On the journey, they meet the carefree bear Baloo and the hungry snake Kaa as well as an assortment of martial elephants and a monkey king. In Disney’s animated version, Mowgli decides to stay in the Man-Village at the end of the story—in contrast to the endings of Kipling’s original and the 2016 Disney live-action remake.

The film was a contentious one at Walt Disney Animation Studios. During its production, Walt was busy with many other ventures, but he fundamentally disagreed with the direction in which Bill Peet, a longtime Disney animator, was taking the film. Walt thought the tone was “too dark” (Barrier 276). Tensions escalated over the artistic differences between Disney and the team leading the project, resulting in the resignation of Peet in 1964 before the project was completed (Barrier 276–77). When Walt took back the reins, he made considerable changes to the film, and one of the first things to go was the music by Terry Gilkyson. Disney replaced Gilkyson with the rising stars of Disney songwriting, Robert B. and Richard M. Sherman. The Sherman Brothers rewrote all of the songs for the film save one—Gilkyson’s “The Bare Necessities” remained in the final version of the The Jungle Book.

“The Bare Necessities” remains one of the most beloved songs in the Disney canon. It is sung by Baloo (voiced by the very distinctive Phil Harris) to Mowgli shortly after they meet and includes many “jungle” jazz elements, including birdlike winds; wailing trumpet solos; an active, deep tuba line; a banjo; and varied percussion (namely drums, cymbals, and shakers). As Baloo himself says, “that’s real jungle harmony!” To Bagheera’s dismay, Baloo uses the song to preach his devil-may-care ethos, encouraging Mowgli to wait for the “bare necessities of life” to fall into his lap; discouraging him from working hard (in Baloo’s words, “If you act like that bee, uh-uh, you’re working too hard”); and advising him to be content, unambitious, and laid-back (“So just try and relax: Yeah, cool it. Fall apart in my backyard!”). While singing his song, Baloo teaches Mowgli how to eat difficult jungle fruits including bananas (the importance of this will be explained shortly) and struts about to the music like Peg in Lady and the Tramp. Jazz is used in Disney as a primitive, wild music, so it is naturally associated with physicality and movement as well as with animality and wildness. Mowgli, attracted to Baloo’s jazzy sound and ethos, starts to sing along. Throughout this film, jazz acts as something of an opiate to the listener. This is underscored in the next scene at the monkey temple. Baloo arrives eager to rescue the kidnapped Mowgli but is soon distracted by the monkey king’s music: “I’ll tear ‘im limb from limb! I’ll beat ‘im! I’ll, I’ll…. Mmmm, yeah, well, man, what a beat!”

Baloo’s song appeals to young Mowgli because Baloo is much more like a child than a grown-up: He trusts that all he needs will be provided, pays little attention to danger, and focuses all his attention on enjoying himself. Jazz is the music of wildness but also the music of irresponsibility. Interestingly, it is during this scene that Mowgli is abducted. Frustrated, Bagheera has just left Baloo and Mowgli to their sing-along, and some intrigued monkeys have congregated on branches above where the pair of newfound friends are swimming—attracted by the jazzy music or its message of carelessness. In either case, they take advantage of Baloo and Mowgli having “fallen apart” to snatch the young boy away for their king.

Baloo is a black-colored bear, but that does not necessarily mean that his fur color plays a significant part in his racial characterization: His voice actor is white, and he is not depicted as a racial “Other” in the film (nor, for that matter, is Bagheera, the black panther). Rather, one might argue that Baloo is an iteration of the nonblack jazz lover already found in Lady and the Tramp. He is the lovable but irresponsible male who lives by his own rules rather than by those that society would impose upon him. He chooses jazz as his sound because it encapsulates his personal philosophy of freedom and improvisation. As this examination will continue to find, jazz is the music of choice for Disney characters who willingly eschew responsibility or social mores for freedom and leisure.

“The Bare Necessities” is one of two “jazzy” songs in The Jungle Book. The other is the Sherman Brothers’ song “I Wanna Be Like You,” which is—in my opinion—much more problematic. The song is sung by Louie, a monkey king who wants Mowgli to teach him how to make fire so that he can be “human” too. Of course, the irony is that Mowgli is a “man cub” who wants to be an animal so that he can stay in the jungle. Ultimately, neither gets his way. Though the original recording of the song remains popular in culture, in its cinematic context it is uncomfortable to watch. In the words of Greg Metcalf, who wrote an insightful article in 1991 about the movie and 1960s culture:

King Louie—a name Disney added in a clear reference to Louis Armstrong—presides over a kingdom that is a slum in “the man-village ruins.” He is assisted by a right-hand monkey with a white shock of swept-back hair and a tail swept out like the traditional image of a plantation houseboy in tails … . Having established the situation, then, as Disney’s generic American white boy dragged into the slums by blacks… King Louie forces bananas into Mowgli’s mouth where they sit like oversized cigars or marijuana joints. These bananas have the same effect on Mowgli as his hypnotism by Kaa. Mowgli gets glassy-eyed and develops an enormous dumb grin. Remembering the stories prevalent in the 1960s of banana-skin smoking, it would appear that King Louie is getting the boy stoned. Before you know it, Mowgli and his grin are up dancing around with the monkeys. And why was Mowgli kidnapped? King Louie explains that he has gotten as far as he can go as a monkey; that is to say, being black. Now he wants to be a man, white, and he sings, “I want to be like you.” (92)

Metcalf’s argument that King Louie is characterized by Disney as a “wannabe” human (read: white man) needs little elaboration. The character was voiced by the white actor and singer Louis Prima, however, as the Sherman Brothers thought it would be unwise to cast a black actor (Louis Armstrong was suggested) for the role because of the very racial implications noted here (Weinert-Kendt). Like “The Bare Necessities,” the music for King Louie’s song shares many features with Ellington’s “jungle sound” jazz of the ’30s, which was at this same time being revitalized by him in works like La Plus Belle Africaine (1967). It features low percussion layered with brushed drums and shakers, birdlike whistles, wailing or growling horns, guitar, piano, vocal percussion, and vocal imitations of brass instruments, as well as a chorus that engages in a call-and-response pattern with Louie, who sings “nonsense” scat sounds as well as words.

Given the racial implications of the monkeys’ animated depictions, it is not surprising that their musical sound was also “black;” but what is surprising is that it was not the sound of the R&B or rock and roll of Brook Benton, Berry Gordy, or Chuck Berry. In 1967, these artists were the faces of black popular music in America. Jazz remained a vital tradition in the “50s and”60s—which saw the development of modal jazz by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and of course free jazz by Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. But jazz was no longer the dance music of the masses, and it was not the music of late-”60s youth. Nevertheless, it is jazz that sonically represents both the blackness and the wildness of the monkeys in The Jungle Book, because it is Walt Disney Animation Studios” default choice for depicting social “Others” and the uncivilized.

Jazz: The American in Paris

Like that of the The Jungle Book, the score for The Aristocats (1970) ended up as something of a pastiche, featuring songs by Terry Gilkyson (“Thomas O’Malley Cat”), Floyd Huddleston and Al Rinker (“Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat”), and of course the Sherman Brothers (“Scales and Arpeggios” and the theme song “Aristocats,” sung by Maurice Chevalier shortly before his death). The plot was based on an untitled story by Tom McGowan and Tom Rowe about a family of well-bred cats living in Paris and owned by Madame, an elderly former actress of some means. The cats are Madame’s pride and joy, and when her longstanding butler Edgar learns that she intends to leave her considerable estate to the cats before him, he hatches a scheme to kidnap them. Abandoned in the French countryside, Duchess (voiced by Eva Gabor) and her kittens are found by the smooth-talking tomcat Thomas O’Malley (Phil Harris again), who agrees to guide them back to Paris and, with the help of his jazzy friends Scat Cat and the Alley Cats, ends up defeating Edgar at his own game.

The Aristocats features two notable “jazzy” numbers: “Thomas O’Malley Cat” and “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat.” The first of these is sung by O’Malley as he happens across the beautiful Duchess (and to his dismay, her kittens). There are many resonances between this song and two others that have already been discussed: “He’s a Tramp” and “Bare Necessities.” Like both of these songs, “Thomas O’Malley” describes a confident, free-spirited, somewhat rakish male and his ethos, which prioritizes freedom over the comforts of social convention: “I only got myself and this big old world, but I sip that cup of life with my fingers curled. I don’t worry what road to take. I don’t have to think of that. Whatever I take is the road I make. It’s the road of life, make no mistake.” O’Malley’s opening solo describes his character for the benefit of both Duchess and the audience. He is footloose and free-spirited, an “improviser” at life, as he tells us in his words and through his music. His swinging, crooned solo is accompanied by brushed drums, birdlike flute flourishes, clarinet countermelodies, and of course wailing brass. And, as one might expect, it is also accompanied by a high-footed dance that visually demonstrates O’Malley’s physicality and comfort in his own body.

