So this is what history in the making looks like: Disney-fied, gumbo-and-beignet making, blues belting, smart and feisty black girl pride.

Until, of course, this animated icon turns into a frog. And then she’s all of those things, but she can do froggy things, too, like eat flies while lecturing a lazy, but handsome, obliquely brown-skinned prince from some made-up country on the virtues of hard work and thrift.

(Oh, and said prince has been turned into a frog, too, which is how our historic heroine got into this mess in the first place.)

One could argue the wisdom of turning Tiana, Disney’s first African-American heroine, into a green-skinned frog for a good chunk of The Princess and the Frog. Why trot out the first with so much hoopla and self-congratulatory fanfare, only to submerge all that chocolate perkiness a third of the way through? Is Disney hedging its bets, afraid of letting too much blackness play front and center on the big screen?

Making history comes fraught with all sorts of baggage. A movie can’t just be a movie. A black heroine can’t just be a heroine. Precious can’t just be Precious. She has to stand in for everyone—especially Oprah. Even in the age of Tyler Perry, we’re still starved for black celluloid images, images that reflect African-American life in all its complexity. So we show up at the multiplex armed with great expectations—and a magnifying glass. Heaven help the film that dares to be art, free of the burden of uplifting the race.

And let’s not forget Disney’s own checkered past with its dastardly depictions of black and brown folks, from the Ebonics-talking crows in Dumbo to the swinging monkeys in Jungle Book to the What Makes the Red Man Red explainer in Peter Pan. Given all that, The Princess and the Frog couldn’t just be a movie. It had to be a moment, complete with tie-in merchandise carefully trotted out well in advance of the premiere: The Dress! The Doll! The Hair Products!

Given all that, Disney’s first princess in 12 years has a lot to live up to. And its filmmakers tread a fine line between attempting authenticity and keeping the fantasy alive. This being Disney, there are certain tropes that must be in place: Spirited Heroine sets out on a journey. Encounters all sorts of travails along the way, travails which will prompt her to break into song. Animal friends help her in her journey; they, too, can’t help breaking into song. Handsome, often cross-cultural, prince pops up, but evil forces conspire to keep them apart. He sings, too. Back in the day, the Handsome Prince usually saved the day, but this being 2009, the Spirited Heroine generally gets to save the day—and Handsome Prince—thereby actualizing her own Inner Princess. The Handsome Prince and the Actualized Princess hook up; live happily ever after, etc., etc.

Now, the whole idea of princes and princesses is a little hard to swallow for a film set in New Orleans in the Jim Crow-era 1920s. So writer/director Ron Clements has to turn things inside and out to make those Disney tropes fit. Princess Tiana is really the daughter of a gumbo-making, laborer father (Terrence Howard) and a seamstress mother (Oprah Winfrey) who makes clothes for the rich white family. (The patriarch of the family is named, God help us, Big Daddy.) Tiana grows up to be a hard-working waitress (Anika Noni Rose) with big dreams of opening her own restaurant, where she’ll honor her dead father by making his gumbo recipe the toast of the town. Meanwhile, her best friend, Big Daddy’s pretty blonde daughter, dreams of marrying her Prince. The Prince—Prince Naveen from fictional Maldonia—just happens to have just stepped off the boat in New Orleans, looking for good times and hopefully, a rich girl to marry. As it turns out, the Prince is broke. Not that empty pockets have altered his oversized sense of entitlement. Clearly the Prince is sorely in need of a little reeducation. (“You’re a no-count, philandering, lazy bump on a log,” Tiana tells him.) This being a Disney production, bad deeds and philandering, lazy ways do not go unpunished. Through some Voodoo skullduggery, the Prince is turned into a frog. Unfortunately for Tiana, she is too.

I’ll have to admit to feeling disappointed when big-eyed Tiana was turned into a bug-eyed frog. It’s rare to see a mostly black world rendered lovingly through the hands of Disney animators. (And as the first hand-drawn Disney cartoon in two decades, it’s a thing of beauty.) But as a plot device, the whole amphibian thing works well as a driving force: Tiana needs an obstacle to overcome; nothing’s a more powerful motivator than suddenly morphing into a slime-ridden, swamp-dwelling critter. The Princess and the Frog charms and entertains, while not ignoring certain class and race realities, from Tiana and her mother sitting on the back of the trolley car to two white bankers dismissing Tiana’s business plans because of her “background.” New Orleans, with its grand Garden District mansions and humble shotgun houses, looks just right.

It would be nice if they could get that distinctive New Orleans accent right, too, but—sigh—Hollywood rarely does.

Teresa Wiltz is The Root’s senior culture writer. Follow her on Twitter.