In Defense of the Princesses (Part 2): The Fresh Batch

In recent years, Disney has received infamy for their inane Disney Channel sitcoms and original movies, and direct-to-video sequels. The Disney Channel has also given us a generation’s worth of tween stars, the most notable of whom have made their mark with varying degrees of controversy shortly after widespread popularity and success. Buxom redhead Lindsay Lohan is now a puffy-faced alcoholic who can’t hold down a job. Hilary Duff of Lizzie McGuire fame became anorexic in her late teens and have faded from the spotlight since recovering and subsequently becoming a mother. The stars of Camp Rock had a massive amount of haters for their uninspired brand of pop music. Demi Lovato battled eating disorders, drugs, and heartbreak that culminated into a suicide attempt. Vanessa Hudgens “accidentally” got a handful of nude pics leaked. And of course, Miley Cyrus.

It is clear that, somewhere along the way, the Disney Studios fell into the hands of greedy executives instead of passionate artists that gave us the classics. It appears that, after Mulan, Disney entered a dark period.

 VERY dark

The success of Pixar overtook the success of Disney’s traditionally animated features. What the Disney Animation Studios did not realize at the time was that Pixar’s success was not exclusive to its amazing CGI animation but with effective storytelling. What Pixar was really doing was use the technology they have to propel a story forward. The technology then becomes an efficient vehicle for a story, no matter how outlandish the concept. By the time The Incredibles became a smash hit and Treasure Planet became a huge flop, Disney decided to forgo traditional animation and dabble in CGI. They gave us Chicken Little.

It was clear at this point that the creative team at Disney had become so preoccupied with releasing several mediocre preteen-targeted TV movies and series that they had lost touch of what Disney was really about. It’s not about sugarcoated slogans about dreams and magic and wishing stars; it’s about preserving the purity in the human spirit. It’s this little spark of purity that yearns for justice and virtue—the same one that celebrates the triumph of good over evil. Isn’t that exactly what Disney succeeded with its most memorable classics? Isn’t that what Pixar achieved with precision in almost all of their works? No, Disney decided it was purely the CGI that made The Incredibles work while Treasure Planet flopped.

A dear friend of mine believes that this decline in quality is related to the power struggle between Nickelodeon and Disney. Nickelodeon rose to power because of their intoxicating slogan (“The TV channel FOR KIDS!”) and highly stimulating programs that conform to this slogan. While the Nickelodeon programs in the 90s were entertaining and memorable, many of them did not quite have the same lasting impact of the same intensity as Disney.

However, most of these programs tended to be more reflective of contemporary society rather than an illustration of idealism. Troublemakers who rebelled against authority are made heroes while the disciplined, straight-laced kids who put them in line are villains. (Recess and Even Stevens, anyone?) While these programs promoted independence and free thinking, most of them portrayed tenets of child culture that its audience will eventually grow out of and that are ultimately of little use.

However, the high ratings that these programs earned for Nickelodeon propelled Disney to launch the Disney Channel with its own set of animated series and live-action sitcoms for pubescent audiences. The Disney Channel ended up becoming highly successful, but as with any television network, there is a dark side. Television networks thrive on profit; whatever earns more profit is milked for all it’s worth. Creative teams work fast and have to compromise their vision in favor of whatever can be more profitable.

By the year 2000, the awkward, boy-crazy, and shallow but otherwise beautiful bullied heroines of several high school comedy series became the forerunners of Disney for their appeal to girls aged 12 to 15. This wouldn’t have been so bad if this were not a great plunge in quality compared to the classic Disney movies only as recently as at least five years prior.

The appeal of beautiful and “quirky” heroines leaked onto the quality of movies by the turn of the millennium. The Princess Diaries set the trend of teen drama formulas for the several Disney movies to follow. Amelia Mignotte Thermopolis Renaldi, nicknamed Mia, was awkward and unconventional in appearance. She suffers from stage fright and is viciously bullied for it by a posse of beautiful cheerleaders. Never mind that Mia has no predominant character traits to make her admirable or unique or a role model; we’re supposed to identify with her because we feel sorry for her. She is a caricature rather than a whole person with a set of complexes and good qualities and bad qualities. Every other character is a caricature; the entire movie is a cartoon filmed in live action. The next several Disney Channel Original Movies that followed applied the same formula or at least the most hackneyed teen drama tropes ever.

