The company chose its annual shareholders' meeting to announce that it had started production on a film called The Frog Princess, set in New Orleans and featuring an African American princess called Maddy. Thursday's meeting also took place in New Orleans - which gave Disney an extra opportunity to show its solidarity with the Crescent City in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Company executives gave away next to nothing about the plot or characters in the film. Disney's studio chairman told reporters only that it would be scored by Randy Newman, who has worked extensively with the Disney subsidiary Pixar on the Toy Story films, A Bug's Life, Monster's Inc. and Cars. Cook added: "The film's New Orleans setting and strong princess character give the film lots of excitement and texture." The choice of a black princess is part of a long-term marketing strategy to give Disney characters as much "diversity" as possible. In 1993, Disney rolled out its first non-white princess in its animated version of Aladdin - and promptly ran into a wall of angry protests from Muslims and Arabs who said the film was racist in its depiction of a Middle East riddled with casual violence.

"I come from a land, from a faraway place," ran one notorious song lyric, which was eventually changed because of the lobbying pressure, "where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face; it's barbaric, but hey, it's home." Disney followed that up in 1995 with Pocahontas, a retelling of the encounter between an English settler and a Native American princess so radical it spawned whole seminars at university history departments. Disney's animators also came under fire for modelling Pocahontas on the supermodel Naomi Campbell, although they countered they had in fact used Native American faces as their inspiration.

The Frog Princess is written and co-directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, responsible for Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. Perhaps more significantly, the film fits into Disney's princess-oriented marketing strategy. Since 1999, the company has rolled out toys, books, clothing and other merchandise based on its eight existing film princesses - Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Jasmine from Aladdin, Pocahontas and Mulan.

Maddy will fit right into that product line. And she is almost sure to raise the hackles of the usual anti-Disney suspects.

The days when Walt Disney was accused of blatant racism are long gone. (One particularly egregious example of that being The Jungle Book, made at the height of the civil rights movement in 1964, in which Mowgli is told he can't live with Baloo the bear because different species need to keep to themselves.)

But it is still regularly accused of offering a bland, corporate, patronising vision of different ethnicities and cultures, . "Disney's message of inter-racial harmony is clear," Marlene Wurfel wrote in a tough - and funny - essay in Z magazine a few years ago. "It doesn't matter what color your skin is. What matters is that you are beautiful, good, submissive, materialistic, and willing to play the game. If you are racially other than white, you can either be a princess in 'your own country', or you can conform. You can do either of these, while celebrating your deference to the natural order of things in song."