WMG / The Princess and the Frog

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Theories on Dr. Facilier, Mama Odie, and voodoo in general

Mama Otie studied in Discworld

Read Witches Abroad and tell me I'm wrong.

The "Shadow Demons" are the ghosts of Disney villains past.

Here's a list of villains that have died in the past, pre-1920s:

• The Wicked Queen
• Maleficent
• Ursula - Now that I think about it, one of the ghosts had wild Medusa-like hair that reminds me of her.
• Gaston
• Jafar
• Frollo
• Shan Yu
• Clayton
• Scar- Some of them looked quite animilistic. Also, if we take the Hercules joke he must have died a pretty long time ago. The lack of humans may imply the film took place before mankind even evolved.
  • Then Scar would have had to be a pretty old lion in order to have been alive before mankind existed and yet still be killed by Hercules. It could be that, since he was killed by the hyenas, he made a deal like Facilier and brought back by the friends on the other side only to lose out to the demigod.
    • OR, the Lion King took place RIGHT before humans came about, and Hercules was the first man.
    • That makes no sense. Hercules clearly wasn't the first man, as we see Ancient Greece that has been populated long before Hercules.
    • Better, and not messing with timelines, Scar died to the hyenas, and made a deal with dark forces to be returned to life, impervious to mortal weapons. The forces obliged, and Scar became the Nemian Lion, which is the actual lion impervious to blades and arrows that Hercules in myth had to fight, and skinned with it's own claws to make a cloak. The Nemian Lion was a rampaging monster, killing people. So Scar gets his deal, and has only vague shadowy memories of his life, but knows that he must kill, to pay the FOTOS. Hercules gets called in, and Scar gets his double death when a quasi-divine hero chokes him to death.
• Ratigan - See above.
• Rourke - Just about, he died in the 1910's.
• Sa'Luk
  • Alternately, one of the shadows looked like the cat, who also happened to be voiced by Keith David.
  • Then what does that make the one that looks like Jack Skellington?
    • Jack's already dead. And yeah, not evil, but we never do find out where Facilier's really goin'.
    • If he's not really evil, that could be it - he could be the one tasked by the Loas to keep an eye on Facilier.
    • Someone made a very cool fanart based on this theory.

Mama Odie can see the living.

Her eyes are blind (or in a jar) as she demonstrated by accidentally breaking a vase, using Juju as a walking stick, thinking a key and a few buttons were candies, almost falling off a desk, almost falling in an hole and so on. Yet she never appears to have any trouble locating anyone, even from a distance, and knew exactly where Tiana's heart was. While it could be explained by her hearing, it may also be that her magical "life" powers grant her the ability to perceive "enlightened" bodies.

Dr. Facilier is Hades' new assistant.

It is implied that Facilier was dragged to some sort of Hell equivalent, or at least an unpleasant afterlife. In the Disneyverse, Hades seems to rule the afterlife (forgive me for bringing in Kingdom Hearts logic, but that game definitely proves that Hades rules EVERYONE'S afterlife). Facilier was dragged off because he couldn't pay his "debt." Megara was working for Hades to pay off HER debt. Hades is, of course, immortal, so it stands to reason that him being kicked into the Styx wasn't his demise. Once he crawled back out and found Meg missing, he was in need of a new assistant. That's when the voodoo gods drop Facilier off at his door, of course ready to work off his own debt.

• Bonus points if Claude Frollo also shows up, absolutely terrified because he's met the real Hellfire IN PERSON.
  • I'm on it!

Mama Odie was a former slave.

She even says out loud that she's 197-years-old. African-Americans were still slaves nearly 200 years ago. She may have escaped from her masters and somehow became a witch doctor. Perhaps she was bought and separated from her family. All alone, she prays to the sky to help her. And her prayers have been answered by Friends from the Other Side (the GOOD side, of course, explained in the WMG above).

• That would make sense given that 1926 minus 197 years would mean that Mama Odie was born roughly in 1729.

Dr. Facilier got reincarnated as The Arbiter

• Since the good doctor sold his soul to the FOTOS for power to make his life easier, they thought it would be a nice bit of Laser-Guided Karma to have him reincarnate as a Proud Warrior Race Guy and force him to gather souls the old-fashioned way...with lots and lots of plasma to the face. Even after his Heel–Face Turn at the end of Halo 2, he's still providing the FOTOS with Covenant souls, assuming they're not that picky. Besides, destroying all sentient life means there won't be any souls left in the long run for the FOTOS to take.

Dr. Facilier knew he was the villain

Because he put himself in the role. He saw that the way the future unfolded, to be down properly and be good, needed Naveen and Tiana to hook up, and he knew for it to be the perfect fairy tale romance, there needed to be a villain. Being the only convenient figure with ties to dark powers, he resigned himself to the role.

The Friends on the Other Side never expected Facilier to succeed.

They simply let Facilier believe that they expected him to pay his debt, allowing him to rack it up so high that he'd only be able to pay it back with his own soul. That's why they're smiling during the "Friends On The Other Side" reprise: the moment they've been waiting for has finally arrived, and they're free to claim the real prize, Facilier's soul.

Facilier himself is a Nobody or Heartless.

Going off of a previous WMG: Facilier gave up his heart (like Xehanort) to the FOTOS; the shadow behind him is his heartless. Alternatively, he is a heartless himself, and the shadow behind him is like the being attached to Xehanort's Heartless.

• He seems to have emotions, which would rule out being a Nobody. I'll grant you, the Nobodies usually seem pretty emotional, despite what King Mickey suggested, but the genuine, desperate fear as he was being dragged to The Other Side seemed pretty legit.
  • Irrelevant, but it was Yen Sid who said they were emotionless, not King Mickey.
  • While I'm not necessarily arguing against this point, as he is too emotional for a Nobody, I'd like to point out that Demyx and Vexen seemed quite afraid of death.
  • On the other hand, Xemnas is quite hammy despite what you'd expect. Facilier could be doing a similar thing, and over-compensating on mimicking his "original" personality. This WMG otherwise seems pretty legit to this troper, if only because the FOTOS have always reminded her of the Heartless.

The Friends on the Other Side are a collective being of Eldritch Abomination and dead voodoo practitioners that couldn't pay their debts; this entire movie was a Xanatos Gambit: win or lose, they get a soul.

• Facilier accomplishes his goals? That's just fine with the Friends; they get a boatload of souls to boost their power, and they can take Facilier later as he keeps increasing both their power and his own through deals. However, Facilier was also the Friends' earthly agent and appeared to have intelligence the collective lacked, perhaps because of the alien thought processes of dark beings and dead souls; rather than simply killing Facilier as punishment for failing them, the Friends absorbed him mind, body, and soul into their collective, regaining the power and knowledge they gave him plus interest. Facilier still lives as a shadow being on the Other Side, aiding his fellow Friends further and waiting for another voodoo user to come along, willing to make a deal...

Both Odie and Facilier are Awakened

More specifically, Odie is a Free Councilor while Facilier is a Seer of the Throne

Let's compare the two:

• Odie is quite obviously a kind and generous woman, but besides that, she is also incredibly self-reliant and clever-both traits associated with Pentacle mages. She is a bit weaker, mystically speaking, then Facilier, but not because of lack of talent-she's chosen the hard-but-moral way of gaining strength and power, rather than selling her soul (and everyone else's) out to the Exarchs (represented by the shadow demons).

• Facilier, on the other hand, is a greedy Classic Villain with absolutely no concern for the Muggle populous, caring only about himself and his own power-while hypocritically relying on the Exarchs to feed it. What's more, he's petty-he doesn't care about ruling the world, he cares about saving his own skin while making a pretty penny doing so. This, ultimately, leads to his Karmic Fate Worse than Death-his own lack of ability to realize that other people care about their friends, unlike him, leads to the Exarchs being thoroughly defeated by a mortal. You Have Failed Me doesn't begin to explain their attitude towards this.
  • Better yet, both Dr. Facillier and Mama Odie are Sin-Eaters
    • You thought so too?! I knew I was not the only one!
  • How about Changelings? The Friends on the Other Side... well, I don't think I have to elaborate.

Facilier and Mama Odie are Loa Scions

Continuing the White Wolf approach, they're both Scions of the Loa pantheon. Mama Odie is the direct daughter of Damballa and follows his path fairly straightforwardly. Dr. Facilier is a Scion of Baron Samedi, adopted by a previously unknown Titan of Darkness, the Friends on the Other Side.

Dr. Facilier is actually Tiana's Father.

Think back to the temptation scene. Facilier sounds rather... personal on quite a few lines. He's a smooth operator, but he knows just how to make his pitch. This is quite impressive; we've seen his work before, but he'd been paying attention to Naveen, that was the focus of his plan. He hasn't met Tiana by this point, perhaps that time in Dukes... but he's shown to be focusing on the Le Beuffs. Tiana on the otherhand knows of the 'Shadowman', but not the name Facilier, suggesting it's mostly by rep. Facilier doesn't even know that anyone's been accompanying Naveen aside from Lawrence.

The little echo of 'almost there' could take on another meaning in this context, couldn't it? Even their character designs have some points of commonality. Imagine a gaunt version of Tiana's Father. (ironic, given his love of food....

• Tiana's father died a poor man who never made his dream come true he could have been recruited by the Friends On The Other Side in exchange for coming back to life. He wanted to use voodoo to provide for his family like he used to but....The Dark Side Will Make You Forget.

Madam Odie IS Suga Mama from The Proud Family

I know someone mentioned this before, but I wanted to elaborate further.The fact is, they look alike, sound alike, and it could be possible Madam Odie used magic to halt her aging. Because there is a running gag in "The Proud Family" where it showed a photo of Suga Mama from twenty years ago and she looks exactly the same. She has a sister who can use magic, as well as she once scoffed at stage magician who in anger switched her and her dog's heads as a one second gag, which she turned back to normal off-screen. (Did it herself?) ALSO in the Lilo and Stitch crossover she beat up Gantu in a wrestling match. If you have seen the movie he is at least 80 feet tall. That's a task an elderly lady couldn't possibly do without supernatural means.

Dr. Facilier is Hades

When Hades was dragged down by the souls, he was eventually born into a human body—the body of Facilier. Facilier and Hades have many shared physical features, such as long, pointed noses and overbites. Both enjoy making deals, manipulating people, and have anger management issues. Facilier seeks to control souls because he wants to regain his post as lord of the dead.

Dr. Facilier is actually a Vizard, and the "Other Side" he's referring to? That's Gensokyo.

More of a Rule of Funny thing, but This troper's younger brother made an off-hand comment about how Facilier made that skull paint appear from nowhere on his face in a similar manner to Ichigo's hollow mask. And the Genoskyo theory? Well, that mask on his wall could hold one of Yukari's borders, the voodoo trinket came from Rinnosuke's shop, and Naveen turning into a frog was most likely Suwako's doing.

• Any Touhou character who tried to do what the people on the Other Side did would have to be suicidal, since Reimu (or her 1920's equivalent, or in a pinch Yukari) will probably just start exterminating for real. It is more likely the "Other Side" is the Disgaean Netherworld, and therefore Dr. Facilier will be turned into a Prinny. Which is probably ironic.
• Then again, his name could refer to the yukkurii.

Dr. Facilier is the spurned, illegitimate child of Big Daddy.