While I have previously defended the unrealistic narratives of Disney Classics, I criticize the Disney Channel Original Movies for similar reasons. As these movies are set in the real world, I think it should follow that the stories are realistic or at least believable. Instead, they are over-the-top with the idealism.

After working on mediocre productions for too long, by the time Disney was ready to revive the Disney Renaissance, they were overwhelmed at the public scrutiny they were facing and were anxious to produce a movie that can please their audience the same way the classics did. Launching the Disney Princess franchise was clearly a ploy to remind audiences what Disney was all about. I think they failed in that area. By emphasizing all things girly about the classic Disney Princesses even with more tomboyish traits like Pocahontas and Mulan, the Disney Princess franchise ended up garnering even more criticism against Disney.

In response, Disney came up with a series of new princesses that are supposedly different from their predecessors. The first attempt is a successful albeit unpopular one.

Kida: Heiress to the Lost Empire

In a story that explores the themes of colonial disputes, politics, and integrity over greed, Princess Kidagakash is a character as complex as the plot of Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Like Pocahontas and Esmeralda, Kida is dedicated to setting right what was once wrong. She is diplomatic toward the unexpected explorers from the outside world and actively works with Milo Thatch to seeking solutions for reviving her people’s lost culture.

Independently from the hero Milo Thatch, Kida has her own story arc in which her pragmatic idealism duels with her father’s reluctance to seek help when they can get it. Following the sequence that unwittingly turns her into a damsel in distress, Milo has to fight greed and corruption to restore the culture and integrity of Atlantis. She is the first Disney Princess to become Queen.

Atlantis is a strong movie by itself. It has a strong original concept that worked magnificently. There is no tale for it to derive from, so Atlantis only has the steampunk genre and a handful of scholarly documents to build a story with. This strategy produced a marvelous result of a movie.

As much as I enjoyed it, Atlantis: The Lost Empire has its small fault. I felt it didn’t have as much heart as Pocahontas or The Hunchback of Notre Dame even if they all had roughly the same level of Dark And Edgy. Then, I remember the featurettes: “Less songs, more explosions,” the filmmakers said. And I asked, “What’s wrong with songs?” While I agree that Atlantis: The Lost Empire was not the kind of movie that needs the standard musical format, I sensed the cynicism in the filmmakers’ motto while making the movie. I sensed it leaking into the movie, affecting much of the atmosphere despite the inherently idealistic themes of the movie.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire became a cult favorite despite its relatively small earnings and lukewarm reception from film critics. This was apparently enough to encourage Disney to keep working on movies of the similar tradition. A free-spirited princess with combat skills, apparently, as a good role model for young girls who were born in the world of political correctness.

Hence, the studio reanimated the Disney Princess franchise with a new batch of princesses they thought were breaking the mould. They emphasized that “These princesses are DIFFERENT; they don’t care how they look; they don’t care about getting boys; they KICK ASS!” Now that’s impressive and ambitious and all, but the previous Disney Princesses were as distinctive and spunky as these new ones. Anybody who has actually watched the Disney Classics knows what I am talking about.

Princess Merida: Brave Princess of Dun Broch

By the time Disney and Pixar introduced Brave, it was very clear that Disney has lost its way. Leading the movie was the image of a girl with shockingly vivid and unruly fiery hair, turquoise eyes, and emerald green dress. Her most notable feature was her bow and arrow. The people cheered. The studio promoted her as “different” because she is a fighter. I got very worried.

While Brave turned out to be an effective and powerful story about a mother and her daughter learning from each other, this doesn’t take away the fact that the marketing for the movie was packed with lies. The advertisements told the cynical and disillusioned audience that Merida is “not like the other princesses.” Merida holds a deadly weapon and refuses to adhere to the gender roles expected of her.

On the contrary, Princess Merida isn’t all that different. Merida is as tomboyish as Mulan, as rebellious as Jasmine, and as cocky and selfish as Ariel. The only difference is that she holds her signature weapon and uses it with finesse.

Besides, who were these “other princesses” that the marketing was referring to? Then it occurred to me: the studio has compressed and distorted all the previous Disney Princesses into this one thing for people to point and laugh at, like Giselle from Enchanted. The way I see it, it’s like the shallow and girly traits that the Disney Princess franchise highlighted were now exaggerated and somehow held as an ugly truth that needs to be corrected.

