From Rugrats to The Simpsons, at some point in our lives we’ve devoted time to watching cartoons. Whether you have been depriving your inner child of animation for who-knows-how long or are an active Disney/Nickelodeon/comic strip-phile like I am, this is an inside look into something you may not know about animation. Enjoy this free issue of the Toon Times.
It began with the high-pitched trills of "Someday My Prince Will Come" and ended somewhere around the rich melody of "Once Upon a Dream." The age of the antiquated animated princess lasted a few decades, but the revival of the Disney princess brought a new form of royalty – still feminine, but not so delicate.
In the nearly 75 years since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs made its debut at the Carthay Circle Theatre as the first full-length cel-animated feature in film history, the landscape of society and cinema changed dramatically, giving rise to a new form of princess. The “princess prototype” of the damsel in distress waiting for her prince to arrive on his white horse has, as a result, gone through several regenerations, culminating in a new form of an almost feminist royal persona.
"Someday my prince will come"
The 1930s through the '50s, which gave rise to three of Disney’s most well known princesses: Snow White, Cinderella and Aurora (of Sleeping Beauty), were a time of transition within the United States. The traditional notion of the woman’s role in society was constantly being challenged. As more women began to enter the workforce, single mothers (though still considered social pariahs in some ways) began to raise their children in full-view of their peers and create a new base for feminism.
However, Disney was barely a reflection of this newfound strength in the female gender. Snow White is in so many ways a symbol of helplessness in a male-dominated story. As the Evil Queen (read: her stepmother) plots to murder her, Snow White escapes to the forest and encounters a group of dwarves who take her in. Playing the perennial housewife, she cleans up their man-cave while wearing heels and whistling a cheerful tune, perpetuating a false notion of how lovely housework is.
Sitting down to sing, Snow White recounts the tale of her encounter with the prince of her dreams, whom she will wait for so that he can take her away to his castle. This, as well as her other “dreaming” song, "I’m Wishing," clarifies her intentions within the story – to wait until a man can rescue her from a state of constant waiting.
Similarly, Cinderella and Aurora have their own songs alluding to the influence of men, specifically princes, in their respective stories. Cinderella sings “so this is love, so this is what makes life divine.” This speaks to not only her inability to escape her situation herself, but even more to the power the prince has in freeing her from the grasp of her evil stepmother and stepsisters. Aurora, while not glamorizing the notion of love being the only option in “Once Upon a Dream,” does talk of her prince as if he is an inevitability. Each of these heroines maintain a central theme of romance's necessity and the certainty of finding a prince to save them.
Over time, though, the prince would become a secondary concern for the next generation of princesses.
"To be free"
In 1989, Disney Animation's pioneers ushered in a second generation of Disney princesses with Ariel in The Little Mermaid. This new film mimicked the arrival of Snow White to a predominantly animal-filled animation industry, but also set itself apart from its predecessors. While Ariel does dream of being with Prince Eric on land, a great portion of her song is dedicated to the notion of escaping the entanglements of her own undersea royalty. She longs for adventure and exploration, of having feet instead of fins.
Her Princess equivalents, from Belle (of Beauty and the Beast) to Jasmine (of Aladdin) to Pocahontas, possess even more developed desires. None of these princesses dream of finding a prince to sweep them off their feet and remove them from their mundane lives.
Belle, in "Belle (Reprise)," scoffs at the lack of charm in her suitor, Gaston, and instead dreams of “adventure in the great wide somewhere.” She makes her dreams come true on her own rather than waiting for a prince to arrive at her doorstep. Jasmine, a princess with no desire to find a prince among all the “egotistical braggarts,” sings "To Be Free" – not in the film, but in the stage adaptation of Aladdin – in which she yearns “to climb a tree and ponder” or to be “free to wander.” Pocahontas’ dreaming song, alternatively, is about her standing at a crossroad, deciding whether to “choose the smoothest course,” or to pursue her dreams “just around the riverbend."
These princesses, while they each have a prince (in Pocahontas' case, a captain) who enlightens them to the world they’ve always wanted to know – Ariel to the world above, Belle to something greater than the "provincial life," Jasmine to an ungilded existence and Pocahontas to the passionate discourse of the heart – are mainly concerned with something that is a quintessentially male prospect of the royal fantasy – adventure.
They – the princesses of the '80s and '90s – were ushered into existence under a society built on the relative equality of men and women. Unlike the 1930s and '50s, in which the female station was still traveling a blurred line between strength and passivity, the women of these later decades were not nearly as marred by the expectations of society.
"I’ll make a man out of you"
After Pocahontas in 1995, power came to the princesses in new and unexpected ways. A new breed of “sort-of-princesses” came into being, including characters like Esmeralda (of The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Megara (of Hercules) and Mulan. These were women who were not only working-class heroines, but also blatantly feminist characters who rejected the norms of class and sexuality. In a scene opposite Frollo, justice minister and Quasimodo’s master, Esmeralda rips away from him when he inappropriately strokes her neck, aware of his “unholy thoughts." Betraying Frollo and his peers’ notion of “gypsy vermin,” she is a character with moral conviction.
Megara, not a princess, but a heroine in the same way as Esmeralda, mocks the antiquated notion of the “damsel in distress” as part of a ruse organized by Hades to attract Hercules into battle with the centaur Nessus. Sarcasm guides her character throughout the story, despite a tortured past.
An obvious example, Mulan stretches gender expectations in crossing boundaries by cross-dressing to keep her father from engaging in war with the Huns. She, beyond all other female characters, has the bravery that decades earlier might only be prescribed to her male counterparts.
The heroines of these films, though not princesses in the traditional sense, seem to be Disney’s answer to the archaic notion that they perpetuated until 1959 with Sleeping Beauty.
Esmeralda, Megara and Mulan are a respectful reflection on women that earlier Disney films never put much thought into inciting and preserve the idea that a girl can be a beautiful female lead without being a shallow damsel searching for her knight in shining armor.
"See the light"
Even more recently, princesses have re-entered the scene as contributors to this new feminist perspective within Disney film. Tiana (of The Princess and the Frog) and Rapunzel (of Tangled) have proven that even within the princess prototype, strength of character can prevail.
For Rapunzel, the ultimate goal of finding a husband falls nowhere within her line of sight. In her dreaming song, "When Will My Life Begin?," she sings of a life outside of the confines of her tower, outside where the "floating lanterns gleam." Rapunzel is no damsel waiting for someone to come along and rescue her from the monotony of daily life. After all, she has always had the hair which she needs to remove herself safely from her tower, she just needs to have the right opportunity and the gall to use it.
Tiana's raison d'être, different yet strong-willed like Rapunzel's (if not moreso), is to open a restaurant both to pursue her dreams and to honor her daddy who told her "fairytales can come true." "Almost There" even features the lyric, "look out boys, I'm coming through," that attests to Tiana's unwillingness to be hindered by her gender. In contrast to princesses like Aurora or Snow White, after Tiana's first chance encounter with her male counterpart, Naveen, she is filled with distaste for the man. She is not swept off her feet as the typical princess might be. Instead she's a rational, if almost cynical, alternative.
Whereas Snow White dressed in heels for housework to please the men and preserve the romanticized image of the female housewife, the princesses and heroines of later Disney strived to leave the house and let their feet take them to new places where self-betterment - with or without a man - was the ultimate objective.
Whether wearing sandals (Megara), flats (Ariel, Belle and Jasmine) or no shoes at all (Esmeralda and Rapunzel), the heroines of the Disney of late are a vision of how times have changed. Instead of dreaming of princes, the princesses of today look to greater goals.