His obsession with the man is not explored at depth, but his insistence that LeBouf should pay attention to him and stop passing him by, coupled with his entire plot and his desire to bring up Tiana's own daddy issues make this seem like a possibility.

• How? Facilier's in his mid-40s and probably of a similar age to Big Daddy
  • Given that "magical life extension" is explicitly available in the movie's canon, it's possible that LeBouf had previously gotten a booster shot of hoodoo for a long life and money, possibly through his son.
• Alternate theory: Facilier is LeBouf's illegitimate half-brother. Explains just about as much as the other theory and takes account their similar ages.
• Alternate alternate theory: Foe Romance Subtext.
  • This please. I demand Fanfic. If there must be slash in this fandom, let it be this.

There are some more rules to voodoo

One of them is that the practicer of the dark arts must admit himself for what he is before he makes any deal with "customers". Facilier, being Facilier, managed to find an especially harmless-sounding way to say that: that was the hidden meaning of the rather contrived-sounding "Won't you shake… a poor sinner's hand?"

He probably is forbidden to outright deceive anyone. (Though he can help someone else make a deception.) Notice that at no time in "Friends on the Other Side" does he lie. He tells Naveen that there's green in his future and he'll be free to hop around from place to place. Lawrence is told he'll become "Exactly the man you always wanted to be". Note that he ends the song by saying he's not to blame if Naveen and Lawrence aren't satisfied. The Friends on the Other Side are the one's who imposed such a rule.

Dr. Facilier and Mama Odie are related.

They could both come from a long line of closet voodoo practicioners. Facilier could be her nephew... or even, her great nephew or grandson... and through some distance from the family over the years, became evil as a way to become independent.

• Mama Odie is repeatedly referred to as "Queen of the Bayou". Dr. Facilier said that he was a royal on his mother's side. Coincidence?
  • Yes because when he said that he held up a shrunken head with a crown on it. He was clearly lying.
  • Or alternatively he was still telling the truth. And was holding up a family heirloom. So to speak.
  • The head was his evil grandmother. His mother was good, so still rebellion, and Odie has gotten past all that rebellion stuff because she dug a little deeper. And is his x-times-great-grandmother. And yes, this means the above troper is correct, it was an heirloom.
• I'd believe it. Both greatly resemble members of The Proud Family.
  • This troper believes it too!
• In an earlier script "Dr. Facilier would not just be a dark wizard who wants to conquer New Orleans with the help of his friends, he would have been Mama Odie's son, who followed the path of the dark arts unlike his mother. In this same script, there was to be a showdown between the two of them, which would have converged into a major battle during the Mardi Gras."(Source: Disney Wiki) In an alternate universe where this came to pass, even if Facilier were bad would Mama Odie really be driven to KILL HER OWN SON? WTF Disney!!
  • Considering Mama Odie was 197 years old, making Facilier her son would raise some serious timeline issues.
    • Considering Mama Odie is 197 years old, it's entirely possible that Faciler is similarly long lived and this wouldn't cause any issue with the timeline.
    • It's also possible that Facilier's mother was Mama Odie's great-etc. granddaughter; that would jive well enough with his claim to be royal on his mother's side too.
  • Also, it seems likely that voodoo practitioners age differently from normal people. Most people half Mama Odie's age wouldn't be able to put on a huge song and dance number like that.

Mama Odie has Friends on the Other Side too.

But her friends are on the OTHER Other Side. The afterlife has two sides. A dark side, where the corrupted are doomed to suffering as shadows, and a light side, where the good live in peace as sources of light...Stars.

• I assumed Faciler and Mama Odie were just working with different Loa: I could see Mama Odie being a disciple of Damballa or Diejuste while Facilier was conniving with Baron Kriminel or Kalfu.
  • Except Kalfu isn't evil at all, though one could say that Facilier isn't necessarily purely evil either, just power-hungry and likely desperate due to poverty. There are spirits one could work with in Voodoo that take the shape of shadow animals, and that seems to be what Facilier is working with in the later half of the movie. It could still be Kalfu, as he allows ALL manner of workings to pass by him if he can be bothered, it's just hard to tell with law because they don't work with the same system of morality that humans do.
  • I've always assumed they were both using the same entities, but used different approaches, with Mama Odie using them in a more benevolent way. That said, it could be that, for different uses, different prices, and that Facilier's particular sort of magic has human souls as the needed sacrifice.
  • Seeing how the movie doesn't use any real-life Voodoo imagery or symbols for very good reasons it's safe to assume that the "voodoo" used in the film actually are two wholly different systems. Facilier got his powers by making deals with devils and invoking the power of demons while Mama Odie invokes the power of nature.
    • Actually, there are a lot of real-life Voodoo symbols and imagery in the movie. Facilier in general is based around the image of Baron Samedi; the skull mask in "Friends on the Other Side" is a huge give away. There is also a flag in his store with the veve for Ezili Freda on it, and the snakes holding Naveen down could be a nod to Damballah. There are also some symbols floating by in green during the end of the song, some of which seemed legit but where going a bit fast for this troper to tell. In the end... Facilier seems to be using not lwa, but a different type of Voodoo spirit which usually takes the form of shadow animals, which is made obvious in the scene where he sends the shadows after Naveen and Tiana and they take the shape of animals.
• Maybe Mama Odie's FOTOS is Evangeline? Instead of making deals for what people want she grants people what they need if they're willing to work for it. Everyone who makes a wish on her gets a happy ending.

Facilier grew up with prestige and power before falling to the bottom of the barrel.

Facilier appears very light in skin, and pronounces his name in what I'm guessing is a French pronunciation, which could possibly make him Creole. Creoles of some African descent did have quite a bit more opportunities with wealth and education than non-Creole African Americans. That is, until Jim Crow laws reared their ugly heads. Then anybody of any African descent was treated no differently under those laws (In fact, there's at least one instance where a person who was one-sixteenth African had to sit in the back of the bus.), causing many Creoles to lose their power. The same could have happened to Facilier. Being knocked down caused him to want the power he lost and more as he takes revenge on the city that stole it away from him.

• On the audition list, they did mention that they were looking for someone with a Creole accent.

Facilier's "friends" are the Heartless.

After thinking about it this kinda makes sense. They apparently feed on the souls of people. Light harms them. And lets not forget that they are usually seen as shadowy figures. I dunno, but it sounds like a great way to set them up should they ever appear in a future Kingdom Hearts game.

• That sounds twenty times better than how they inserted Heartless into the Mulan world.
• Could be Organization Thirteen mixed into this as well.

Facilier's main 'friend on the other side' is The Other Mother.

She once took a break from the button eye method of stealing the souls of young children, so she made a deal with Facilier to gather up more souls. Once the device broke, she took him to her world, than turned him into a cat.

He switched sides, run off to the real world, and did battle with her ever since.

• ...that's just too perfect.
• And come to think of it, weren't three of the "friends" little dolls with button-eyes?
• The Cat even has the same voice actor!
• Someone please write this fic RIGHT NOW.
• oh and to add more awesome sauce to this wiborn is the great Grand son of Tiana and Naveen his great aunt being a child that went missing explaining why Tiana and Naveen had no more children after their twin daughters as it hurt too much if they lost another child and kept their remaining daughter away from the door that claimed the other.

Facilier's main "Friend" is Chernabog

Facilier and Ursula use the same type of magic, but Ursula paid off her debt and attained more power.

• Impossible - In voodoo you cannot acquire 'more' power, you can only get as much as you can trade for - that's why Facilier ended up in trouble; he traded for more than he had to give.

The FOTOS are actually Hades!

See here for more details

Facilier is The Genie's Nobody.

Both are charismatic men that sing a flashy, catchy song about friends and the magic they can use to a protagonist. Also supported by the theory that Facilier's "friends" are the Heartless.

Facilier's debt was to bring himself back to life.

Dr Facilier (or the Shadow Man) had been interested in the occult during his life, but something happened (anything from sickness to murder to just an accident) and he was dead. The tombstone you saw near the end was his but it was normal. No face, maybe even no name if no one knew who he was. Just a date of death.

When Dr Facilier was on the other side, he met the "Friends on the Other Side." He convinced them to give him more time in the world of the living. In return, they demanded that he give them souls equal in worth to however much they demanded for the initial revive and the continued life-span. The interest tacked on by how long he was "alive" for was quite high, so Facilier quickly thought up a plan to get control of the city and sacrifice everyone in it to his Friends. At first, he may have planned to get the girl to give something to him in return for money or power, but when he read in the paper about the Prince, that was too good of a chance to pass up.

Either because of side effect of coming back to life in that manner or to help keep an eye on him, the Friends made Dr. Facilier's shadow come to life as well. When Dr Facilier was dragged into the maw of the giant mask, they left his horrified face on his tombstone as a final insult to him.

• To add to this... His semi-skeletal face seen during the "I hope you're satisfied" bit is his magic failing to keep the charade of a completely living being, revealing a magically reanimated skeleton that is still on its way to being revived fully.
  • Eh, except that the skull mask is a huge symbol of the Gede Lwa, specifically Baron Samedi. It's pretty clear that was who Facilier was modeled after.
• More specifically, he was Jafar. The personality isn't quite the same, but who knows what effect being dead for centuries might have?

Mama Odie is married

She wears a ring on the traditional wedding ring finger. Juju seems like a possible candidate for her husband, though the Morphic Resonance rules of the universe would indicate he's a real snake due to his eyes. She could have turned him into a snake-eyed human at one point though.

• Given 1: Mama Odie's only companion appears to be her snake. WMG Given: Mama Odie is married. Conclusion: She's married to the snake. Your logic fails. She could be widowed. Juju's relationship with is closer to that of Belle and the dog-turned-footstool - a pet and appliance when necessary. Mama Odie seems the type to rule any roost, but that seems to be going a little far.
  • Notice that the above above says Juju seems like a possible candidate. No one said she had to be married to him.
  • Perhaps the remains of her husband were the eyeballs and jaw in those jars?
    • This troper just thought the same thing! The jaw was even "smiling"!
    • Those are probably her's. Notice that Mama Odie is blind and toothless, yet has eyes and teeth in a jar?
    • Now that's just disturbing!
• It's also possible she is spiritually married to a lwa she serves; sometimes lwa do ask practitioners to "wed" them as a show of devotion.

Dr. Facilier is a Depraved Bisexual

Judging by his appearance, he seems to be designed after the Vodou God, Baron Samedi. Who is, among other things, a bisexual (sometimes) crossdresser. He was a bit touchy-feeling with Naveen in the beginning...

• Not to mention some of the lyrics in his song:

  If you relax it will enable me to do/anything I please...

Sounds sort of rape-y, both out of and in context.

• Naveen: "He was VERY charismatic!"
• There is also a flag in the background with the veve for Ezili Freda on it. She is known for being protective of gay men.

Dr. Facilier was reincarnated into Oogie Boogie

Dr. Facilier has his friends from the other side take the form of shadows. Oogie seems to be able to control his shadow to sing in the beginning song in Nighmare, so this troper's idea is that Dr. Facilier's "friends" decided to give him A Fate Worse Than Death - being trapped in a gigiantic burlap sack with living bugs as guts. This drives Facilier mad, making him less savvy, more sadistic, and lowered the quality of his grammar. So now Dr. Facilier is double dead first killed when the tailsman was broken, then when he was torn apart.

• But he's not voiced by a big lipped alligator
• On the other hand, the fact that the sack isn't his real body, and that his soul was placed in it, could explain why he's so easy to bring back from the dead in the games.