Tiana: Not a Frog Princess

After the success of Enchanted, Disney finally resumed adaptation of beloved fairy tales. However, due to commercial trends in the movie industry, it appears that Disney is once again pressured to conform with its competitors—just like what happened in the Disney Channel as mentioned earlier. The “dark reimagining” of fairy tales became popular as the “vampire craze” dwindled when The Twilight Saga came close to its ending. This trend in fairy tale retellings gave us Snow White and the Huntsman, Jack the Giant Slayer, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, and to a lesser extent, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which was essentially a sequel to the 1951 animated classic.

What do these “dark fairy tale retellings” have in common? If Disney’s brand of fairy tale retelling is capturing the spirit of the tale and building a story over it with a stable setting and characters, “dark” retellings involves coming up with a ludicrous action fantasy concept and then forcing familiar fairy tale elements into it. For the aforementioned retellings, it involved the hero or heroine somehow being able to participate in a battle and use weapons that would otherwise take decades of training to master in real life. These retellings are typically marketed as “edgy” and “gothic”—apparently, an opportunity to ridicule Disney for altering horrific European folk tales into pastel-colored Romantic illustrations.

A variant of this eventually happened to The Princess and the Frog.

Due to its featuring the first black Disney Princess, The Princess and the Frog got into a lot of controversy before it even came out. The chamber maid named Maddie became a waitress named Tiana. Her character design was compromised to appease all possible detractors. Worst of all, The Frog Prince became The Princess and the Frog.

The Frog Prince is about a young princess becoming friends with a frog who keeps asking her to kiss him. She is unaware that the frog is really a prince who was cursed into his amphibian form. He needs the kiss of a princess to become human again. Because of the unfortunate implications of this adaptation if all the characters are made black, Disney had to change a lot of things. They eventually had to come up with an entirely different story.

To be fair, The Princess and the Frog is good, but it’s not great because it’s not The Frog Prince. It’s about the characters reading The Frog Prince and using the magical elements of the fairy tale to break the frog curse.

In The Princess and the Frog, we have a black 1920s New Orleans waitress who works day and night to make her dreams come true. (See what they did there?) Okay, that’s refreshing and realistic. But oh, what have we here? Her best friend Charlotte LaBeoff is the comic relief because the wants to marry a prince because of fairy tales and wishing stars. What does Lottie look like? She is white, blonde, blue eyed, and loves pink ball gowns—an intentional caricature of the Classic Disney Princesses. At one point, Lottie even says, “Did you see the way [Prince Naveen] danced with me? A marriage proposal can’t be far behind!” The audience laughs.

Tiana, on the other hand, has lived a hard life so far and has become so disillusioned that she no longer believes in fairy tales and wishing stars. The audience is supposed to follow her example. Even if Tiana is ultimately proven wrong in the end, the damage is done: The Princess and the Frog told us that your dreams can come true only if you work toward it, not because of magic. While there is no arguing that this is true, I feel that this is too cynical for Disney. Besides, the movies that The Princess and the Frog makes fun of weren't meant to be realistic in the first place.

Rapunzel: Tangled Up with Flynn

I initially avoided Tangled at all costs because I was very much disappointed when I first saw the trailers. Rapunzel was my favorite fairy tale growing up because I identified with the heroine being all cooped up in an isolated tower like the Lady of Shalott.


I felt drawn to her desperation for human companionship that she let the traveling prince to keep visiting her. I loved the thrilling climax of the tale where the witch discovers the prince; cuts Rapunzel’s hair; and uses her hair to trick the prince into killing himself. (He doesn’t die, but some versions involve the prince going blind in the process.) I loved this story, and I loved every version of it except the Barbie adaptation. So you can imagine my disappointment when I first saw the Tangled trailers: Why should I care about this Flynn guy?

Nobody seems to have anything bad to say about the movie, so I finally went ahead and watched it. The experience was exactly how I expected it: like The Princess and the Frog, Tangled is good but not great. While it is a good movie on its own, it’s not exactly the same fairy tale I loved as a child. The animation was great; the voice actors were great; and the story was good. I liked how Rapunzel was exactly how I imagined she would be; I loved the dynamic between her and her “Mother” Gothel.