O’Malley fits what had, by this time, become a classic type for Disney heroes: a confident alpha male, living on the periphery of society by choice, often with a history of womanizing but always with a heart of gold. O’Malley is a particularly convincing lovable rogue, perhaps because many of his character’s key traits are already associated with cats. Interestingly, Disney had already featured a lovable feline cad five years earlier in the live-action film That Darn Cat! (1965), with an eponymous theme song written by the Sherman Brothers and sung by Bobby Darin. This theme song bears some melodic resemblance to another song popularized by Darin in 1959: Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” written in 1928 for Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) and translated as “Mack the Knife” by Elisabeth Hauptmann.⁶ Though the character of D.C. (the Darn Cat) is not fully anthropomorphized in the live-action film, the theme song’s description of him is very similar to O’Malley’s self-description in The Aristocats. As Darin croons, “There never was a greater smooth operator than that darn cat.” O’Malley builds upon the character of D.C. with a fully anthropomorphized personality and Phil Harris’s distinctively rumbling, characterful voice—which naturally also echoes with the sounds of another laidback jazz-lover, Baloo the bear.⁷

“Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat” is sung by O’Malley’s friends, who, unbeknownst to him, have decided to crash his Paris “pad” when he, Duchess, and the kittens are on their way back to Madame’s. The leader of the group is the trumpeter Scat Cat, voiced by real-life jazz trumpeter Scatman Crothers; the part was intended for Louis Armstrong, but he ended up pulling out of the project due to ill health (Johnson 172–73). Scat Cat was notable in being a jazz-singing character who was actually voiced by a black actor. All jazz songs to this point had been sung by white actors, even in the case of King Louie. Scat Cat’s black fur color was probably also meaningful—though the fur color of anthropomorphized Disney animals was not necessarily meaningful, as suggested above. While the blondeness of Peg seemed to intentionally advertise the character’s association with her white voice actress, Peggy Lee, Baloo and Bagheera were black-furred animals voiced by white actors and were not depicted as racial “Others,” whereas the reddish-brown King Louie was portrayed as a racial “Other.”

Scat Cat and the Alley Cats are some of Disney’s most overtly “jazzy” characters—even considering Louis the alligator from The Princess and the Frog. The characters in the “band” depict a range of twentieth-century “cool” musician types. Scat Cat himself is depicted as an homage to an earlier era of jazz with his old-fashioned bowler and bowtie; one of the Alley Cats is an Italian accordionist wearing a neckerchief; another guitar-playing cat has an English accent and wears colored glasses and beads, representing a Beatles-type hippie musician; a third is a Siamese pianist-drummer who is clearly intended to represent an Asian musician; and a fourth is a heavy-browed Russian bass player. The band is very eclectic and racially diverse, as “swinger” musicians on the social periphery might be.

The film is set in 1910, so it would be very early to be hearing any sort of “jazz” in Paris, as this was fifteen years before Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet would travel to Europe. Though members of the band are seen playing double bass, guitar, and accordion, the song proper (as opposed to the instrumental number played immediately before it) is dominated by clarinet, piano, drums, and horns—not least Scat Cat’s own trumpet. The song features “nonsense” scat singing and has a strong instrumental emphasis, with long breaks for brass solos as the cats dance—as of course they would when that wild, physically charged jazz music is being played. And in line with jazz performance practices, the instrumental and vocal parts sound dynamic and interactive.

Scat Cat and his Alley Cats represent a group of likable urban bohemians—unconventional, culturally multifarious, confident, straight-talking, brassy, a bit rough, but ultimately good-hearted. They provide a counterpoint for Duchess and the kittens’ Parisian refinement and epitomize the wild, ethnically diverse (American) jazz culture that O’Malley participates in but does not ultimately belong to—for, like all of our lovable rogues, he is “white” at heart, and, though he dabbles in the wildness of jazz, he can still make himself look like the “white” people if he chooses to do so. This is shown at the end of the film, when O’Malley—like Tramp before him—is domesticated and brought into polite society, with starched collar and all.⁸

Woodshedding in the Bayou

And so that brings us to Disney animation’s leading homage to jazz (and the first Disney princess film that has anything to do with it): The Princess and the Frog of 2009. This film advertises its “jazzy” music from its opening title, as jazz is one of the important ingredients in its “gumbo” of New Orleans cultural flavors.

This princess film starts out in jazz’s hometown in 1912, but the majority of the plot is set about ten years later, in the early ’20s.⁹ The plot—which was very loosely adapted from E.D. Baker’s popular book The Frog Princess (2002)—centers around Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose), a hard-working black waitress who wants to fulfill her late father’s dream of opening a restaurant called Tiana’s Place. She ends up being transformed into a frog after she tries to help Prince Naveen, who has been turned into one himself by the evil voodoo man Dr. Facilier. On their quest to turn back into humans, Tiana and Naveen make friends with the jazz-loving alligator Louis, the loyal but delusional firefly Ray, and the (good) voodoo lady Mama Odie. Every black character in the film was actually voiced by a black actor—perhaps with the exception of Prince Naveen, who manifests Disney’s attempt at “race neutrality” (according to Gregory 436) and was voiced by Brazilian-American actor Bruno Campos. With this film, Disney appears to have been trying to correct the twofold shortcomings of its previous princess films, which are criticized for either (1) a lack of racial diversity, especially in their early films (Disney featured all-white princesses from Snow White in 1937 to Beauty and the Beast in 1991); or (2) the appropriation of other cultures in their more recent films—namely Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), Mulan (1998), and subsequently Moana (2016)—which were intended to counterbalance the insufficient diversity of their earlier pictures. The redoubtable screenwriter-director team of Disney animation, Ron Clements and John Musker, wrote the screenplay for The Princess and the Frog in collaboration with Rob Edwards, a black screenwriter who had already worked with Disney on Treasure Planet in 2002. With Rob Edwards as a screenwriter, a predominantly black cast, and even Oprah Winfrey signed-up to voice Tiana’s mother, Eudora, what could possibly go wrong this time?