  Barrel: "How hard could it be?

The main FTOS is Ganon

Rule of cool.

• Join me Tiana, and I will make your restaurant the greatest in New Orleans! Or else you will die!

Facilier's Deal Was Actually For Lawrence All Along

Naveen was just a formality, and, in order to fool them he had to act like Naveen was the one he was dealing with, but the main deal was with Lawrence, so that Lawrence could impersonate the Prince. However, in order for that to work, he had to get the Prince out of the way, so a necessary formality would be to accept anything that Naveen might have wondered or half-wished, as long as he could twist it into a way to get rid of him. Note that the whole time Naveen doesn't even realize what's going on and only vaguely realizes he's made an agreement, but Facilier specifically shows Lawrence his deal and Lawrence picks up on it right away.

• That's pretty much right. Of course Naveen was just a formality. The whole plan was to get to Big Daddy's fortune by using a stooge to marry his daughter. But because of the way the spell works they needed Naveen alive, so he was turned into a frog because he would have been easier to deal with like that, or so Facilier thought. Facilier isn't the Enchantress, he wasn't trying to teach Naveen a lesson, or anything.
• Naveen was too intelligent. Lawrence would be far easier to control, hence why his deal was with Lawrence, and he just screwed Naveen over.
• Yeah, I thought this was pretty much canon. Naveen was just a tool to aid in the plot, but Lawrence was the one carrying it out. Also I got the impression once he was done with Lawrence, he intended to hand him over to his Friends in his place. "I look deep within your heart and soul... You do have a soul, don'tcha Lawrence?"

If Tiana had accepted Facilier's deal, he wouldn't have been a Jackass Genie about it... at first.

By that point, Facilier's plot was dangling by a thread. He needed that talisman back at whatever the cost. If Tiana had given it to him, he would have given her the restaurant with no strings attached because he would be in too much of a hurry to think of a way to screw it up. One of the reasons that Tiana's father (and likely Tiana herself) loved cooking so much is because it brought people together. While Tiana's restaurant would have started off great at first, she'd soon notice that she was getting less and less customers. This wasn't because of anything wrong with the restaurant, but because the people are slowly being killed by Facilier to pay off his F.O.T.O.S. Eventually the only person willing to go to her restaurant would be Facilier himself. Both to sample Tiana's excellent cooking and to be a horrible human being.

• So had she made the deal, she wouldn't have paid a price, but everyone else in New Orleans would have. Plus she wouldn't have been able to enjoy it knowing she betrayed Naveen, left him trapped as a frog, and let Charlotte marry an impostor (and therefore let Facilier kill Mr. LaBouff)... all of which Facilier knew and would have laughed in her face about later. That sure would have been a depressing ending, all right.
  • On a more cheerful note, it's doubtful that Tiana would simply go about running her restaurant and just leave Naveen and Charlotte and her friends and family in danger like that. Even if she gave back the talisman and accepted the offer, she might pretend to go along with it, but would probably still warn Charlotte that "Naveen" was a fake and keep the real Naveen with her to find another princess. If Charlotte never marries the fake Naveen, Facilier would never get control of New Orleans, leastwise not how he has planned to.

The some of the shadows that Facilier summoned to kill Tiana and Naveen where once other Voodoo Practitioners.

Some of them like the female one appear to be human, at a time they where alive they had shadows like Facilier, once they screwed up with the voodoo gods they where dragged into their graves by their shadows like Facilier, once they reached the other side their physical bodies became non-existant and their shadows became independent, they soon lose their sanity and become servants for other Voodoo Practitioners.

• There is a type of spirit in Voodoo that takes the shape of a shadow, specifically animals. These are usually personable to one practitioner, as they are made to work for that specific person. The reason why they would be dragged into the grave with Facilier would be because he is their source, so to speak; they are tied to him, so if he goes, so would they.

The FOTOS really were Facilier's friends—in life.

Or at least, the shadows were. Think about it: the shadows are the ones who seem most cooperative with Facilier, he only needs to whistle in order to get them to do something, and he's informal with them ("Now we're back in business, boys!"), and no other shadow but his own were present for his demise.The shadows were other Voodoo Practitioners who made deals with the other FOTOS, and eventually suffered the same fate that Facilier did later, and were twisted into mindless puppets/Eldritch Abominations. Facilier knows what will happen if the talisman is broken because he already saw what happened to his friends and doesn't want the same fate!

• Look at the graves around Facilier as he says "I still got that froggy prince locked away"- you can see some of the shadows surrounding him, leering menacingly.
• The female one might be his sister, and the dolls might be ones his mother made for him... just to add to this theory.
• It could also be that he employed spirits to work for him; Voodoo does have such a concept in its beliefs. That would explain why they'd come at a mere whistle, yet turn on Facilier when he seems to be losing control of the situation.

Facilier is a member of the Maldonian royal family.

Him saying he was royal on his mother's side wasn't just a throw-away gag. Facilier was born out of wedlock to a Maldonian queen/princess and a Creole man, but his father was exiled for this and he lost any claim he had to their power and fortune. That's why Facilier picked Naveen to use in his scheme; not only would it make him rich and pay off his debts to the Friends, but it was a way of finally getting revenge against the people who were responsible for his lot in life.

• OR he stole the head from a Maldonian cemetery.

Facilier really descends from African royalty.

His ancestor may have been an illegitimate child of a king/prince of one of African monarchies (Ethiopia? Mali?). The father sold his unwanted child to slave traders who brought him to America. Facilier's mother is his descendant. While she wouldn't know about it, FOTOS may have told Facilier.

• Or, maybe, Facilier's ancestors reigned on one of the African empires until their empire was conquered by a rival one (or they were just captured in one battle) and were sold into slavery to some European. We don't even need the FOTOS to tell Facilier for him to know: if it happened sufficiently late (i.e. being deported in late 1807, before the ban on importation of slaves took effects), Facilier's enslaved ancestors may have managed to preserve the memory until a mr. Facilier bought them and either freed them for some reason (that could include having a son from one of them, from which our Facilier would descend if we take as valid the WMG on him being a once rich creole) or was forced to let them free due the Emancipation Proclamation.

Another guess about Facilier's royalty...

It's a play on words - the spirits that Voodoo priests call upon are called "Loa", which is derived from the French roi, king. When he says that, he just means he's a Voodoo sorcerer, and so was his mother.

Facilier didn't die

That portal in the mouth of the big mask? That wasn't to the other side, but to another point in time and space. They gave Facilier a fate worse then death, they sent him into the future and turned him into Oscar Proud!

• And Mama Odie lived on to become Suga Mama.
  • So that makes Juju Puff, right?
• Alternate explanation: Oscar Proud is an identity created by Dr. Facilier for another get-rich-quick scheme to pay off his "debt". The reason Proud Snacks taste so awful is that every bite gives a piece of your soul to the FOTOS.
  • And thus, Suga Mama is actually an identity created by Odie in order to ensure Oscar's eternal failure by causing his Proud Snacks to taste awful and slowly manipulating the entire Proud Family to treat him as the Butt-Monkey.
  • Also, does that mean Facilier/Oscar decided to take the A.J. Crowley approach to damnation of the masses? (Also, it would explain why Suga Mama's sister was psychic and Penny's occasional appearances of magic powers...)

Dr. Facilier bought out Tiana's building.

He's always shown looking around for people to con. Depriving the main character of her goal in an attempt to influence her to make a deal later would be totally in character. Later he insinuates that he has access to the building.

• How would he do that? He had no money.
  • ...he probably had some deal with the realty brothers.
  • Well remember, the Fennor Brothers gave Tiana until Wednesday to come up with the money. If Facilier's plan had succeeded, he would have had the LeBouff's fortune by then. That would be more than enough to buy the building, he simply offered to pay after Mardi Gras, which is when the Fennor Brothers were going to start working anyway.
  • Or, he payed for the building in exchange for their souls to not be used as payment to his... friends.
  • He made the offer to pay in cash, thus overwhelming her bid, then would have approached her with a 'bargain' once she heard. As we saw, Tiana was completely crushed and desperate and Facilier was right down stairs, if Naveen hadn't escaped she would have made her way downstairs and Facilier would have offered her the building and received whatever he wanted in return all without needing to use the power from the FOTOS and increasing his dept. Simple, easy payoff, with no risk to himself, if she accepts he gets what he wats, if she doesn't he just takes back his bid. Think about it, the Fenners might have been acting like racist jerks but why would they? Tiana is BFF with Charlotte, daughter to the richest man in town. After a few days it would have been obvious there was no other buyer and they'd either have to accept Tiana's money or make it blatantly clear they were being racist. Tiana would have been crushed and Charlotte would not have stood for that, she'd have screamed for Daddy and ruined them. Only reason things got so desperate is because Tiana was turned into a frog before any of her ways out became clear.
    • Everything about this makes sense except for them having to accept Tiana's money because they can't be seen as racist. In modern times, sure, but this is the 1920s. Also, Tiana is black, female, and not exactly upper-class, as opposed to the Fennors being rich white men - they could make up some story or claim she didn't really have the money. They have plenty of reason to accept the offer when no one else turns up, but not looking racist wouldn't be one of them.
  • A pair of Corrupt Corporate Executives see a stack of hundreds, they don't ask questions until their buyer disappears and the money turns into a pile of leaves. At that point, they still don't ask questions because their original buyer was shoving money across their desk while a talking alligator pointedly growls at them.

Dr. Facilier wasn't dragged to the spirit world but instead was Taken for Granite

And in relation to the above WMG about some of the Shadow Demons being former Voodoo Practitioners, his shadow turned into one as well.

• Almost the same, except he became a Voodoo Mask rather than a Shadow Demon. Immediately after becoming a Mask, his appearance still reflected his original human features, but in due time he will evolve into a more featureless face like the Voodoo Masks we see, and he will be and act just like the other Masks.

Dr. Facilier's first name is Joseph.

There is a fan theory that the "royal" on Facilier's mother's side of the family was a Voodoo queen, perhaps even Marie Laveau herself. In many French Catholic families (including Laveau's) it's a custom to name all girls Marie and all boys Joseph. The middle name is used as a common name. Whatever his middle name is, it was probably something Francophonic like Etienne, Christophe or Yves.

• By that same token, his last name is Facilier either. It's something more pedestrian, and "Facilier" is just a business name.

Dr. Facilier's mother was a Voodoo Queen and sold her own son's soul for power.

Throughout the film, we see Facilier becoming increasingly desperate to close the deal, and when he inevitably fails it is his own soul that is taken.The thing is, we never actually see him make a deal himself; the friends on the other side simply give him whatever he needs to do his job. That sounds more like he is an employee than an ally making equal trades.Assuming his mother sold his soul for power, it would render him a pawn of the "friends" rather than an equal partner in the deal. They supply him with magic and tools, he makes deals in their stead.

I suspect the reason his deal with Lawrence and Naveen was so crucial is that he made a deal of his own with them off-screen: To acquire them a new soul, a new pawn in a higher place of power who can score better deals for them in the future. When he failed to fulfill his end of the bargain, they decided he was of no more use as an agent and consumed him entirely rather than release him.

The reason he never went to Mama Odie for help like everyone else does? Even as powerful as she is, she cannot directly combat the FOTOS; she can chase them off (likely with help from patrons of her own), but not kill them. She would not only be unable to help him take back his soul, the FOTOS would never allow their pawn to get anywhere near her directly to even ask for aid.

