Next Disney Princess Is Girl Whose Dad Stole A Chunk Of Africa To Make Her ‘Royalty’
For a long time now, people have been asking Disney to do more to diversify its princess line-up. But now the company has one-upped their previous stance of turning a deaf ear to these requests — by making a movie about a white princess whose father literally grubbed up some land in Africa to start their own ‘kingdom’.
Per Jezebel, the movie, which so far is being called The Princess of North Sudan instead of White Privilege: The Motion Picture, features protagonists you may remember: father Jeremiah Heaton, who traveled last year to a small unclaimed strip of land between Egypt and Sudan to stake out his brand-new kingdom. That way, Heaton would become a king, and his daughter Emily would become a literal princess.
Heaton says that by his children’s “special request”, he’s working to reach out to neighboring countries, and making plans to turn his proto-empire into an African agricultural paradise. (It had to be a special request from the kids to be friendly with the other countries in the area? That probably shouldn’t be surprising, considering how the Kingdom of North Sudan came to be in the first place.) To that end, he’s seeking crowdfunding for his Kingdom of North Sudan desert agriculture research program — obviously all the scientists already working on issues of food scarcity and drought around the world were doing it wrong, and diverting funds from them to Heaton’s anti-GMO, anti-pesticide, anti-herbicide pockets is a terrific plan. Let’s all take a moment to congratulate this guy on making “white man decides to play Manifest Destiny in Africa” even more infuriating by adding on “and then has the gall to ask other people for money to support this plan”.
Disney has tapped writer Stephany Folsom to do the script for this movie instead of any number of other perfectly good movies that could have been written about a princess of color instead. Morgan Spurlock, of Super Size Me fame, is slotted to direct. There’s no word yet on exactly what the movie’s plot will be, although The Hollywood Reporter says:
The studio is focusing on the relationship between the father and daughter set against a backdrop of a fantastical adventure.
Movies generally require an antagonist of some kind, and it’s unclear who will be fulfilling that role here. Local nomads who maybe don’t want a bunch of Virginians taking up residence in the area? Evil GMO-loving scientists? Every single government worldwide, who have all so far declined to acknowledge the existence and sovereignty of the Kingdom of North Sudan? Mean mommy-bloggers who aren’t falling over themselves to praise this ridiculous mess of a movie idea? As long as this ‘fantastical adventure’ still features a guy helping himself to a piece of another continent because he decided he deserved it, you can count me and my movie-going dollars out.
(Image: YouTube)