The film has received a great deal of critical and scholarly attention—but not all of it positive. Sarita McCoy Gregory argues that the film offers a “stereotypical image of black women as invisible or as solely attached to labor” (433). Additionally, she posits that in contrasting Tiana’s dreams with those of Charlotte (Tiana’s rich, white childhood friend who is obsessed with marrying royalty), the film shows that “black girls and white girls might wish on the same star, but they come to expect different outcomes” (445). I would agree with Gregory’s summation that the film depicts Tiana’s experiences and dreams as fundamentally different from Charlotte’s. Despite its cast and crew, the film might be charged with inadvertently perpetuating the idea that there is a double standard for what children should aspire to, based on the color of their skin. But, while it is easy to accuse Disney of portraying racial inequality in this film, it would be harder to suggest a solution to the problem. The reality was that in New Orleans during the 1910s and ’20s, there was a double standard between black girls and white girls, and, if Disney had erased that history by building an improbable and ahistorical social equality between the two girls, the film would have been deeply disrespectful to past and current victims of racial inequality. In essence, Disney was never going to get its depiction of a black woman’s experience in 1920s New Orleans “right” because it cannot simultaneously present a scarred past reality and model a desired future for racial equality in America. And, ultimately, though Charlotte dreamed of marrying a prince while Tiana dreamed of working in her own restaurant (rather than someone else’s), it was Tiana’s head—not Charlotte’s—that got the literal crown. Perhaps that is Disney “magic” at its best: encouraging every little girl to dream bigger than society or history might say she should.

While Rob Edwards brought diversity to the film’s story production team, a similar diversity cannot be found in the compositional team for the film’s score. Save for the end-credit song (“Never Knew I Needed”) written and performed by Ne-Yo, the entire soundtrack was written by the Disney and Pixar favorite Randy Newman. Newman split his childhood between New Orleans and Los Angeles, where he established a dual career as a singer-songwriter and a film music composer. He is known for his distinctive and characterful “Americana” sound, influenced by country and R&B—but he does not identify as a jazz musician, according to the biography on his own website (“Biography”). There were two New Orleans-based artists who performed on the soundtrack—the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the (white) blues-crossover singer Dr. John—but, interestingly, no jazz musician contributed to writing the songs, and no black composer did either (save for the end-credit song). Without wanting to disrespect Disney’s intentions for this film or Newman’s very enjoyable songs, I cannot help but feel that, with the music for this film, Disney missed opportunities to (1) acknowledge the black roots of New Orleans jazz music and (2) allow black musicians not only to perform jazz songs in Disney films but finally to write them too.

“Jazz” is used by Newman as a musical flavoring in this film to spice his own distinctive sound—as heard in his four Toy Story soundtracks (1995, 1999, 2010, and 2019) and also that of A Bug’s Life (1998). The audience knows when it is supposed to be hearing “Jazz” in Newman’s music through his choice of instrumentation, but also—crucially—through accompanying visuals. A good example of this would be the title sequence, “Down in New Orleans.” The visuals accompanying the opening song insist that the audience is hearing jazz, mostly through the inclusion of a street jazz band that knits the disparate opening scenes together. The band initially intercepts an unimpressed Tiana on her way to work and subsequently reappears on the wharf as Prince Naveen disembarks his cruise ship. Apart from the inclusion of a strong brass and wind section, the song itself is in a fairly unexceptional Randy Newman songwriting style. As such, I would argue that the audience understands the song to be “Jazz” primarily because of the visuals, not the sound. But jazz is not the only flavoring Newman uses in the The Princess and the Frog. Mama Odie’s song “Dig a Little Deeper,” with its electric organ and chorus, is much more gospel music than jazz. Ray the firefly’s first song, “Gonna Take You There,” with its pronounced accordion accompaniment, is an homage to zydeco, while his love song “Ma Belle Evangeline” is a Cajun waltz in the style of “Jolie Blonde,” the so-called Cajun “national anthem.” Even in this New Orleans-set Disney film, the use of jazz is not homogeneous throughout, and, as such, its incorporation into the score remains quite nuanced. In fact, the relationships between the film’s main characters and jazz are key to defining their identities, proclivities, and ambitions in the story.