Dr. Facilier is just a business name

Considering the name's eccentricity, it's more likely the doctor has a very normal pedestrian name and Dr. Facilier is just the name he does business under.

Dr. Facilier's shadow is actually a Stand.

Stand name: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

Alastor the Radio Demon is Dr. Facilier's younger brother/half-brother.

Story: years before either man was taken before his time, the two were brothers and best friends growing up fascinated by their mother's life as a New Orleans Vodun Queen. As they grew up, both brothers decided to follow the steps of their mother and become Vodun Bokurs. However, Alastor was much smarter in his dealings with the otherworldly powers and treated the spirits with more respect, while Doc looked into how to cheat people and use the spirits to get what he wanted. In the end, Doc was punished by the spirits for his hubris and shady dealings, while Alastor was blessed by becoming one of the most powerful mortal demons in Hell.

Theories concerning Tiana, Naveen, and their friends

Naveen has a mild case of amphibian-focused zoophilia.

Remember how he was first attracted to Tiana aesthetically, while she was a frog, and only subsequently came to love her personality? You could argue that he was attracted to the vibrant enthusiasm she was finally showing, but his favourite story as a child was "The Frog Prince".

• I just figured that he was attracted to her because he's a guy frog and she's a girl frog. Their froggy instincts certainly seem to be strong enough to allow that to happen, as proven by the "fly eating" scene...
• He shows mild interest in her as a human until she shrugs him off and he responds in kind.

Naveen was faking the accent.

Because Everything Sounds Sexier in French.

Ray is in love with a firefly in Neverland.

Ray loves Evangeline, who is The Evening Star, otherwise known as the second planet, Venus. After his death, Evangeline is the second star on the right, and straight on until morning one would reach Neverland. Maybe he's not in love with the planet/star, but someone in Neverland - which now apparently takes place in some unknown part of Venus. Yeah it's a longshot...

Naveen wasn't cut off for any reason but tradition.

Young Maldonian princes have to be sent off into the world in order to understand commoners better, and so he went off to America. Lawrence wasn't particularly poor protection, he was all that Naveen was allowed to bring.

Charlotte knew full well that the money would be enough...

For Tiana's restaurant. Charlotte may be ditzy, but, just like Naveen, she knows people. She may not have his...delicacy—look at him when he's talking to Louis, think of him when he convinces Lawrence to loosen the lid—but she does know quite a bit as the Southern Belle of the town and Big Daddy's daughter. So she knows that Tiana will never accept charity. But ordering that many beignets? Perfectly in-character. And, with the above as given, perfectly in character as both The Ditz and a Southern Belle.

Human!Naveen's singing voice is actually terrible.

The only time we hear him sing is when he's a frog; this theory could be an in-universe explanation of why that last song wasn't a duet. Since frogs have more musical abilities than people do, Naveen's singing was improved as a side effect of turning into one.

• Perhaps, but why, then, does Tiana sing well as both a human and as a frog?
  • Why not? Just because Naveen possibly doesn't sing well as a human doesn't mean she can't. He's also a completely different sort of frog. Maybe Tiana would sing even better as a frog if she had any teeth.
  • Or Naveen's singing talents improve and Tiana's don't change because Naveen is turned into a male frog. Don't forget that in Real Life, male frogs can sing (or croak), and females are mute.

Louis is a relative of The Big Lipped Alligator.

Louis loves music. King Gator loves music. Louis is from the bayou in 20s New Orleans. King Gator is from a sewer in 30s New Orleans. Louis is most likely a reference to Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was given the nickname Satchmo, a contraction of Satchelmouth, a reference to the size of his lips. I'm pretty sure most of you can deduce where I'm going with this.

• This troper roleplays Charlie from All Dogs Go to Heaven over on LiveJournal. In one session, he met Charlotte, and they ended up having a conversation about this exact WMG!

Naveen and Tiana will take their kids to the premiere of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

This movie takes place in the later half of the 1920s. Snow White came out in 1937. And you KNOW Charlotte is going to be first in line.

• Somebody write that fic now.
  • I found fanart, will that do?
    • I found a fanfic, the grammar isn't that great. It might work.
• Before that, they'll take their kids to the premiere of Steamboat Willie. "Hey kids! That steamboat looks just like the ones in Louisiana! Boy, hand-drawn animation will be here way into 2005-2008!"
• Among the many easter eggs of the movie has Walt Disney himself showing up a few times in Mardi Gras, the wedding and at Tiana's Palace at the end. If anything, he probably would invite them to the premiere of Snow White.
• You're all forgetting that little thing called the Great Depression that's going to happen first. A fancy dress restaurant just getting on its feet and in the middle of a lower class neighborhood is not going to last long once the entire world economy crashes. Tiana's business will go under, whereupon she and Naveen will move back to Naveen's homeland of Maldonia to live secluded in their ivory towers. The kingdom will fall once militaristic expansion takes over the nations of Europe (no matter where Maldonia is, it's going to get occupied). Tiana, Naveen, and all their kids will be forced to flee as refugees, and likely spend the rest of their days in solitude away from much of the world. They won't even know the Disney company exists.
  • On the other hand, Tiana is shown to keep most of her money in tins in her bedroom. It's unclear if she keeps this up later or not, but if she does, it would certainly Hand Wave the restaurant not going under; hey, if she doesn't actually use a bank, then she wouldn't lose much of her money. Plus, now that Naveen got his act together, his parents would probably be willing to help them out a bit. It's totally possible that they'd be able to stick around and find out about Snow White.
  • Actually, you're wrong on the occupation issue, in that Maldonia by definition must be occupied. Quite a few countries weren't occupied during WWII, including the microstate Andorra so there is precedent for a really tiny country being ignored. And that's assuming they move to Maldonia. Really I can't imagine anything worse happening to Tiana than having to downsize a bit. Then again, I'm a wishful thinker when it comes to Disney movies, so I might not be thinking hard enough.

Naveen's parents cutting him off financially was only a part of their plan. They had his little brother as a means of replacing him completely.

• Naveen's what, 19, 20? He most likely started his hard-partying ways at around 13-15; plenty of time for his parents to figure out he was a lost cause and start over.

Naveen's Younger Brother is Actually His Son

The Casanova that he is, and with such a large age gap between him and his 6 1/2 year old brother, there's a chance that the kid is the result of a dalliance a teen-aged Naveen had with a palace chambermaid or something. To save face in the public eye his parents passed the kid off as their own.

• Naveen is 20 years old, which would make him a father at age 13-14? I don't think Disney would suggest these kinds of things, anyways.
  • Disney wouldn't, but in a WMG, why not? ;)
• Such large gaps aren't completely impossible, either way. In my family particularly, my older sister and I are eleven years apart, and I'm pretty sure I'm not her daughter.
  • Alternative WMG, Naveen's folks had his brother because they were beginning to suspect Naveen wouldn't be a suitable heir.

There never was any higher bidder on Tiana's building.

The realtors just refused to sell it to her because of her... "background."

• That was what I assumed from the beginning. This being a family movie, they probably couldn't come right out and say it (Politically Correct History and all), but the implication felt pretty obvious to me.
• It certainly seems this way according to the time line. They said she needed the money by Wednesday, right? They were changed back on Wednesday morning, the day after Mardi Gras. During the timeskip to their human wedding Eudora had time to make Tiana's dress and Naveen's family traveled to New Orleans. It would have to be past the deadline by the time they finally went to buy and yet the Fenners were still in possession of the building.
  • Plus, it never indicates that they acquired any more money to pay the extra fees that were imposed — Louis just glared at the realtors really hard! On the other hand, one wonders why the realtors didn't just refuse in the first place, rather than waiting for the party to tell her.
    • Because they're jackasses who enjoyed giving her false hope.
    • According to the novelization, the Fenner's accepted the original price, thanks to Louis.
    • I always assumed that Falicier made a larger bid for the place in attempts to get Tiana to give him the pendant later with his temptation. It's a long shot, but he may have planned this out somewhat.
  • The Disney wiki page seems to confirm this. Why would someone suddenly buy a sugar mill that appears to have been abandoned for at least a decade on the same day when someone else settled on a downpayment? Not to mention the miffed look on Tiana's face when they say "background" really drives home that this was probably the case.
  • It wasn't uncommon practice for realtors to promise African-Americans a chance to purchase a rundown property, wait for them to fix the place up, then yank the deal out from under them and sell the property to a white buyer at a higher price.

Charlotte ends up working for Tiana during the Great Depression.

Since Maldonia is a fictional country, there's no way to know for certain how well it fared during the Depression, but one would assume that the Royal Family, especially a Royal Family that was ludicrously rich before the Depression, would be left somewhat other than destitute. Tiana would undoubtedly have enough financial support from her in-laws to keep Tiana's Palace afloat, and keeping her savings in cash instead of in the bank would have made her doubly secure. The La Bouffs, on the other hand, likely had all their money either in the bank (which probably folded) or in investments (which would have been wiped out). Big Daddy would likely have been forced to sell his family's property, IF he could find a buyer who could afford it, and Lottie would have been obliged to find a real job to support them. Considering what a kind friend she was to Tiana when she was rich and Tiana was poor, I'm sure Tiana was happy to help her out and teach her the ropes of waitressing.

Naveen had at least partial amnesia of the time shortly after his transformation.

Dialogue at various points indicate that he has no idea that Lawrence is impersonating him, such as "Who's waltzing with Lottie?" "How should I know?" and "Lawrence! What are you doing?" However, it's clear that it was Lawrence-impersonating-Naveen who loosened the lid on the jar to let Frog!Naveen free. Presumably the recently transformed Naveen was in too much of a daze to understand what was going on. And, though it's clear he explained at least most of his story to Tiana (enough that she can chide him for messin' with the Shadow Man), he never gives the slightest hint that there's a doppelganger running around, which causes Tiana to assume the worst when she sees Charlotte and the phony together. How was this amnesia accomplished when Tiana recovered just fine? He's got no stamina - loss of a relatively small amount of blood would lead to him feeling dizzy, because he's been pampered his whole life.

• Are you sure it was Lawrence-impersonating-Naveen? It could have been before he put on the talisman, or he'd taken it off so as not to waste the magic or some such.
• Lawrence said he loosened the jar lid because Naveen was starting to gasp. The lack of oxygen combined with the shock of being turned into a frog could have made him very disoriented and unsure of what was going on.

Big Daddy was the one who made the other offer for the sugar mill.

Just a more optimistic outlook than the "There was no buyer"/"It was Tiana's old employers"/"It was some racist jerkwads who didn't want an African-American woman in the business" theories that have already been suggested. The movie tells us that Tiana's mother Eudora disapproves of how much of her life she's devoting to work - being close to the La Bouffs, she went to Eli to ask if he'd be willing to make a donation to her daughter's restaurant fund. Being something of a Parental Substitute/Honorary Uncle to Tia, Big Daddy went down to see the Fenner brothers and offered to pay the full amount in cash, as a gesture of goodwill, and wanted it to be a surprise. His only mistake was not foreseeing the realtors would use his gesture as a means to try and squeeze more money out of Tiana.

• Or maybe he intended to use the place to expand his own business and didn't know Tiana also wanted to buy the place.

Tiana is the distant ancestor of Benjamin Sisko.

No proof, but Rule of Cool. Also, Joseph Sisko's cooking skills are obviously genetic, inherited from his great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother.