However, I find myself immune to Flynn Rider's charm. As somebody who lives in the third world where thievery of various kinds is rampant, I see absolutely no appeal in a thief who can go as far as betraying accomplices for his own gain. Even when we learn of his dark and tragic past to apparently to convince us she’s not a bad guy after all, he’s still a criminal in my eyes. Even then, I saw the “not-really-a-bad-guy” trick from a mile away.

The additional details in the story made Tangled more interesting and intelligent. While I think it was clever to combine Rapunzel with a totally different fairy tale called The Woman with Hair of Gold, a lot of this took away what I loved about the original fairy tale in the first place. While the Rapunzel I loved is portrayed perfectly in the first act, it abruptly disappears for the rest of the movie. Call me a purist, but I’m not interested in seeing a physically fighting Rapunzel wielding a frying pan as a weapon. I think Disney can do better than to force their demure heroines into Katniss Everdeens.

Anna and Elsa: Heroines in Their Own Right

Don’t get me wrong; I love Frozen. I think this movie inspired from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is dazzling, exquisite, and intelligent. The music was great; the characters were great; the story was great. I think it was a smart move to have two princesses and make their sisterly love the focal point of the narrative.

I love how Elsa becomes Queen simply because she is the heiress to the throne rather than being required to marry another royal to become one. I love how this isn’t a big deal, indicating that she can make a competent monarch.

I also love the touch of realism. The Kingdom of Arendelle is “in trade business” convenient for its location in a Norwegian fjord. The castle houses many servants that the royal family treats well. The royal family has a political territory to look after. This isn’t totally a glamorized fantasy world where princesses canoodle with their princes all day; the royals have respective responsibilities.

Most of all, I love how the plot thickens with each act.

That being said, like every other Disney hit, it is not without fault.

Why the need for a subplot involving the protagonist getting engaged to someone she just met à la Cinderella and then making a punch line out of it? We already did this is Enchanted. Yeah, that was funny, and we get it now. If this is a love story between sisters, why couldn’t we have just focused exclusively on the sisters? I think we would have gotten the message even without the contrast of infatuation to drive the point.

A Message for Disney

Disney, cynicism is everybody else’s job. Your job is to lift up our spirits by telling us that there is something good in this world and we don’t have to live in fear all the time. It is not your place to make a punch line out of fairy tales and wishing stars. Next time you adapt a fairy tale, just adapt a fairy tale. You used to be good at it.

In Defense of the Princesses (Part 1)

In recent years, the Classic Disney Princesses have gotten flak from modern/contemporary/present-day feminist audiences for being poor role models for their target audience. The three most memorable Disney Princesses Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty (or Princess Aurora/Briar Rose, whatever you prefer to call her) are passive and useless at best and, at worst, exactly what feminists fight against. They represent the very problems that feminists in the 70s struggled so hard to surpass: specifically, being valued for nothing more than their beauty and/or becoming passive homemakers who get no respect for their hard work.

The more recent Princesses Jasmine, Belle, and Ariel are better received by their modern audiences, but the feminists of their time invariably notice very non-feminist qualities about them: for an affluent and loved daughter, Princess Jasmine rejects responsibility and falls in love with a guy who lies to her; Belle supposedly "craves adventure in that great, wide somewhere" but still becomes somebody's "little wife" in the end; Ariel “gives up her perfect life for a vagina and a man she doesn't even know.” (quoted from Nostalgia Chick)

The latter years of the 1990s produced movies of arguably lower quality but spawned significantly stronger female characters. In the most recent Disney Princess lineup, these include Pocahontas and Mulan. Even when you consider the nearly laughable quality of the movies they come from, they are undoubtedly better role models than their predecessors. But they receive significantly less exposure than their predecessors. Another legitimate Princess, Kida from Atlantis: The Lost Empire, is not even included in the lineup. What does this say about contemporary media making an impact on today's little girls?

Let me just put on the record that I am not inclined to call myself a feminist. I believe in the rights of women. However, the values women hold at certain points in history are not the same as those we have now. In the defense of the six central members of the Disney Princess franchise, they just didn't have everything figured out yet.

I realize that the Disney Princess franchise is merely a giant advertisement to encourage younger families to watch these classic Disney movies that people have loved for generations. However, with the rise of feminism in the 70s and overall cynicism as popularized by grunge and Daria in the 90s that carried over to sarcastic Internet comedy in the 2000s, the Disney Princess franchise became an appropriate target for Internet critics and feminists. Disney Princesses are characterized as beautiful female leads in a movie where the male hero is usually more complex characters than their respective partners. Despite their distinctive and strong personalities, notable Disney Princesses are ultimately the male hero’s prize for a conflict effectively resolved with violence and celebrated with a kiss.