To explore how jazz is used to define the film’s characters, this discussion might best start by considering the antagonist. Dr. Facilier is a violet-eyed, black witch doctor who becomes the chief villain in the plot when he decides to turn Naveen into a frog. Facilier has one song in the film, “Friends on the Other Side,” in which he addresses the Prince and his valet, Lawrence, tricking them into participating in his evil schemes. One should not be surprised to find that Facilier’s song is one of the jazziest in the movie, because he is the moral underclass of the film: essentially avaricious and self-interested, proving dangerous because of his connections with dark, heathen magic. He has all the characteristics of a Disney villain while also being a caricature of an African-American man: a “Shadow Man” who is both criminal and pagan. His song features some hopeful, open, Copland-esque horn harmonies in the fortune-telling section, but, for the most part, it is a big band number. The audience hears a marching, ominous bass line voiced by vocal percussionists (visually depicted as the voodoo masks), a weighty brass section, strong drums, and a chorus. Facilier’s song is notable for its relatively large performance forces, sonically depicting its underlying message: Facilier may just be one man, but he has spiritual allies and associates who make him a formidable foe. Interestingly the call-and response singing between Dr. Facilier and the chorus (“Are you ready?”), as well as the rapidly descending melodic line at the end of the verse, is strongly reminiscent of Cab Calloway’s 1931 hit “Minnie the Moocher,” which continues to be popular in big-band arrangements by the likes of Robbie Williams, and, interestingly, the swing-revival band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Voodoo “baddy” Dr. Facilier’s signature song and Voodoo Daddy’s recordings of Calloway’s hit sound strikingly similar.

And that bring us to Prince Naveen, whose relationship with jazz is, if possible, even more important to his characterization. Naveen is a prodigal royal. As he explains to Tiana while in frog form, “my parents are fabulously wealthy, but they cut me off for being a leech!” The impecunious prince thus needs to find a wealthy girl to marry so that he can restore his fortunes without working or being responsible. Naveen prefers to live for enjoyment, and his chief enjoyment is jazz. Soon after arriving in New Orleans, he joins the walking jazz band with his ukulele, rapturously exclaiming to his long-suffering valet: “Listen, Lawrence, Listen! Oh… it’s jazz, it’s jazz music! It was born here. It’s beautiful, no?” To Naveen, jazz represents an escape from reality. It is the music of freedom. Naveen, as already noted, is “ethnically ambiguous,” which can be interpreted in a couple of ways. On the one hand, his racial ambiguity made the film appear more modern and racially diverse, but, on the other hand, it prevented there being an on-screen interracial marriage between Tiana and Naveen. In any case, Naveen is depicted as a cultural outsider to New Orleans jazz—like the very “white” Peg. His interest in jazz music and jazz culture is thus symptomatic of a general moral delinquency. Jazz is wild and perhaps dangerous music, so only those seeking an escape from social mores would involve themselves with it.

The music Naveen so admires is the cultural heritage of his destined bride Tiana, but her interest in New Orleans’s famous music is notable only for its absence. In Tiana’s solo song, “Almost There,” she assures her mother that her late father’s dream to open his own restaurant has nearly been fulfilled. She sings of her journey getting to that point, but mostly of what the future will hold. In this daydream sequence, an abstracted version of Tiana struts about in a glamorous white dress and boa, flanked by her army of waiters and chefs. The visuals of the restaurant suggest that her venue would feature jazz music and dancing for its patrons, but this is the extent of jazz’s involvement in her dream. It is an element in her recipe for commercial success. Her song itself features clarinet riffs between verses and some brass flourishes over brushed drums and piano—so it is flavored with some “jazzy” sounds and does feature her strutting about. However, I would argue that “Almost There” is not supposed to be interpreted as “jazz”—particularly when juxtaposed with the next scene, which finds Naveen playing his ukulele with the street jazz band to a crowd of keen onlookers while dancing with a child (emphasizing the childishness of both Naveen and jazz music). After all, “Almost There” is the Disney princess’s signature number, so it is not surprising that the song sounds at least as much Randy Newman as Louis Armstrong, because wildness is not a major part of Tiana’s characterization—unlike Naveen’s. Tiana is hardworking and straight-talking, and she knows where she’s going. Jazz music and its cultural associations do not communicate any of these qualities, so it does not define her sound.