• Also, there is a taxidermied alligator at Joseph Sisko's restaurant. That might be Louise.

Tiana has had run-ins with Dr. Facilier before.

She knows not to trust the Shadow Man, and he doesn't seem to like her much. If Disney were to do an animated series or direct-to-video spinoff, the obvious hook would be a younger Tiana being roped into one of Facilier's voodoo schemes and barely managing to foil it, learning an Important Lesson while accidentally getting him into trouble with the FOTS...

• He does seems to know her situation extremely well for someone he has never met before.
  • Facilier is magic. He knew Naveen's past, that he was a cut off prince in search of money, and he knew Lawrence's past, that he was pushed around his entire life. Presumably, he hadn't met any of them before.
  • ...So, what, he read Naveen's palm or something? (Or that morning's newspaper...) It's more likely that he's really good at guessing people's personality based on how they respond to certain events. Naveen being a hard-partying, but estranged prince? Pretty easy to figure out. The audience was clued in on this in the first minute or so he spent onscreen. Lawrence being a weak-willed butler? Same deal, and easier still when you consider Facilier's line about "Fat cats in fancy cars", implying that he's had personal experience in that department and can sympathize with/more easily recognise others with the same attitude. Tiana, on the other hand, while easy to peg down as a hard worker, has a more specific dream: wanting to own a restaurant. Unlike the other two, this isn't something that is readily apparent at first glance... in order for Facilier to know it by mundane means, he'd have to know her, at least by reputation.
• Though in Facilier's defense, he doesn't seem to like anyone all that much, though he also doesn't seem to hate any of the protagonists either. He's just doing his thing, and stepping on people to get what he wants is a necessity. Literally. Poor Ray.
• Tiana is a smart woman, and Shadow Man is not a very reassuring name. If you add she knew from Naveen he was somehow involved in the whole Frog Prince debacle...
• They do know each other, at least in passing: Facilier is a patron at the cafe Tiana works at the start of the movie. It's possible he's a saltuary or even a regular patron, and Tiana dealt with him enough to know he's bad news.
  • So comfirmed?
• This could work: Remember the temptation scene? If she only knew "The Shadow Man" via reputation, she wouldn't have known Dr. Facilier was the Shadow Man when she saw him.

Facilier is a minor sorcerer of Tzeentch.

Very bright colored, overt magic, reliance upon trickery and playing the hopes of the human heart, very strong transformational skills, required to bring souls over or suffer the consequences, sounds like the architect of fate to me.

The Fenners expected Charlotte to help Tiana.

They assumed Charlotte would give or lend the extra money Tiana needed because of the "new buyer" and, considering how she reacted upon learning of Tiana and Naveen's love story, they were right.

Ray's Death...

• ...was put in a a retaliation to what The Nostalgia Critic said about Scar. As in that he pointed out that Scar was the only Disney villain to knock off a main character. The challenge was set, and the film makers decided to beat that challenge.
  • As good a theory as any, considering it was a pretty senseless death otherwise.
  • I thought Ray's death played beautifully into the film's themes of sacrifice and doing what's right as opposed to what's easy- he had no need to help Tiana and Naveen, didn't want to ask Mama Odie for a wish, and could've just given them directions and left them to it. But he went out of his way to help them, like a good samaritan- and sadly paid the price, just as Tiana's dad paid the price working so hard to get his family out of poverty. But he still got a reward, whereas Facilier is presumably still being tortured as we type.
  • Does Kerchak not count as a main character?

Louis was turned into an Alligator by Dr. Facilier

Louis can play the trumpet, dreams of being a jazz singer and likes human foods. It could be possible that Louis was once human and had a run in with the Shadow Man like Naveen did, and was turned into an alligator and run out of town into the bayou. He wants to be human, but I guess either he's too dumb to figure out a way to change back, or it's an unbreakable curse.

• This was actually the original plan for Louis (an early design had him wearing glasses, in fact). As production continued, the directors thought this made the story needlessly complicated, and simply made him a regular gator.
  • This could still be true anyway.
  • But he has to have it pointed out by Naveen that he could fulfill his dream by becoming human, and he burst out laughing at the idea of Tiana and Naveen having originally been human. And his specific words are, "What if I asked Mama Odie to turn me human?", not "turn me back into a human?" Implying he wasn't human in the first place.
  • It could be that slowly losing one's memory of being human over time is part of the transformation magic.
  • As a potential Wham Episode, Louis meets a family member(s) who has been searching for him and drops a bomb-shell Wham Line to the effect of "Have you forgotten?". Note how despite the fearful reception that Louis has received, it's as if subconsciously, he longs to be back among humanity to play for them and wants to return to the way things were before.

Charlotte's mother is Sophie from Anastasia

Yes, the movies are from different companies, but compare.

• Charlotte: French last name, obsessed with fairy tales and romance.
• Sophie: French, obsessed with fairy tales and romance.

I can't link images, but they're both round-faced blondes, and the movies take place fairly close together chronologically.

• Yeah, but Charlotte's last name comes from her father. (It would make sense that Sofie was her grandmother on her father's side

• This makes little to no sense for a couple of reasons. First is time frame. Anastasia takes place in 1916 and 1926. Princess and the Frog takes places in the same decades. When Charlotte was born, Sophie was still living in Russia. Sophie is not French. She is Russian with presumably mixed heritage, as her real life counterpart had mixed blood that did not include French relations. When Sophie and her Empress Dowager cousin — note that the age gap between Sophie and Dowager Empress Marie was large enough that they seemed more like daughter and mother, even though they were cousins — moved to France during Russia's revolution, Sophie immersed herself in the romantic and thrilling culture of Paris, probably in part to drown out bad memories, and thus developed a French accent within the course of ten years. Sophie's surname was not French. It was Danish. Sophie could not possibly be Charlotte's grandmother because she was not even old enough to be a grandmother at the time that Charlotte was a little girl. Another dent in this theory is that Charlotte and her family look nothing like Sophie's lover, Vladimir. I'm sure that Sophie did play around with pretty boys in France, but again, Charlotte was already born by the time Sophie began her life in France. Mayhap the ladies could be distant relatives, but this would most likely have to be through Charlotte's unknown mother's lineage.

Tiana is descended from John Henry. (🎶John Henry, John Henry...🎶)

I just got done watching the animated short — John Henry and Tiana's father James look a little bit alike, and Tiana and John's wife Polly look (and sound) really alike. Plus, they've all definitely got a strong work ethic in common. (And a fancy for catchy musical numbers that emphasize their strong work ethic.)

You could even use a deconstruction of John Henry's story to explain where James got the ideology of "Work hard, but don't neglect things like love and family." John Henry hammered through a mountain to earn what was owed to him and his family, but in the process, he worked himself to death and left his son (who was James's father or grandfather) to grow up without a father in his life. James tries to instill a sense of compromise in Tiana in order to avoid something like that happening again in the future.

Tiana is a Princess.

• Calling is almost certainly Troubador: She's a gifted artist (cookery counts as an artform for this) who uses her art to bring people together and inspire them, but can become obsessed with her art if she's not careful.
• Court affiliation could be either Clubs, with the way she brings together people of different colors, ranks, and temperaments and with her knack for dealing with nature and making use of what's on hand, or Hearts, for her emphasis on hard work, determination, and earning herself a place in society.

Tiana's ancestors are from Maldonia.

Going by below mentioned theory of Maldonia being African country, it could be possible that Maldonia took part in the Atlantic Slave Trade, with Tiana's ancestors being one of the few African slaves bringed to America. This would make her failing in love and marrying Naveen as Heartwarming in Hindsight, since she not only forgived his family of their past sins, but also - in a way - returned to her ancestor's homeland!

The orange dress that Tiana wears near the end of the movie becomed her everyday dress.

Because it's my favourite dress out of all dresses that she wears throughout the movie, and I think she looks cute in it! Bu the other reason why I think this dress becomed her everyday dress, is because of Rule of Symbolism - the dress is orange and some people think that orange is created by darkening yellow color, and in movie color yellow is associated with hard work and diligence. So she wears the dress to show that she "loosed down" while remaining responsible, hard-working woman.

Tiana speaks French really well.

Barring the fact that she was born in a city that was founded by French colonizators, Tiana could have learned how to speak French thanks to Lottie who considered teaching her BFF Tiana French as a nice way for both of them to bond with each other. If Naveen will ever learn that (most likely during the time when both of them will be in Paris) he will be surprised that Tiana not only speaks French, but also speaks it better than he does.

Tiana sometimes sings in her restaurant.

After she learned to relax and appreciate the little things in life, Naveen decided to ask her if she would share her wonderful voice with patrons of their restaurant. Tiana said yes... as long as she's not busy in the kitchen.

Miscellaneous theories

The Princess and the Frog and Atlantis: The Lost Empire take place in the same continuity.

Both Atlantis and this movie feature a rather unusually high prevalence of minorities in positions of power/wealth and high amounts of racial integration for the time periods. Thus it occurs to me that they might both be in the same universe. That universe is also an Alternate History.

This world split off from our own at the Revolutionary War. In this world, the United States' founding fathers were really radical, and decided that "liberty and justice for all" (yes, I know that's from the Pledge and not the constitution; work with me here) meant all. In that world, the abolishment of slavery and universal suffrage (both for minorities and women) were written into the constitution from the beginning. The United States has had about 100 extra years to work through its racial issues. The Civil War still happened, but slavery was no longer a part of it and it was instead purely about states' rights. In the 1910's-20's of these films, racism and race issues still exist (as they even do today), but aren't at a forefront. Hence why there are integrated restaurants in the Deep South, and why in Atlantis, we have Dr. Sweet and Hispanic Audrey working alongside the rest of the white crew.

• Taking things further, this timeline extends back to Pocahontas, where the English colonists in the Americas founded a society that encouraged respect and cooperation with the Native Americans. This led to an all-around increase of progressive treatment of minority groups. I know, In Spite of a Nail and all, but it works.
• This also places it in continuity with Gargoyles, for extra Rule of Cool.
• And the continuity of Phineas and Ferb. Cause
• This troper has long since decided that the Disney universe is one which resembles our own, but brushes over things like laws for inheriting the title of prince or princess or racial or gender history.
• Hm... changing the American Civil War to being about states' rights would have made it unrecognisable... but it might not be needed to actually have an American Civil War - neither Atlantis nor The Princess and the Frog references the ACW, after all. There might be another way, though: as the main page's entry on Politically Correct History notes, there are hints at blacks aren't quite up to social class with whites, yet it is clearly in advance of our world. This might be a world where Reconstruction was handled differently and better, leading to an America/South that both was more subtle about its discrimination of blacks than OTL, and far more willing to overlook race if talent was found (Sweet was a talented doctor, Audrey was a talented mechanist, Tiana is a talented chef), especially if eccentric rich white males were backing it.
• It actually wasn't that uncommon at the time for minorities to have their own businesses and sources of wealth. Pat F is fairly accurate for its time period.
• Also, might as well add Hercules too. Greece, rather than falling due to the pelopennisian wars, survived for many more years, long enough to become a technically advanced empire that intermingled with the Romans rather than being conquered.

The Princess and the Frog lends itself to a shared Disney universe.

Ray becoming a star when he dies proves that Timon was right and that stars are just fireflies stuck in that big bluish black thing. But the precise star that Ray is now? The second star to the right.