While this criticism is a legitimate concern as the powerful influence of these movies can dangerously warp any child’s perception of what love is before she can experience it, a lot of detractors forget that classic Disney movies fall under the category of fantasy. It is entirely wish-fulfillment to be beautiful and be desirable for nothing else. It is also wish-fulfillment to meet a perfect match and never have to worry about developing pet peeves over your partner’s idiosyncrasies. Quite frankly, I think there’s nothing wrong with that. However, I don’t think the movies or the company behind them should be made accountable for a child’s disjointed perception about “true love.” The writers and animators behind these movies were clearly making do with the time and resources they have based on the attitudes and values that their milieu holds at the time these movies were created. As a fiction writer myself, I think it’s not fair to, for example, blame me for a child’s behavior later in life because my works featured literary tropes that would not have the same outcomes in real life. Parents, guardians, and more sensible peers are responsible in teaching children how to distinguish fantasy from reality. As Alice in Wonderland teaches us, fantasy does not belong in the realm of reality, and vice-versa.

While I agree that even fantastic tales have to have some measure of realism (i.e. believability), I believe it is unfair to demand that fairy tales conform to the attitudes and values of its modern readers. I believe that fairy tales, especially those as presented by the Walt Disney Studios, were envisioned according to the attitudes and values of the filmmakers and screenwriters at the time they were created. Therefore, I think they have to be respected for what they eventually became.

Princess Aurora: Shallow Love Interest or Broken Bird?

Among all the Disney Princesses, Princess Aurora, nicknamed Briar Rose by her fairy godmothers, get the strongest criticism for being nothing more than a plot device rather than a proper protagonist who actively influences the plot with her actions and decisions. In the process, the Three Good Fairies become the actual heroines of Sleeping Beauty, with Prince Philip as an effective avatar of St. George as he battles Maleficent as the Dragon who guards the Princess at the tower.

It’s quite easy to criticize Princess Aurora for these reasons. In addition, her most valuable assets are her Gift of Beauty and Gift of Song, both bestowed upon her by two of the three fairies. The narrative makes it seem that Briar Rose has absolutely no valuable character traits to speak of. (My sisters and I theorize that the third fairy Merryweather was going to give Aurora the Gift of Wisdom/Knowledge, but I digress.) However, as the story flashes forward to Aurora’s sixteenth birthday, we find that she turns out to be charming and cordial with a passionate streak worthy of any girl her age.

I admit it is difficult to determine specific personality traits with a few lines and one song, but based on the classic structure of fairy tales, the character design can speak a lot about what the character is like. Her beauty and blonde hair indicate a kind heart and innocent nature. Her deep purple eyes (colored black when zoomed out) indicate having rare qualities which, unfortunately, we never actually see up close. However, we do see some of these qualities during her screen time.

In her first song, “I Wonder,” Briar Rose sings of her desire to find true love. Critics love to call Aurora out for this, too, because she seems like she is a shallow girl who cares of nothing but dating someone. But let’s put this into perspective: Aurora has lived all sixteen years of her life in a secluded cottage in a thick evergreen forest with no social life except with three overprotective old ladies she isn’t even related to. She is obviously lonely—perhaps even depressed. At one point, she laments, “They never want me to meet anyone.” I don’t see anything wrong with a teenage girl craving romantic attention from a boy. It’s not only normal; it’s healthy. Like literally every other human being, fictional or otherwise, she has self-preservation instincts that can be followed by finding a mate to, potentially, have a family with.

However, having literally no prior experience with the opposite sex, she wouldn’t have any idea what is proper or not. She was understandably startled when Prince Philip showed up and turned her aria into a duet. However, she was also as understandably naïve and hungry for social contact that it takes only seconds for Prince Philip to attract her enough to waltz with him at the riverside and later invite him to dinner that same night. I know this isn’t something supposedly virtuous girls would do, but Aurora obviously doesn’t know that.