Tiana’s ambivalence toward New Orleans music is, if anything, confirmed in her trio with Naveen and Louis the alligator. “When We’re Human” features some of the most genuinely “jazzy” music in the whole of The Princess and the Frog. It has “improvisatory” instrumental and vocal solos underpinned by piano and drums. The instrumental solos are diegetic to the plot, performed by Louis the trumpet-playing alligator and ukulele-playing Naveen. Louis desperately wants to play jazz in the city, but he is unable to because everyone is terrified of alligators. After meeting Naveen and Tiana and hearing their story, he mentions that Mama Odie might be able to help turn them human again. The frogs are delighted at the news and ask for Louis to take them to her, but he refuses—until he realizes that he could ask her to make him human too, so that he can play his beloved jazz. As they journey through the swamp, he starts singing the song “When We’re Human,” in which Naveen quickly joins, using a twig wrapped in spiders’ webs as a would-be ukulele. Tiana, however, is quick to register her disapproval of Naveen’s dreams, implying that he is arrogant and irresponsible. Reflecting jazz practices, each of the characters is given a chance to “solo” in the song, but they have very different things to say. Tiana uses her sung solo to restate her ethos of hard work, and she snatches Naveen’s instrument and throws it away before returning to her more profitable activity of paddling them through the water toward Mama Odie and their goal of becoming human. Notably, she is the only character who does not participate in the song instrumentally. The significance of this is twofold. Firstly, Tiana’s engagement in the song reflects historical gender divides in jazz. Very few women came to fame as jazz instrumentalists in the twentieth century (save Hazel Scott and a few others). Instrumental jazz has come to be associated with masculinity, so that if a woman is to get involved with jazz, it is less problematic if she is a singer rather than a player. And then secondly, women may sing jazz rather than play it, but true ladies do not do either. Like Lady the spaniel, Tiana is “too nice a girl” to be hung up on jazz music, so, ironically, her jazz solo in this song is actively anti-jazz.

And this brings us, finally, to Louis (voiced by black actor Michael-Leon Wooley), who—like Naveen—is largely characterized by his relationship with jazz. Louis (who was presumably named for Louis Armstrong) has one burning desire, and that is to play with the jazz greats of New Orleans. Like King Louie before him, Louis the alligator’s very animality has racial undertones. Though he is a Louisiana native and plays jazz as well as any human, he is barred from playing his own music. As he explains to Naveen and Tiana, he once tried to play jazz on a riverboat, but everyone was too afraid and ran away. He is, after all, an enormous wild animal. In the film, the band he tried to play with were black and the crowd they played to was ethnically mixed, but Louis’s experience is nevertheless sadly analogous to the real experience of black jazz musicians in the twentieth century, who were edited out of their own music as more “acceptable” musicians—like Paul Whiteman—became the white faces of black music in America (see the film King of Jazz).

Though Louis is set on the idea of exchanging his scales for smooth skin, Mama Odie and her chorus of flamingos start setting him straight in her gospel-inflected song “Dig a Little Deeper,” in which she tells Naveen, Tiana, and Louis “It don’t matter what you look like, don’t matter what you wear.”¹⁰ But when Louis insists “I want to be human too, so I can play jazz with the big boys,” she tells him “Jabber Jaws, you dig a little deeper, you find ever’thing you need.” Her words prove prophetic (as one would expect) in an immediate, if not lasting, way. On their journey back to New Orleans, the trio hitch a ride on a riverboat. To his surprise, Louis finds he does not scare other musicians or their audiences, because it is Mardi Gras and everyone is dressed up. Everyone is looking wild and scary like him. But the audience knows that this is only a moment of literal carnival and is left wondering: When it is over and people see the real Louis again, what happens then? Louis is jazz-loving and “wild” like Naveen, but, unlike Naveen, he is not that way by choice. He is an animal, so his skin will never change—and people’s reaction to it will not either, it seems. Like King Louie, Louis the alligator will dream about being human, but his dreams will never come true. Even Disney’s magic will not stretch that far.

Conclusion

In Disney animated features, jazz was a consistently used—if not abundantly used—musical idiom, from Peggy Lee’s songs in 1955 to Randy Newman’s in 2009. But it never has had purely musical meaning. It has been used to characterize and conjure associations with the wild and uncivilized—much like the Cotton Club’s “jungle sound.”¹¹ I am not arguing that there has been a conscious, concerted effort by Disney to use jazz in a uniform way throughout. After all, this article has examined five jazz-featuring animated films from a huge portion of the company’s history, from Walt’s day to far beyond it. But what I would argue is that these case studies indicate that Walt Disney Animation Studios has continued to use jazz as a musical device to depict racial and cultural tropes, perpetuating assumptions about jazz and blackness that developed in the 1920s and continue to survive in culture today. In some cases, this is indeed a pernicious wildness that is not and cannot be redeemed, such as in the cases of Dr. Facilier and his demonic big band, and of course Cruella de Vil. King Louie does not necessarily fall into the same category. Unlike in the live-action 2016 remake, in the animated version of The Jungle Book King Louie is not vicious or terrifying, and he certainly is not the ultimate villain in the film. That role is reserved for Shere Khan, who gets no song at all. No, Louie does not bear any particular ill will toward Mowgli—he just wants something from him that he cannot get for himself, and he uses his hypnotic jungle “beat” to coerce Mowgli into helping.