• Awwwww.
  • This troper thought that Evangeline was the second star to the right. Being the wishing star AND the gateway to Neverland? Boy does Evangeline have a busy schedule.
• Hate to spoil a good theory, but Peter Pan takes place during The Edwardian Era, during the 1900s, at least ten years before this movie took place and, therefore, before Ray could become a star. Unless you say the Disney version happens later...
  • Nobody said "magical star creation" had to follow the logic of causality. Basically, effect (star) preceding cause (events of the film) via magical time travel/reality rewrite. Since only the protagonists of the film notice the star, and not the many astronomers and astrologers who would almost certainly notice a star just appearing from nowhere. Since the stargazers of the world never notice the new star's sudden appearance (which they would and people would definitely mention it later, as it is pretty damn unusual), we should assume reality has been rewritten to have that star always being there.
  • It could be that the star was always there, and that stars occasionally incarnate as living creatures. Ray was already a star, and remembered being Evangeline's partner. Dying just made him go back.
  • Doesn't the Disney Peter Pan sequel take place during WW2? Wendy is only 10-15 years older in it, making Peter Pan canonically occur in the 1920s.
    • Jane is twelve ears old during WWII. Wendy was probably in her thirties then, and she was twelve or thirteen years old in Peter Pan. If Return To Neverland took place in, say, 1944, and Wendy was about twenty when Jane was born, then Disney's Peter Pan took place in 1925, making it possible once we assume that The Princess and the Frog takes place in the first half of the 1920s.
  • Timon was right about the stars. Pumbaa was full of it... gas that is, about his theory.
• The Magic Carpet having come to New Orleans via Paris, added to Mama Odie having gotten her hands on the Genies lamp, indicates that it is a part of the shared disney universe without these facts.

Evangeline is a fairy.

Wishes made on her come true: Tiana got her restaurant, Lottie got her prince (I've waited this long!). But noble sacrifice also results in granting wishes: The Blue Fairy (who came down from seeming to be a star in the sky) gave Pinocchio "real boy"hood after a Heroic Sacrifice; Ray's death came as the result of a Heroic Sacrifice as well, and he got his wish to be loved by Evangeline.

• I'll go you one better: Evangaline IS the Blue Fairy.
  • First Jiminy, then Ray? That girl has a thing for insects.
• No, Evangeline is the Evening Star, right? Venus. Evangeline's a goddess.

Evangeline was at one point an actual firefly

Ray becomes a star when he dies, suggesting that the same could happen to other fireflies. Evangeline could have been a firefly that Ray was in love with who died, and turned into the star. Ray couldn't accept that she had died, and treated the star as if it were still the living Evangeline.

• But the only way that this could work would have been if Evangeline entered an already-created star, since Evangeline actually BECOMING a star means that she would have had to become a star when Tiana was a very young girl (in order for her to wish on that star for her restaurant). That would've made Evangeline-the-star several years old. Ray couldn't have known her as a firefly in that case—he'd have been dead by the time of the movie. Fireflies don't live that long.
  • Yes, fireflies don't live that long. And alligators don't play trumpet, either.
  • Still, consider one of the arguments for Ray/Evangeline being the Second Star on the Right, despite Peter Pan taking place well before The Princess and the Frog. Magic can make a timeline just as wibbly-wobbly as a time travel device in a sci-fi story. It's possible that when Evangeline and Ray became stars, the stars they became came into existence in the past as well.
• This just has to be written.
• Here ya go. Straight from the Fanfic Recs page. Enjoy~!

Nathaniel was meant to be an ahead-of-time parody of Lawrence.

Well, Giselle, Edward, Pip, and Narissa all were somewhat parodies of previous Disney characters, but where does that leave Nathaniel? What I'm guessing is that because a completely-animated film takes much longer than a live-action-with-some-animation film, they could have been filming at around the same time. Thus, the Enchanted filmmakers figured they might as well make a parody of the Naveen and Lawrence dynamic with Edward and Nathaniel.

• Lawrence is following the tradition of the doddering British sidekick who constantly gets abused, like the duke, Grimsby, Cogsworth, and Zazu. Nathaniel was probably supposed to be a parody of that, but because he was also villainous, it kind of messed up the twist in this movie when Lawrence went evil because he wasn't putting up with that shit anymore.

But I'm pretty sure decades from now, people will be surprised to hear that Enchanted was released before The Princess and the Frog anyway.

• This troper saw Enchanted just an hour or so ago and kept thinking "Nathaniel reminds me eerily of Lawrence! How is that possible?" Perhaps Disney simply used Nathaniel to parody the spineless minions that the evil queens have (like the hunter in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and when they were making this movie, they looked back at Nathaniel and thought he would be good to reuse.

But the conception of this movie did take place at just about the same time Enchanted was being made. The reason Alan Menken couldn't work on this movie was because he was working on Enchanted. And, yes; every time I think of Lawrence, I hear Nathaniel's frantic "Oh no!"

• This theory does sound likely, but Daystar is also pretty simular to that guy.

The second star next to the "Evangeline" is not Ray.

Go ahead and hate me, but it's simply not possible. It takes thousands, maybe millions of years for the light to reach the earth so the star would have had to be created before Ray had even been born. It was a coincidence, but his friends were just too hopeful.

• A wishing star did it.
  • Rule of Romantic It's sweet, it's touching, it's never intended to be scientifically accurate.
• Maybe he's a Time Lord.
• Hey, although science knows how fast light travels, no one knows how fast a soul travels. It's entirely possible that Ray's new "body" was created, yes, thousands of years ago, and his soul only got there recently. It's possible!
• Disney is the most idealist company on Earth; Of course he gets to be with his girlfriend.
  • Because gators playing trumpets, shadow demons, 197 (the fact that she lived so long I mean) year old blind voodoo ladies, people turning into frogs are all possible right?

Evangeline used her wish to be with Ray.

Let's say that stars in this film really are balls of flaming gas in space, but that there are spirits that serve a purpose. Evangeline is the spirit of the wishing star, and listens to all people say to it and helps it come true. One night she hears someone not wishing on the star, but courting it. It's her star so she's flattered and the fact that he genuinely likes her (not to mention his sweet songs) helps her to fall in love. When Ray is dyeing, she uses her personal wish to be with Ray in some way; since the light from a new star is about to reach Earth, there is the need for a new star spirit, so...

Ray's Evangeline is actually a pre-incarnated Minako

Evangeline is the North Star, which is Venus.

• No wonder Minako is doomed to be unlucky in love for all eternity... her soulmate is a Cajun firefly.
• Evangeline is supposed to be the evening star, from what I recall and could find online (which is, in fact, Venus). The North Star is an actual star, has nothing to do with Venus, and is in fact, not particularly bright.

David Xanatos inherited the Lebouf fortune.

By the time of the eighties, Xanatos will somehow receive the Lebouf fortune. I know, it may seem meager compared to the amount of money he has by the nineties, but he had to start somewhere.

• Nope. He made his fortune through a Stable Time Loop involving two coins from 10th century Scotland and a letter to himself. See that article for more details.
  • Fine then. He bought whatever it was that made the Lebouf family rich.

Evangeline is in fact the (or a part of) instrumentalized humans from Neon Genesis Evangelion

Not just the Evangeline = Evangelion name parallels. Remember when Ray died, and became one with Evangeline (lying beside), while everybody's wish came true? That actually symbolized instrumentality: at the moment of death, when one believes in instrumentality, which is a godlike being that takes the form of your most loved one (in Ray's case, a star), he/she gets assimilated in the collective, while instrumentality can also serve as the catalyst where anybody's wish could come true (aka wishing through as star, let's see, Naveen returns to becoming a human, Tiana gets her own restaurant, and in Evangelion everyone on Earth is hugged by their loved ones, and Shinji gets his wish of becoming an individual). The FOTOS Dr Facilier served could be the Angels, or beings from an alternate instrumentality where the Angels dominated, considering their Eldritch Abomination- like nature. Alternatively, Evangeline is Eva-01, floating in spacetime and watching over the new humanity which emerged from the Sea of LCL (some of which imagined themselves to be animals, after all, you could be anything you wanted as long as you imagined yourself in it).

What? Every WMG should have at least one connecting it to Eva!

• You know it's going to be jossed, don't you?
• That's why it's a WMG. It's not necessarily intended to be canon, just a fun little thought about how two completely different universes could be connected.

It's not a Fairy Tale curse, magic users are just dicks.

Mr. Facilier and the FOTOS knew that being turned into a frog is a stereotypical magical curse with the associated "cure" of kissing a princess. So, because it's black magic and they're all assholes, they engineered the curse to transform anybody who kisses the victim into another frog, regardless of royal lineage. When Mr. Facilier gets dragged off by the FOTOS and his amulet maintaining the spell on Naveen gets smashed, the active effects of the curse are dispelled, leaving only the results (i.e. being a frog). So kissing Charolette does nothing becasue there's no magic in effect at all at that point. Their later transformation occurs because Madame Odie casts a spell of her own to reward the two for learning their respective lessons and hooking up, keeping in character with her role as a vague, intelligent source of you-must-figure-this-out-on-your-own wisdom. Odie didn't restore them earlier either because magic is unable to interfere with other magic that is still in effect, or she just wanted them to smarten up before she helped out so they would learn their Aesop.There are no rules-loopholing contractual elements to the spells and no overarcing geas in effect. The two protagonists are just manipulated with smaller scale polymorphs and psychology by jerkass magicians.

"Friends on the Other Side" is a warning from Captain Anderson about Saren and the Reapers.

Some of the lyrics are way too on the nose if you look at them through tinfoil hat-colored glasses...

• Sit down at my table / Put your mind at ease / If you relax it will enable me to do anything I please... Clearly a reference to Indoctrination.

• Transformation Central! / Reformation Central! / Transmogrification Central! Not really eveidence, but playing thatis bit in the back of my head during Saren's One-Winged Angel act is the only way I can get to sleep after watching this cutscene.

• A final point of evidence: Keith David's voice is very sexy. Case in point, imagine my dumb-ass theory being read in his voice. Doesn't it sound so much more reasonable now?

• Transformation Central could also refer to conversion into husks or being turned into pink goo to create a Human Reaper Larva.

• Ah yes, "Reapers." The immortal race of sentient starships allegedly waiting in Disney Animated Canon. We have dismissed that claim.

Dr. Facilier is mixed-race.

With his skin tone and features it is entirly possible that he was the son of an African-American and a Caucasian. This would also make him a Woobie as back than people who were mixed-race were preduiced against along with other ethnicies. His parents would not be able to marry and back then it was still very shaming to be born to un-married parents. He might not even have been able to see his father.

• I think it's pretty heavily implied that he's Creole. I may be wrong, though?

Maldonia was founded by expatriates...

...from Greece, Italy, India, the Middle East, France, Spain, some African countries, and everywhere else Naveen could possibly be from. So rather than being just one race that offends you, he's all of them!

Maldonia is in South East Europe.

Maldonia sounds suspicously like a mix between Malta and Macedonia. Naveen has a mix of a French, Italian and Spanish accent, and his tanned skin would probably mean he was from southern Europe.

• It could also be southwest Europe. For some reason I'm thinking Moorish Spain.

Naveen's family has a history of making deals with Jerkass Genies, all the way back to the first members of his family's dynasty.

And that's why the country is called Bad Giftia.

Maldonia is a South American "French Coast" country.

