Princess Elena of Avalor, a confident and compassionate teenager in an enchanted fairytale kingdom inspired by diverse Latin cultures and folklore, will be introduced in a special episode of Disney Junior’s hit series Sofia the First beginning production now for a 2016 premiere. That exciting story arc will usher in the 2016 launch of the animated series Elena of Avalor, a production of Disney Television Animation.Remember my hit* post about Princess Sofia? I got all excited for a second that we were going to have a real Latina Disney Princess, but it turns out it's just a spinoff of Sofia the First on the Disney Channel. Elena does look 'more Latina', which yay for representation for brown girls (especially brown Latina girls), but you can't claim she's Latina since she's from a made-up country. Please read that post I wrote about Sofia for all my thoughts about giving us "Latin@" characters who are from a made-up world.
I am further annoyed by the "this fake world is inspired by Latino and Hispanic cultures around the world!" nonsense that I hate. Latin@s are not all the same; please don't lump us together. A ~*Latin-flavored*~ setting (when done by white people) is just insulting; there's better representation on a tortilla chip bag. I get that the amount of countries and cultures is overwhelming, but try to do better by us.
Although I guess you could argue that like half the white Disney Princesses are from made-up lands (Atlantis or whatever the mermaid city is called, wherever Frozen is set, etc.). So I guess what I'm annoyed by the most about this is that it's more of the same. They already did this to us with Sofia. Why aren't Latina princesses good enough to get a feature film? This feels like some "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" nonsense.
p.s. I am so excited for Moana!! PLEASE GO SEE MOANA; it needs to be super successful so that Disney will keep making movies about non-white people!
*not really