Louie is a crucial character in understanding the relationship between jazz and blackness in Disney. As Metcalf has suggested, the scene at the monkey temple is pregnant with racial implications. King Louie’s depiction as a dancing, jazz-loving human “wannabe” is problematic—as is his “whitewashed” voice. In Disney’s feature-length animated films, the divorce between blackness and jazz began with Peggy Lee in Lady and the Tramp, which put jazz in the mouth of a blonde, blue-eyed dog. The two were reconciled in The Aristocats with Scat Cat and the Alley Cats singing “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat.” While Louie wanted to “be like you,” Scat Cat sings everyone wants to be like us. Finally, the reunion of jazz and blackness was—I believe—intended to be celebrated in The Princess and the Frog. Nevertheless, I would argue that this film actually follows in the steps of its predecessors for the most part, using jazz to import specific (and longstanding) extramusical meanings into the film. Additionally, Louis the alligator’s desire to become socially acceptable by changing his “skin” is a stark reminder of harsh racial realities outside of Disney’s animated world—but also inside of it. Notably, the film score’s compositional team did not include any black musicians—or even a career jazz player, for that matter.

But jazz was not just used to depict evil (Cruella and Dr. Facilier) or blackness (Louie, Louis, and Scat Cat). In many of the cases this article has discussed, jazz was used to portray “white” characters as lovable rogues. Tramp, O’Malley, Baloo, and Naveen were associated with jazz because it was a symbol of their carefree attitude toward life and their abandonment of social mores and responsibility; but, significantly, they remained able to opt in to society if they chose to do so, because they were essentially “white.” And they all do. They all “grow up” in the end and are brought back into their right place in society. Tramp is adopted by Lady’s owners and gets his own dog collar. Baloo realizes that his “Bare Necessities” ethos will not paper over all cracks and leaves Mowgli in the Man-Village where he belongs. O’Malley also gets adopted by Duchess’s owner, Madame. Naveen pleases his parents with his hardworking bride, gets re-inherited, and runs “Tiana’s Place” with his princess. That is not to say that these characters necessarily have to give up jazz. O’Malley and Naveen certainly do not. But the characteristic waywardness of these jazz lovers is reformed, removing the meaning of jazz and just leaving the sound.

But this is for male characters only, of course. A female character’s association with jazz is less innocuous. Disney does not depict one jazz-loving “lady.” Lady herself, of course, has nothing to do with jazz. Duchess finds Scat Cat and his Alley Cats charming, but, notably, when she joins in the instrumental music for “Ev’rybody Wants to Be Cat,” she plays the harp (perhaps the most “feminine” of all instruments) in a pseudo-lullaby. Even Tiana, the closest Disney comes to a “Jazz Princess,” actually has as little to do with jazz as she can get away with in a jazz-oriented film set in New Orleans. The two female characters that are definitively linked to jazz in Disney animated films do not benefit from the association. While a sympathetic character, Peg is defined by her relationship with jazz and her identity as a nightclub singer—a washed-up, incarcerated beauty singing of womanizing men she wishes would “come her way.” And then, of course, there is Cruella. No female could be less feminine than Cruella. She lives in a cloud of green cigarette smoke, drives her own fast car, has lots of money, and butchers small, fluffy animals. She is obviously evil, and what music could communicate the perversion of her femininity? Jazz, of course.

We may find it curious that over this fifty-year period—which saw many forms of popular music come and go—Disney clung to the jazz idiom as a symbol of wildness. But, of course, one must consider that many of these films were set in the early twentieth century, when jazz was still very modern and very risqué: Lady and the Tramp was set in 1909; The Aristocats in 1910; The Princess and the Frog from 1912 to the early 1920s.¹² Walt Disney Animation Studios has long favored this period of history, perhaps because it is sufficiently far from modern audiences’ experiences to remain “idyllic” (even Walt Disney himself would have been just a child in the 1910s). In any case, the use of jazz by Disney animation has shown remarkable consistency for more than fifty years—even through to The Princess and the Frog, which promises to break this worrying mold but disappoints with its depictions of a wild, jazz-loving foreign Prince and a trumpet-playing animal who dreams in vain of being human. Disney has used jazz to signify wildness, animality, “Otherness,” social unacceptability, irresponsibility, and carefree living, perpetuating stereotypes of jazz and ultimately blackness that echo from the exotic sounds of “jungle” jazz at the Cotton Club in the 1930s. Some things never change.

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Additional information

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Georgina Bartlett

Georgina Bartlett is a popular-music historian researching the intersections between comic opera, pleasure-garden music, domestic entertainment, and street song in England around the turn of the nineteenth century. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Miami, where she studied under Professors Karen Henson and Melissa de Graaf, and she completed a doctoral dissertation at Oxford University under the supervision of Professor Suzanne Aspden. During her doctoral study, she held a Junior Teaching Fellowship at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; lectured at the Faculty of Music on Foundations in the Study of Music; and was the Lecturer and Organising Tutor in Music at St. Peter’s College, University of Oxford.