Besides, the narrative has to move forward at this point, so the filmmakers have to make do with the limited time they are allowed to extend the movie. In fairness to the filmmakers, they constructed this adaptation of Sleeping Beauty at the time when women were valued for their beauty and homemaking skills more than anything. It was hardly anyone’s fault that Aurora was the way she is; she and the filmmakers who came up with her screen portrayal are all just products of their milieu.

Let us also not forget that when the fairies finally tell her the truth about her past, she willingly but sadly accepts that she has to return to her father’s kingdom and never see the handsome young man with the red cloak again. I think this goes without saying that she is mature for her age and realizes that some things are worth sacrificing.

Cinderella: Mindless Daydreamer or Enduring Martyr?

Cinderella has the story that everyone recognizes the most: when a girl’s wealthy father marries a lady with two daughters of her own, the stepmother reveals her wickedness when the father dies and promptly turns the girl into a slave in her own home. This setup is an easy cause for much angst; however, Cinderella, like Aurora before her, remains cheerful and kindhearted as indicated by her blonde hair, blue eyes, and general beauty. Cinderella’s attitude toward her situation is cause for both praise and criticism. On one hand, she is a role model for not letting hardships get in the way of being the best person she can be. On the other hand, she lets her stepmother and stepsisters get away with abusing her and does nothing to better her situation, like perhaps run away.

It is important to remember that until the women’s rights movement beginning as recently as the 70s, women had very few career options. Professions traditionally regarded as “feminine” like nursing or teaching weren’t available to women in Cinderella’s time either because it required extensive education, which weren’t intended for women either. Women in Cinderella’s time were groomed to become wives and mothers and nothing more; they were conditioned to behave accordingly. Having been born a daughter of an affluent father and later brought up a slave to a wicked widowed stepmother, Cinderella has literally nowhere to go. If Cinderella runs away, her only option is to become a prostitute; she is obviously too proud and respectable for that kind of humiliation.

Her fantastically gentle attitude is another thing.

Her mantra is: “Someday, my dreams will come true.” After several viewings of the movie, it occurs to me that this is more of wishful thinking than any real attainable goal. Knowing that she would rather stay in her father’s house where she has food, clothing, and shelter, Cinderella has no choice but to make the best out of her horrible situation. What dreams does Cinderella actually have, we never really know. After quite a few viewings, I determine that Cinderella may or may not have any actual dreams to speak of. She only tells herself those words to make her feel better; otherwise, she will not be able to function and end up displeasing her already cruel stepmother.

Cinderella has the thankless job of attending to her stepmother and stepsisters’ every need in addition in keeping their enormous house spick and span. She does this all by herself, and each mistake leads to additional housework as punishment. If it weren’t for her attitude, she would have snapped a long time ago.

Considering this exceedingly horrible life, despite Cinderella’s attitude, she is actually quite tired of it. No wonder she broke down when her stepsisters ultimately prevented her from having exactly one night to have a good time.

Her “falling in love” with the Prince is a tricky issue to tackle. Is she starved for male affection like Aurora? Perhaps. Is it daddy issues? Maybe. There is realistically no excuse to declare she “loves” the Prince while they have only danced; and vice-versa. However, we can assume that they are genuinely attracted to one another, and the Prince took the glass slipper as an opportunity to get to know her. We are not given details of their courtship nor the time between when Cinderella fitted the glass slipper and when she married the Prince. However, the royal decree of fitting the glass slipper to every eligible maiden who attended the ball involves taking the perfect fit to be the Prince’s bride. I can forgive it because of time restrictions. As I have said before: this is fantasy. It does not have to be completely realistic.

Ariel: Just a Spoiled Teenager

Ariel’s character is as terrible as her voice is wonderful. The fiery redhead seventh and youngest daughter of King Triton is challenging to bring up. She is selfish and stubborn and her first appearance in the movie involved her completely neglecting a very important royal event. When her father aptly scolds her for this, she argues that “I am sixteen years old! I’m not a child!” She must think it must be incredibly mature of her to disregard the humiliation she just brought to her father and his Royal Court Composer. She apparently cannot grasp the concept that, while humans are truly fascinating creatures, they destroy as efficiently as they can create. Take note that Prince Eric’s ship is destroyed in the storm because it carried explosives, which are also invented by humans.

She develops a crush on Prince Eric and immediately decides: “Daddy, I love him!”