Its origin as a French colony offers the prince's accent. and its mixed European-African-Mesoamerican heritage was the source of his looks.

Maldonia is a Caribbean island-country not formally recognized by the League of Nations or (after the time of the movie) the United Nations.

His parents sent him up north to learn the value of a dollar before risking him running the Maldonian economy into the ground as king, since they couldn't figure out how to teach him the value of a Maldonian livre and even a relatively high-class country doesn't have much of a financial buffer when it only has around fifty full citizens.

Maldonia is an Indian Princely State

• This has as much to do with Naveen's name as anything else: Lost actor Naveen Andrews is of Indian descent.
• India also has a pretty long history interracial marriage: some historians estimate that one in every three British men stationed in India during the colonial period had a local wife and there's a sizable Anglo-Indian community there today.
• This also feeds into the above theory above about Naveen's parents having planned to cut him off for a while: if you didn't have a legitimate, biological son to pass the title onto, the British could take your kingdom away, so of course if they wanted to cut him off, they would need a back up.
• As for the accent: Naveen's voice actor is from Brazil, a Portuguese speaking country. In universe, Maldonia could easily overlap with Portuguese-conquered Goa, or have been founded by expatriates escaping the Goan Inquisition.

Working with the theory that the original deal with the friends was to bring him back to life, Facilier was a victim of a Klan lynching.

Big Dan Teague is "Big Daddy" La Bouff in ten years time.

He became desperate for money and cruel due to the stock market crash and an accident where he lost both his left eye and his daughter. It also forced him to leave New Orleans for Mississippi and change his name. He also doesn't care for "people changing into frogs" stories. "Don't you know these things give ya warts? *SQUISH*"

Maldonia was a byproduct of the events of Aladdin

When Aladdin wished to become a prince, Genie's magic ended up creating a country to go with his princedom, spontaneously creating Maldonia. Though neither Aladdin or the Genie realized what had occured, the royals that were put into power by the wish over Maldonia were enough to keep it together.

• This would certainly explain Naveen's ambiguous brownness, since it would put Maldonia somewhere in the Middle East.

Maldonia is an alternate universe version of Brazil

• Where the portuguese monarchy was never abolished just changed a little, and at one point the royal heirs married local women giving as a result interracial descent and explaining why they seem to have some european influence.
  • Or the republican coup d'etat initially succeeded but was then defeated by a monarchist counter-coup, restoring the empire but under a different name and dinasty to cut away from emperor Pedro II wishing to end the empire (the main reason the coup succeeded: most of the population was monarchist, and the ruling classes only had problems with Pedro's direct heir being a woman).
  • Alternatively, one of the messes during Pedro II's minority ended up becoming a full-blown civil war started with the secession of an area self-proclaimed Kingdom of Maldonia that ended up conquering the whole Empire.

Facilier is a servant and/or avatar of Nyarlathotep.

"The Other Side" is the Black Lodge.

Facilier's shadowy servants are Vashta Nerada.

Mama Odie's snake is Kaa from The Jungle Book (1967).

Who is also the snake from Disney Animated Canon Robin Hood (1973). She found him after he was slithering alone after those two movies and took him in, and he performed a Heel–Face Turn.

Goofy!Marlowe from Mickey's Christmas Carol is one of Facilier's friends

Look at this◊ picture and tell me I'm wrong.

Dr. Facilier is a maleficar.

The Other Side is the Fade. The FOTOS are demons. His ritual with Prince Naveen is blood magic.

Tiana has short-term memory loss

At the end, she notices the Fake Naveen getting married to someone else, but thinks it's the real Naveen, even though she knew about the Fake Naveen, and even saw him, earlier.

• It might have just slipped her mind. She was excited and probably distracted by the fact that she'd just learned Naveen was trying to propose to her and the prospect of being human again and getting her restaurant at long last. It's entirely possible she just assumed it was really Naveen on the float because she was only thinking about him.
• As has been pointed out elsewhere, Tiana sees the fake Naveen, but we never see her find out that he's a fake Naveen. It was Naveen who didn't remember enough about the events surrounding his transformation, and he didn't even know that Facilier had enlisted his own butler to replace him. Even with the story he told her, Tiana doesn't have anything to suggest that his transformation hadn't happened while Lottie was fetching a new dress, and that he had been the one dancing with her before it happened.

The Friends From The Other Side is actually Giygas's spirits.

After the events of EarthBound (1994), Giygas split into multiple spirits. He went into the time of this movie and Facilier found him. As a result, Facilier named him and his spirits "The Friends from the Other Side". Giygas really never liked this, but had trust in him to rule the world and New Orleans. After Facilier is sent into Giygas's spirits, where Facilier dies, Giygas stays there until his death.

The wrecked steamboat from The Rescuers is the same one seen in this movie.

As the time passed, the popularity of the steamboats decreased and it was abandoned on the Devil's Bayou, which is located in Louisiana, allowing Madame Medusa and Mr. Snoop to take it as their hideout years later in their plot to obtain the Devil's Eye.

Facillier calls his Friends on the Other Side "friends" so as not to offend them.

Similar to how you only refer to Fair Folk as "fair folk" or something similar, never anything nasty, or else.

The Friends on the Other Side are Incubators

They make contracts with humans that involve their soul. Instead of Fair Folk they are business like. They were delighted to see Faciler fall into despair at the end. Thus, here is what happened in Faciler's backstory. Kyubey appeared to him and offered him a wish in exchange for his services. Faciler wished for voodoo magic because that's what he knew about. It was only later that he realized he truly wanted money ("We all know the real power in this world it's magic, IT'S MONEY!") and this dissonance is what made him even more bitter than before. Around this time Kyubey decided to experiment with sub-contractors and this is why Faciler makes deals instead of something more straight-forward; he gains more souls/energy for the Incubators to fight entropy in exchange for more power like a line of credit. After the talismen he was seconds away from witching out due to despair.

Facilier is a descendant of Jack Sparrow.

Well... who else in Disney has a close female family member as a shrunken head? Captain Teague. He's also, technically, pirate royalty, thus making Jack pirate royalty as well. Alternatively, Captain Elizabeth Swann Turner is the Pirate King, and, well, 10 years is a long time to wait, and she did have that kiss and UST with Jack. It's possible that Facilier is a descendant of an illegitimate child of Elizabeth Swann and Jack Sparrow, who took a page from his family's history, and turned a female relative into a shrunken head.

Disney will never make another hand-drawn animated film after 2011.

The Princess and the Frog was supposed to play as an experiment to see if hand-drawn animated films, done the traditional way, are still profitable. Sadly, it never gave a clear answer, since even though it was very profitable, it had to compete against 3 other blockbuster heavy-weights in theaters, and it was not released in 3D. Winnie The Pooh was released 2 years later, and even though it was planned before anyone knew Princess wouldn't live up to Disney's expectations, Winnie is only under an hour long, and was done for a fraction of the budget Princess was. The whole setup felt like a big "screw it let's end in a putter" situation.

• In 2013, Bob Iger announced that there are no plans to make another hand-drawn animated Disney film in the foreseeable future.
  • John Lasseter has said that he feels there are still things in 2-D animation that can't be accomplished in any other medium, and considering he and several other animation directors/producers grew up with beloved Disney classics, it seems unlikely they would let it die out completely.
  • Another thing to note is that Iger never said that Disney was 100% done with 2-D animated films. There's just not any plans to make one now. It's very possible we might see another 2-D flick in the late 2010's, just not now.

Facillier's freinds are created by Discord from Friendship is Magic.

While in statue form he can't effect his own world but he can sure-as-hell create chaos in the disney canon. His ultimate plan was for Facillier to free him.

When Facillier lost his soul, he became a Loa, maybe not immediately, but eventually.

Which one? Baron Samedi.

Tiana, Charlotte and Dr. Facilier's souls would be more valuable to Shadow Creature than normal ones.

Dr. Facilier promised his "friends from the other side" that if they brought him Prince Naveen, he would give them the souls of the whole population of New Orleans. When Tiana breaks the amulet, the "friends from the other side" choose to interpret this as Dr. Facilier breaking their contract and take his soul instead. However, Dr. Facilier tries to point out that his plan still could work, as he still has Naveen imprisoned. When the "friends" choose to ignore this, it leads me to believe that they wanted Dr. Facilier's soul all along, presumably because his own dark nature and previous dealings with them, so his "evil" soul was more valuable than a "normal" soul. However, I also think that the opposite may hold true. Since Tiana refuses to take the easy way out and is probably the most unambiguously "good" character in the film, her soul would have been appealing to the "friends" as well. Similarly, with Charlotte, Dr. Facilier says more than once that after Lawrence marries Charlotte, he will then kill Big Daddy and take control of New Orleans. (It's also inferred that Dr. Facilier intended to get rid of Lawrence somehow after, given the way he delivers the line, "Sixty-forty, like I said." and the way he freely shoves Lawrence about.) However, Facilier doesn't reference what might happen to Charlotte afterwards, and since Charlotte proves at the finale of the movie that she's a genuinely good, kind person at heart, this leads me to think that unambiguously "good" and "evil" characters like Tiana, Charlotte and Dr. Facilier, respectively, would be valuable for the supernatural beings.

Dr. Facilier planted that newspaper in his jacket.

All as part of his act to look like the average voodoo witch doctor who scams vulnerable people out of their money. He wanted Lawrence to be skeptical of him and his magic. As he said moments later in "Friends on the Other Side": " If you relax it'll enable me to do/anything I please! " Now we could just label that lyric as a simple mark of charisma but suppose it's true. If we think that way then of course he would want to have Lawrence convinced that he was a hack so he could relax.

Now Naveen was easy. He would've been relaxed either way but Lawrence had to be manipulated into becoming relaxed. If he were actually convinced that he was for real then he would either run away or not or act tense throughout the whole time wondering if he were going to be harmed. Because Facilier put that newspaper on him where it was readily visible, Lawrence was convinced he was a fake and in turn was relaxed throughout the tarot card reading because hey, how can a hack with a few magic tricks harm you?

Charlotte's father knew he was going to create a Spoiled Brat trying to fill a mother-shaped void in her life, so in between her early childhood and young adulthood, instead made her Spoiled Sweet.

Sometime he realized that he was screwing up his only daughter, so he changed his parenting skills a bit so Lottie wouldn't be a Spoiled Brat constantly depending on her father. Indeed, she turned out very well.

• This would also somewhat explain why Charlotte is prince-obsessed. It's not just that she likes fairytales—it's that the main man in her life treats her as a princess. Whether that's beneficial for her or not—after all, she's still getting her own way all the time regardless—it's quite touching that she'd want to find a man who'd treat her as well as her daddy does. Considering her time period, it's also pretty progressive. Maybe she's smarter than we thought.

The kingdom of Maldonia was founded by Prince Eric.

True, we don't know where, exactly, Prince Eric lived, but it certainly wasn't Denmark- judging from the lagoon they visit, it's somewhere near the equator. Either Prince Eric or his descendants broke away from the mother country to found the kingdom of Maldonia, and that's why Naveen looks so much like Eric.

In the universe of The Princess and the Frog, John Wilkes Booth missed.

