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We all grew up watching the various Disney Princesses go through exciting trials and tribulations on their journeys to happily ever after, and children around the world continue to adore these iconic characters. But what do they say about women and gender roles? SAM HIGGS looks at how the ideal Disney woman has changed - and stayed the same - over the span of more than eight decades.
REPRESENTATION, TRANSITION AND THE DISNEY PRINCESS
The idea of the Disney Princess as a commercial entity was first conceived in 2000, when Disney employee and former Nike chief marketing officer Andy Mooney decided that the princesses little girls were creating in their own imaginative play needed to be given a brand. At first, Disney was reluctant - might lumping them all together destroy the mythology of each of the princesses' stories? The princesses were each given distinct colour profiles, and rules were made, including that none were to make eye contact.1 The fact that as of last year the Disney Princess range of products was estimated to be worth around US$5.5 billion more than demonstrates the popularity of the brand and, by association, the film franchise.2
The exposure given to these films presents us educators with an eighty-year body of symbolically rich work steeped in slowly evolving themes and values, and a cohort of students who have grown up consuming it, loving it and, in many cases, knowing it religiously. Granted, this might be truer of girls than boys, but growing up in this culture, many male students will have received passive exposure from siblings, friends or non-gender-biased parents.
Through structured analysis, students can learn to understand how Disney Princesses act as allegories for the dominant representations of women at the time of each film's production. They can also begin to evaluate the evolving values Western society places on gender roles.
This discussion is based on the studio's current official Disney Princess line-up.3 It will group the films and their representations of women into three eras.
THE CLASSICAL PRINCESS
When considering Disney's earliest era of animated films, it's easy to lump together his three original princesses - Snow White (Adriana Caselotti) from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (William Cottrell et al., 1937), the title...