When I was a very young girl living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, my father and I had a Friday ritual that I looked forward to all week long.

We would drive to the movie rental store and pick something to watch over the weekend.

He leafed through bootleg copies of American action movies and Bollywood romances, always getting something new for him and my mom to enjoy together.

Me, I made the exact same selection week after week: Disney's beautiful animated 1950 movie Cinderella.

Those pre-school days started what would become a life-long love affair with animated fairy tales.

As a child, it was my dream to become an animator for the Disney Studios. Over the years, that dream and my art faded but my love for those movies did not.

Now a much bigger kid, all this month I found myself eagerly awaiting the release of Disney's latest, long overdue return to classical fairy tales with the movie The Princess and The Frog.

Aside from all the usual hype around a film like this, there is an additional twist: The princess in question — Tiana — is black. African-American to be precise.

Disney's Tiana, princess for a new generation. (Disney Studios/Associated Press)

Set in 1920s New Orleans, the movie is a also love letter to a distinctly African-American city that has been through some very rough times.

Night, night Snow White

Now I know that for some of you Disney is synonymous with evil American imperialism — right up there with Wal-Mart, McDonald's and The Gap.

It is emblematic of a saturating, fake culture that is homogenizing the rest of the world. I understand that concern.

I also understand that Walt Disney himself was considered suspect by some people, based on their interpretation of some of the characters in his cartoons.

But if you separate the art from the artists (and the purveyors), the joy and magic of those gorgeously animated films is undeniable. And this latest addition is no exception, this time for some extra special reasons.

I'm far from the first to point out the importance of having a black woman in a role like this. But you cannot underestimate how much it means for young girls of colour to see images of leading women who look like us on the big screen — even if they are just cartoons.

For the ultra-feminists out there — yes, Tiana is still a princess, beautiful and thin, in a gown and tiara.

In the merchandising, she's shown in fully regalia, not in her waitress uniform and certainly not as a frog.

But we need to see her that way. Those images of a "Snow White" princess and a fair-skinned sleeping beauty were embedded into our brains from an early age as the prototype of womanly elegance. White is beautiful. Dark is not.

More than colour

In recent years, it is true, Disney has inched closer towards darker-skinned princesses. There was the Arab Jasmine, the Chinese Mulan and aboriginal-American Pocahontas.

But the truth is, they really weren't that dark.

Tiana, on the other hand, has no long, flowing hair. Her complexion is dark, her nose is broad and her lips are full. There is no denying she is a black woman of African descent.

Aside from Tiana's colour and beauty, there were other positive treats for me in this movie.

The opening scene features Tiana and her mother and it was not clear at first if there is a father figure in the film.

I feared that the movie was going to jump on the stereotype of the broken, fatherless family, a condition that afflicts a disproportionately high number of black families in America.

But Tiana's father is clearly there — a loving, strong and positive role model who teaches his daughter to work hard and dream big.

Real girl stuff

The Disney producers could also have taken the lazy route they've gone down in the past whenever two or more females vie to be the fairest of them all, to win the prince's heart.

That is to set up the jealousy and competition among them.

Disney girls are taught at a very early age to mistrust other girls. Sisters, stepsisters, mothers, step-mothers, friends, queens, and witches — they're all out to get you.

In this instance, we have rich, blond, blue-eyed Charlotte, a childhood friend of Tiana and beautiful in the traditional Disney sense.

Charlotte is also hoping to win Prince Charming's heart. But the two girls support one another rather than compete.

In the end Charlotte sacrifices her own chances with the prince to help Tiana's dreams come true.

A heroine of our own

The prince in this movie is named Naveen, a distinctly Hindu name. So maybe our prince is Indian, or maybe he's of mixed race. But he is most definitely very dreamy, in an animated way.

More importantly, though, his race is never an issue, and the interracial relationship is celebrated without the usual clichéd Romeo and Juliet family opposition. Refreshing.

Back in the theatre, my cousin Sabrina, another kid at heart, handed me the tissues as I wept my way through the final third of the movie.

When it ended, she told me that she's reading Barack Obama's autobiography in which he, too, talks about the lack of black role models when he was growing up.

He didn't see many people who looked like him portrayed in a positive light. And that just made me think how far we've all come together.

Today there is a black president in the White House and an Africa-American princess in our theatres.

Maybe this movie won't become a classic like the older films — the songs, for one, aren't as catchy — but for many of us big and little girls of colour it embodies a much bigger gift. A heroine to call our own.