With Lincoln alive to hold the more vengeful figures in check, there was a kinder, gentler Reconstruction that left the South less sullen and bitter, and more tolerant in general. As a consequence, the romanticization of Old Dixie didn't become nearly the cultural phenomenon it did in our world; there was no The Birth of a Nation (1915), and hence the Ku Klux Klan didn't experience the surge in popularity it did in our timeline. Therefore, the La Boufs don't see anything wrong with being friends with their black seamstress and her daughter, eating in an integrated restaurant, marrying foreign princes, or supporting Tiana's love of him, either. Sure, there's still the occasional jerk like the Fenners, but all in all, it's a nicer Roaring Twenties, as far as race relations go.

Bill Cipher is one of the Friends on the Other Side.

There's no real reason for this, it just seems to fit. Maybe someone could make fanart or something.

The Friend who looks like Jack Skellington? Wrong Jack.

It's actually Candle Jack. With his kidnapping expertise, he was the one who grabbed Dr. Facilier and dragged him into The Other Side, like I just did to this troper here.

• All jokes aside, notice how that particular shadow appears to be In the Hood, which Jack Skellington is not, and that guy is.
• In case you're wondering why he kidnapped Facilier even though Facilier didn't say his name, I have 2 possible explanations: 1, the creators refused to let Keith David say the line for fear that he would be kidnapped, or 2, he was Just Following Orders from the leader of the FOTOS.

Facilier's shadow is The Man Behind the Man.

He is one of the FOTOS, and his name is The Shadow Man. "Dr. Facilier" is the name of the human, who isn't actually a human, but a body created by the FOTOS for the Shadow Man to use as a puppet so he can interact with the human world. The Shadow Man serves as kind of an ambassador for the Friends to get them what they want - human souls. When the Friends drag Facilier into the Other Side, they were actually dragging the Shadow Man back into TOS, and they probably destroyed the Facilier body. Admittedly, I have no proof, but wouldn't this be awesome?

Tiana's Palace became a speakeasy.

Guests are clearly seen drinking alcohol at the end of the movie, and before anyone tries the "non-alcoholic/sparkling grape juice" defense, look at Big Daddy; he's intoxicated. Since violating Prohibition was rampant throughout America, and often not enforced, it's not a stretch that Tiana and Naveen would serve illegal giggle-water to their guests. Add to that Naveen's fun-loving, mischievous personality, and Tiana's business savvy personality, and you've got a speakeasy of Gatsby proportions in the making.

• Charlotte could smuggle plenty of bottles under those large skirts.

The Friends on the Other Side are the same thing as Rasputin's Dark Forces.

The reliquary is the same as Facilier's amulet. When both of them were destroyed before Rasputin or Facilier could fulfill his mission, the FOTOS dragged him to either Hell or some dark spirit world (it depends on what you believe). This theory is also on Anastasia's WMG page.

Charlotte still has her Balloon Belly from the early concept art.

We just never saw it because we never saw her with her corset off.

The Friends on the Other Side are Good All Along and an example of Dark Is Not Evil.

The original loa were not (at least inherently) malevolent beings, not even the shadier ones like Baron Samedi and Kalfu. They were sympathetic to the poor and desperate and willing to make deals with them, and it is implied that Facilier fell under such a category in his past. While Facilier was screwing around with the rich and those who were trying to "cut corners" in life and do things the easy way, including Naveen, their goals were aligned. However, once Facilier began to involve Tiana in his schemes, someone who was (a) poor and (b) dedicated to hard work, the Friends lost their sympathy with Facilier and began helping Tiana (and later Naveen, once he matures) instead. Alternatively, their entire goal from the beginning was to help Tiana and Naveen achieve their dreams, but only after they go through sufficient Character Development to prove themselves worthy of it. They were never interested in devouring the souls of New Orleans, merely pretended to be as part of their Batman Gambit - they could have easily attacked/claimed frog Tiana in the cemetery when she broke Facilier's talisman, but expressed no interest in doing so. Their endgame leads to victory and a happy ending for everyone except Lawrence and Facilier, the only two evil characters in the entire story.

Bonus points if they're the SAME beings who provide Mama Odie with her power, only she is able to use them freely and without any fear of suffering the same fate as Facilier because she has the Friends' approval through her wise use of her powers and her understanding/spreading the message of what really matters.

Charlotte asked Dr. Facilier to kill Ray.

Charlotte probably saw Ray escape with Naveen's frog form when the fake Naveen fell off the float. After Dr. Facilier told her that the Naveen she tried to marry was fake and it was a result of the necklace's magic. Charlotte responded to this by telling Facilier that if he saw Ray again, he should squish him because he ruined her wedding and stole the pendant. This could also be why Charlotte distracted Tiana and Naveen in their frog forms to kiss her, as she didn't want them to find out that Dr. Facillier stepped on Ray and stole the pendant..

Tiana's employers were the other bidder.

After one of them witnessed Tiana finally having enough money to buy the abandoned sugar mill she intends to turn into a restaurant of their own, he told the other employer and they decided to pool their funds to outbid her so she'd never leave them. At the very least, they'd force Tiana to spend more than initially expected. At most, they could either keep her working at their original places or become joint owners of a new restaurant and make Tiana their employee or a minor partner there.

• Based on an above guess that the realtors expected Tiana to take a loan from them, her employers expected that, by making her take the loan to get her own restaurant, she'd eventually default and then return to them.

...Or there was no other bidder.

Common guys, although the Fenner Brothers told Tiana that she had been recently outbid by a gentleman, it doesn't seem strange that someone would coincidentally bid on the mill after twenty years of being untouched the same week Tiana placed her bid???

• Most likely, the Fenner Brothers were probably making up an excuse to prevent selling the mill to Tiana due being either a woman of color (as they are implied to have prejudices) or simply that due her then economic status she wouldn't have been able to mantain the business on her own.

Big Daddy owns the abandoned sugar mill.

It's been so long ever since he left it at the hands of realtors he forgot it until the Fenner Brothers informed him that someone bought it.

Facilier used to be the class prankster at school.

He entered into voodoo to take his pranks to the next level.

Facilier is literally unable to outright tell lies.

When he threatens Lawrence against breaking the talisman, he never says what he'd do to Lawrence because anything he'd threaten to do would be lying about the fact the FOTOS wouldn't let him live long enough to do anything.

• Not entirely inaccurate - to cast your Voodoo on somebody you need some form of contract. While deceit is optional, to deliberately lie invalidates the contract. Facilier told Naveen he could have a green future, and Lawrence that he could be the man he'd always wanted to be. And they agreed to that.

In this universe, wishing on a star really does work...

Just not in the way you expect — a la Mama Odie, you get what you need, but not necessarily what you want. Proof? Tiana wishes upon a star, and what happens?

• Of course it works, It's Disney.

• When you wish upon a star/Makes no difference who you are/Anything your heart desires will come to you...

Tiana is the distant ancestor of Benjamin Sisko.

No proof, but Rule of Cool. Also, Joseph Sisko's cooking skills are obviously genetic, inherited from his great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother.

• Also, there is a taxidermied alligator at Joseph Sisko's restaurant. That might be Louis.

Winnie the Pooh exists in this same setting

The movie takes place in 1926, the same year that the original Winnie-the-Pooh book by A. A. Milne was published. Now that Tiana's learned to relax and appreciate the little things in life, maybe she'll find some joy in some charming children's characters that just so happen to also be under Disney's copyright...

Lawrence will do little if any jail time

• 'Cause who is going to believe that story?
  • At least he wouldn't do any time in the United States, per se. If he gets sent back to Maldonia, on the other hand, while he wouldn't have to worry about being implicated in Facilier's plot (due to how fantastical it'd sound) he could face charges of high treason for conspiring against Naveen, and if the latter testified against Lawrence, let's just say the former butler could be in deep trouble...

Maldonia is a multi-cultured country

I say this because Naveen is tan colored yet is able to speak French, it could be that his home land is multi cultural or something similar like that.

Maldonia is a African country

When I first watched the movie I wasn't aware of existence of Latino's and mixed race people and assumed Naveen is a African prince. While he's a Ambiguously Brown, there could be a possibility of him being black: people of African descent have very different shades of dark skin and Ethiopians have European facial features. As far as Politically Correct History goes, I assume that in this movie universe, Maldonia was one (or only) African country that somehow managed to protect their independence and monarchy during the Colonial era. The reason why Naveen speaks French is either Everything Sounds Sexier in French or descendants of French colonizators live in Maldonia.

The Disney+ series

The series will introduce Tiana's other childhood friend who is African American just like her.

While Tiana already has five other friends who are African Americans like her, we don't know if they know each other since childhood, plus, if their interactions are anything to go by, they don't support her dreams due to showing concern for Tiana's workaholic nature. Thus, the series will feature Tiana's second BFF who will be based on the Mecca Gerima from Really Love (possibly even having the same actress), and who's supportive of her and her dreams, just like how her character in the movie was supportive of the main female protagonist. As why she wasn't present during the events of the movie, it could be explained that she lived in the other town (she could have move out from NOLA at young age) or had some important business beyound New Orleans, and had to temporarily leave the town before the events of the movie.

• She also could be the one who gave Tiana the orange dress that she wears near the end of the movie, thus explaining why it became Tiana everyday dress - by wearing the dress, she remembers her friend that give it to her as a gift.

Tiana will have her hair straighten.

The recently released shampoo commercial for Brazilian company of haircare products Seda showed Tiana letting her curly hair down, implying that the recent series will somehow focus on natural hair. And given how Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur had one episode dealing with natural hair, there is a possibility that this series will have one too. The episode will be about Tiana getting her hair straightened (either for getting '20s Bob Haircut that she wored in "Almost There" and in Facilier temptation or for hair care reasons) using natural methods (referencing the fact that Black women maintain their hair by sporadically straightening it) with episode showing it as a good think, and providing An Aesop "both curly hair and straight hair are beautiful".

If there will be some fighting scenes, Tiana will use frying pan.

Just to make a homage to another Disney princess that uses pan as weapon.

Tiana's five other friends will be fleshed out.

There will be Flashback Episodes showing events that happened before Naveen arrived to New Orleans.

Such as showing how Tiana and Eudora dealt with James death, Tiana's misadventures with her friends rather than just Lottie, Naveen's life before he meet Tiana etc.

The series will be more grounded up than movie, and will mostly present Slice of Life type of stories.

The series will expand on the Roaring Twenties aspect of the movie.

Such as Tiana and Naveen going to jazz clubs or to the first cinemas.

• If so, one idea that could developt into an arc would be including Gangsters and the Mafia, and maybe have them target Tiana's Palace for their own wicked deeds.

We will explore more of Dr. Facilier's background, as well more potetial sight seeing of the Other Side as well.

Just because Facilier is gone, it doesn't mean that we can't still explore more about how the Voodoo works inside New Orleans, as well, who's to say that Facilier was the ONLY Voodoo Witch Doctor around the town?

Tiana will be transformed into animal again, but this time not into frog, but into deer.

That will count as Actor Allusion, given that Tiana's voice actress performed song in Bambi II.

Woodland Critters appearing in Tiana's Bayou Adventure will appear in series as supporting characters.

Given that both ride and series are gonna release in the same year, this can't be a coincidence that each of the animals introduced in the ride has their own established characterizations despite the fact that ride won't focus on all of their quirks. But what if Disney is subtly hinting that these characters are Early Bird Cameos that will appear in the series, with their characterizations being fully shown instead of being just background of the ride, with potential episodes featuring them as side or main characters (such as episode where Octavia, Apollo and Sebastián go on adventure together)? Plus, it would be nice to see what neighbours Louis has at the bayou.

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