A "Princess" movie that Disney might have gotten right!

[Zen]

[Elle]

For a while Dwayne Johnson was the voice of my morning alarms, but it was too much. Hilarious for a short period but just TOO MUCH.

[Tahlvin]

Looks encouraging. They did have a hubbub over cultural misappropriation over a costume they posted in their Disney Store, where it was the tattooed skin of a Pacific Islander wearing a grass skirt. People were upset/disgusted that they treat someone's skin as a costume. So while they haven't completely nailed the sensitivity bit, they are hopefully improving on gender equality.

[Elle]

Yeah, I'm not really sure how that gets past any series of internal decision-making points. "We plan to create a human skin costume!" "Great idea, what could possibly go wrong?"

[Mike]

They didn't do too badly with Mulan, Brave and Frozen too.

[poorpete]

Music by a relative unknown named Lin Manuel Miranda.

I could do without the "rescue the princess" scenes from films. Rather see Cinderella party with the rats, and Snow White teach Dwarves how to wash their hands, than see them leave their friends for some dullard.

[Mike]

My take on the princesses and pseudo-princesses so far:

1) Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel... all passive vessels who require a man to save them and do very little to help themselves.

2) Pocahontas, Belle, Tiana, Rapunzel... all capable and strong women with agency whose stories are tied up in getting a man and the notion of romantic love.

3) Elsa, Anna, Mulan, and Merida... all capable and strong women with agency whose stories are not primarily about romantic love. Mulan does have a strong romance element to it, but it is secondary to her being the hero who saves all of China. Anna has a romantic subplot, but the movie opens by subverting the notion that romantic love is all it's cracked up to be and ends on the importance of family above all else. Merida don't need no stinkin' man, and her movie highlights her independence quite dramatically.

4) Jasmine, Megara, and Nala... also strong and capable, but their purpose is only as support to the men who are the stars of their movies.

Kida is interesting, because she's a combination of 3 and 4. But then Atlantis was never intended to be princess type movie, and she was not our protagonist.

There's others that can be considered here: Eilonwy, Giselle, Sofia, Tinkerbell,etc... but I've hit the main ones.

*Side note, all of the comments above are looking at the princesses themselves and leaving aside any questions of cultural critique, as all of the films depicting non-white princesses have come under fire for being culturally insensitive in some form or another.

[poorpete]

I see, I think. It's about how they interact with the villain?

[Mike]

Not really. It's about what defines them and what defines their success and their happy ending. Some of it is in how they handle the villain and other plot complications, but it's more complex than that.

Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora are interesting characters who do fun and interesting things in their movies, but ultimately, the three of them are demonstrating their prowess at domestic skills and demonstrating what wonderful wives they would make. They are very much a product of their times. All three of them ultimately are rescued from their fate by marrying a king (or king to be). I put Ariel in that same category, because although hers is not about the domestic goddess bit, her actions throughout the movie are mostly passive, and when she does take an active role in her own fate, it is usually to get herself deeper into trouble, until finally at the end, she is rescued (by a prince) and then gives up her entire life and everything she's known to go be with her savior. All four of these movies come with a moral that needs some context and explaining before I would want my own daughter (if I had one) to take them too much to heart.

I adore Beauty and the Beast, and I love Belle as a character, but remember that the movie is really about Beast, because HE is the one who has to earn his redemption in the end. Belle doesn't have to go through the same kind of change as a character, and essentially her role is to stay with her abusive partner until her love can change him. Again, not an awesome lesson. But I still love the movie.

Princess and the Frog, Tangled, and Pocahontas are all essentially love stories. I like the characters better in these (and I especially love Rapunzel), but these are almost rom-coms, and while the ideas of love and sacrifice are noble, the women's personal achievements are secondary to finding love (and specifically finding love with a man). Sure, Tiana has her restaurant and she is an independent woman with her own goals and career, but the climax of the movie isn't her meeting her career goals. The climax of the movie is her saving and marrying her true love, and the career goals are a happy epilogue that flows from that. None of that makes these bad movies, but from a feminist point of view they do raise some eyebrows in terms of women defining themselves and their happiness in relationship to their success with men.

Jasmine, Megara and Nala I don't even really count in all this, because they are support characters. Their role is to help define the men in their movies. They are as much plot device as anything else.

In Frozen, Anna is our protagonist. The movie is really about her, and she DOES end up having a happy ending with Kristoff, but that's a subplot. Her true happy ending is about the bond between her and her sister, and the romance part of it is an afterthought. I was surprised when the movie didn't mention whether she and Kristoff got married. But whether they did or didn't wasn't important. What was important was Elsa taking her place as Queen and the sisters opening up their kingdom and making the land better for everyone. Beautiful.

Mulan's story was about her saving the world. The romance was again just a subplot. There's troublesome stuff in the idea that she has to hide her femininity and take on "masculine" traits to protect her family and save the world. The idea that she is only celebrated publicly as a woman after she proves herself as a man. But that's way less important to me than the idea that she's a kick-ass woman who saves the world. Take that.

[Elle]