I honestly cannot defend this one. However, I can explain that the weakest point of any teenager’s personality is that they tend to be egocentric. Every one of us who have gone through this phase has experienced feeling that a scolding parent is a domineering authority figure with no regard for your feelings; it is only when we’re older that we learn that our parents are flawed human beings who are concerned for our well-being and we cannot grasp this fact fully.

Ariel’s behavior makes sense. Given her age and personality, she typically has poor capacity to see reason and instead acts on her feelings. This is exactly the same reason teen pregnancy rates remain high all over the world. How the team behind the movie presented this as raw, true love baffles me.

Belle: Something More

If you ask anyone who is their favorite Disney Princess, forward-thinking girls would choose Belle from Beauty and the Beast above everyone else. While she is the most beautiful girl in her village, she doesn’t care much about this fact and prefers reading. She knows that the people of her time disapprove of this behavior, but she doesn’t care either. She puts greater value in knowledge and wisdom than outer beauty, and it is something to admire. The courage she showed when offering herself to take her father’s place in the Beast’s prison is even more admirable.

However, critics of Beauty and the Beast are quick to point out that the main plot involved a glorified example of Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which a kidnapping victim develops feelings of compassion and protectiveness for her captors, going as far as defending him from the people seeking to punish him for his cruelty. Stockholm syndrome can develop when the kidnapper appeases his victim with token acts of kindness, which the Beast does display toward the middle of the narrative.

While these are all valid observations, people who claim Stockholm syndrome neglect a few important details in the narrative of Beauty and the Beast.

Belle is understandably scared and distrustful of the Beast, considering what he did to her beloved father. The Beast, on the other hand, has never been a nice guy entirely because he grew up incredibly spoiled and apparently never taught how to be considerate of others’ feelings and needs. However, when he effectively drove her away when he scared her off the West Wing, the Beast develops remorse over what he did and promptly goes out to rescue Belle from forest wolves. He didn’t do this to manipulate Belle to stay with him; he did it because he knew what scaring her off was wrong and he was sorry.

In a way, the Beast is nothing more than a spoiled brat. He uses his temper to get his way. He scares people into doing his bidding. He does exactly this when he scared Belle off the West Wing; but he realizes he went too far and decided to make amends. While he still fell back into his manipulative ways immediately afterwards when he growled at Belle while she is trying to clean his wounds, Belle puts her foot down: “You should learn to control your temper!”

This pivotal moment set the motion for personal conversion in the Beast. “I want to do something for her,” he confides in Cogsworth and Lumiere. As with his earlier rescuing of Belle from the wolves, the Beast’s subsequent series of kind deeds for her are genuine acts of kindness that his human heart is designed to make him do. In real life, when a kidnapper does the same, he is likely manipulating his victim to prevent her from running away. A kidnapper may also evoke sympathy from his victim, which the Beast clearly doesn’t. He opens his library, takes her to walks, and reads books with her to make her happy, not for his own benefit.

Belle, having always felt out of sync with everyone where she came from, starts to feel more and more comfortable with the Beast when he displays gentleness and kindness that the men in her village didn’t quite show to her. Her love for books doesn’t repel him; he encourages it. He didn’t open his library so she would throw herself in his arms; he did it because he knows it makes her happy. In return, she respects him for it.

Stockholm syndrome victims tend to feel they owe their attackers something in return for “being kind” to them. As with Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera, Christine is torn between leaving the Phantom forever and staying with him as his only companion because she feels sorry for him. Belle, on the other hand, is unafraid to admit to the Beast that she misses her father; she is overjoyed when he finally frees her and displays no hesitation in leaving.

This doesn’t quite seem like Stockholm syndrome to me.

Another issue that people discuss about Belle is that she is a bit of a hypocrite. She rejects Gaston as a suitor, implying that she isn’t interested in romantic attachments in the first place. Her angry huffing following shortly after Gaston’s horrifying marriage proposal also implies Belle is offended at the thought of being nothing more than somebody’s wife. While this sends an empowering message to young girls, the happy ending in which she becomes somebody’s “little wife” anyway makes it appear she didn’t really accomplish her goal of “adventure in the great wide somewhere” and she’s okay with that.

On the contrary, I think she already had her adventure with everything that happened in the castle. She encountered the Beast and her firmness compelled him to be gentle. She got to experience a world where magic was real. In the process, she experienced the love of a man who respected her as a person rather than the man who wanted her as a baby-making sex trophy.