Notes

1. Josephine Baker’s La Revue Nègre performances in Paris also famously played into the “savage” trope associated with blackness and jazz at this time. See Fry.

2. Trips to Harlem were advertised to white visitors by concierges, who would provide the cards of “slumming hostesses” who could guide visitors through these “dangerous” neighborhoods. These cards depicted Harlem as forbidden fruit for white audiences. As one reads (quoted by Malcolm Womack): “Here in the world’s greatest city it would amuse and also interest you to see the real inside of the new Negro Race of Harlem. You have heard it discussed, but there are very few who really know … . Your season is not complete with thrills until you have visited Harlem” (16). In his dissertation, Womack discusses in some detail the culture of white audiences at Harlem jazz clubs, applying Dean MacCannell’s theory of cultural tourism to the Cotton Club specifically: “The white ideas of Harlem constructed by the tourists served to give them permission to alter their behavior … and use the neighborhood of Harlem as a playground for libidinous carousing” (17).

3. I think it is important to comment further on the scope of this study, addressing why certain films, which might appear to be relevant to this discussion, are in fact excluded from it. One such film would be The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, a 1949 animated feature by Disney that is comprised of two short films that were conceived separately but later knitted together for a single release. One is a retelling of The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame, and the other “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) by Washington Irving. As both were literary stories, each was given a famous narrator who presented the tale of what was—in his opinion—the “most fabulous character” in literature: Basil Rathbone presented the English story The Wind in the Willows, and Bing Crosby presented the American tale The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. As well as narrating the film, Bing Crosby (with the Rhythmaires) sang three songs for the Sleepy Hollow story (“Ichabod,” “Katrina,” and “The Headless Horseman”), delivered in a typical Crosby croon. Though this film does incorporate jazz, I have not devoted a section to it in this article as it is not a feature-length film, but rather two short films that were briefly conjoined and almost immediately separated again (for further information on The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, see Neuman). For the sake of scope, I have had to limit this discussion to feature-length films only, and—significantly—only those from Walt Disney Animation Studios itself. Though Disney and Pixar Animation Studios have become increasingly intertwined in recent years, I would argue that Pixar has a separate history and its own cinematic tropes that are distinct from those fostered and perpetuated through Walt Disney Animation Studios. I have not included discussions of Dumbo (1941) or The Lion King (1994) in this article either, though they include notable racial depictions. While they were both feature-length films from Walt Disney Animation Studios, I am not focusing on all depictions of race in Disney animation, but rather on how jazz as a musical style has been used to engage with racial ideas in Disney’s animated movies.

4. This study builds upon the research of Barry Keith Grant, who explored the use of jazz in early animation.

5. Cruella’s car was based on the rare 1935 Bugatti Type 57 Atalante Faux Cabriolet, according to Gratton.

6. The song became even more popular after Ella Fitzgerald’s 1960 live recording Mack the Knife: Ella in Berlin, featuring improvised lyrics and scatting, for which she won two Grammys at the Third Annual Grammy Awards in 1961: one for the track and one for the album.

7. Harris would go on to voice another bear, Little John, in Disney’s anthropomorphized tale of Robin Hood (1973).

8. Interestingly, Madame could be considered another fictitious version of the “Bebop Baroness,” who also ended up living in a large house that hosted numerous pet cats as well as jazz musicians. Her house even earned the name “The Cat House:” a double entendre on its feline and musical associations (Kastin 289).

9. The date of 1912 is implied by a newspaper featured in the opening scenes (when Tiana is a child) announcing that Woodrow Wilson has just been elected President. The film then fast-forwards about a decade to when Tiana is a young woman.

10. The Princess and the Frog is not the first Disney animated film that used a gospel sound for effect. The most notable example would be Hercules (1997), in which the Muses sang the song “The Gospel Truth.” Disney used gospel music in Hercules to indicate that the Muses have a certain authority in moral or spiritual matters. In The Princess and the Frog, it is used in a similar way to indicate that Mama Odie is a reliable voice of wisdom.

11. It may be no coincidence that Randy Newman’s score for Monsters, Inc. in 2001 was composed in a more explicitly “jazzy” style, including the instrumental version of “If I Didn’t Have You,” which plays during the title credits, accompanied by stylized animation of monsters popping out of doors that are continually moving about like playing cards. With the shifting visuals and unpredictable jazz solos, the title credits set the scene for the wildness of the film’s subject: monsters. This film has not been discussed in detail here because it was a Pixar Animation Studios film—made by Pixar, but distributed by Disney—rather than a Walt Disney Animation Studios film. The same holds true for Soul (released in 2020)—though this latest film by Pixar, I would argue, uses jazz in a much more positive way.

12. The film versions of One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Jungle Book are not explicit as to the years in which they are set, though The Jungle Book would conceivably have been set not long before 1900, and One Hundred and One Dalmatians appears to be set in the 1950s, as in Smith’s book.