Jasmine: "I am not a prize to be won!"

Princess Jasmine was raised by her single dad the Sultan of Agrabah, who invites several suitors to the palace, so Jasmine could be married by the time she is nineteen years old. “I just want you to be taken care of,” the Sultan says sadly in the introductory sequence. Unfortunately for the Sultan, Jasmine has a mind of her own. She rejects every suitor (and there were many of them) and craves for the outside world. “I’ve never been outside the palace walls. I don’t even have any real friends,” she says. This is all very sad information, and I am absolutely not surprised that Jasmine tried to run away.

She catches the eye of the street rat Aladdin, and the feeling was mutual. When her plan was abruptly thwarted as it was already going so well, the story officially begins. Aladdin spends the rest of the story trying to win Jasmine’s heart, disguised as Prince Ali Ababwa. What follows is a very familiar fairy tale narrative structure in which the male hero (Aladdin) encounters a set of wacky and sometimes death-defying adventures with a help from his [magical] friends to win the girl. At this point, Jasmine goes from three-dimensional deuteragonist to one-dimensional prize trophy existing solely for Aladdin to acquire—or does she?

I agree that Jasmine’s role was limited and her roundness as a character was reduced to a few scenes, but I don’t think that makes her a “poor role model.” Critics claim that her romance with Aladdin was based on a great big lie. I disagree because Jasmine knew all along; in fact, she was genuinely upset when Aladdin lets the truth slip because he took her for a fool and she wasn’t. Jasmine can see through him and she loves him for his effort in trying to win her heart. What was really happening was that she was in love with him the whole time. She loved him for his kindness, his intelligence, and his honesty. She valued the third one so much she had to confront him for having to lie to her just to woo her. She knew he never had to.

Mulan: The Most Rare and Beautiful of All

Mulan is set apart from previous Disney Princesses with the fact that she isn’t actually a princess and that Mulan leads this epic feature classic as an action heroine rather than a love interest of a more complex male hero. Fa Mulan starts out as a teenage girl who fails the matchmaker’s inspection because of her lack of poise and sophistication, indicating she was meant for a non-traditional life path. Unlike Jasmine or Bella, Mulan isn’t openly rebellious of the society that expects her only to be some guy’s baby-making machine. In fact, she accepts the role, indicating that she has the capacity for responsibility and self-sacrifice. These qualities take full force when Mulan wears her father’s armor and sword and takes his place in the army. The rest of the story revolves around Mulan using brains as much as brawn to survive training and later the war. Mulan gains the respect of her comrades so much that they were willing to protect her even after she was revealed to be a woman. This successfully teaches girls that there are some things more important than snagging a boyfriend. This includes earning a few boy-friends who respect you as a person with integrity as much as a skillful coworker.

But oh, what is this? Mulan falls in love with the hunky Captain Li Shang? She invites him to dinner with her family in the end? What happened to rejecting arranged marriage? Unacceptable!

The complaint about Mulan having a love interest is shallow and minor, but it comes up with almost every Internet discussion about Disney’s Mulan so I have to address it. While fans of the movie generally do not agree with this claim, it is a particularly strong one.

Many feminists seem to equate feminism with rejecting all roles and stereotypes typically associated with women. These roles include being one half of a heterosexual relationship, so feminists tend to gravitate toward heroines who do not have a love interest—hence, the appeal of Merida and Elsa from Brave and Frozen respectively (more of that in the next blog). I agree that it is refreshing to see a heroine that is not bound to any love interest because it means she can hold her own as a whole person. However, I don’t see anything wrong with having a love interest per se.

In Mulan’s case, she has proven her worth to the entire Chinese Empire; how can Shang not resist extending his affections for the girl who has had a crush on him for some time now? Given Disney’s reward system when it comes to happy endings, it only makes sense that Mulan gets her guy on top of the respect and reverence of the entire nation.

Happily Ever After

The Disney Princesses have been part of our lives since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. These iconic Disney Classics were adapted with the same heart and whimsy as we have read them from storybooks. The Walt Disney Studios were clearly capturing the storybook elements as they present these tales to us with vibrant colors, sweet music, and grand scale storytelling. Before you start complaining about these movies or their characters not being realistic enough, maybe you should start to think: perhaps they weren’t meant to be realistic in the first place. Otherwise, they may actually be immensely realistic—just not in the way you expect them to be.