In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

But The Animal Companions Are Doin’ It For Themselves

Lauren

disneyprincesses
(click to embiggen)

Via Sociological Images, where the wise commenters note that the three most recent princesses are excluded. Pocahontas, Mulan and Giselle — and upcoming princess Tiana — are redeemed despite their character assets (which are debatable once Disneyfied) in part because of their ever present animal companions?

I’ve watched my share of Disney movies, but I’ve never trained a critical eye on this animal companion business. From now on, whenever I need to do something really important, like ace a job interview or make a great impression at the next conference, I’m going to look to my housebears for some magical! cat! action!

The least they could do is dress me for the office Christmas party.

31 thoughts on But The Animal Companions Are Doin’ It For Themselves

  2. Hmm, I’ll be the first to say that the Disney movies are some of my most favorite movies ever, and I’m a feminist. I don’t think it’s wrong to like Disney movies, even though some are outdated in their attitudes towards women.

    I do think the Disney princesses are deeper than what’s shown in the picture above. For one, most of the real princesses (versus the airbrushed princesses in the franchise) are disinclined to go around all day swishing their dresses around. Belle for one, is never shown with a book!

    Okay, I’ll get started.

    Snow White- That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Snow White is hated by her jealous stepmother who almost succeeds in killing her. She is brought back to life by a kiss from her prince. However, she works to earn her keep, and has true, loyal friends in the Seven Dwarfs. They like her for who she is. She’s fun and happy and makes them happy.

    Cinderella- Also true. The Prince is beguiled by her beauty and mystery, and so seem, her animal companions. They make her dress for her and help her get out of the tower. She almost does nothing to further her cause and is passive. Not a big surprise, since this film was made in 1950. But, Cinderella also has her good points. She is kind and protective which helps her reap her reward. She is never fooled by anything knows exactly what is going on around her when the Steps lie to her. She also has a bit of bitchiness in her…see the sequence at the beginning of the movie where Lucifer (the cat) makes it seem as if Bruno (the dog) hurt him. Cinderella says one thing to each of them but her actions say something totally different. There’s also the part where she insults the sisters (the “beauty sleep” sequence). This is a girl who has her own mind underneath the mask of obedience she wears. i kind of wish we could have seen more of that, but the story of Cinderella is about the masking and demasking of a downtrodden girl, and the proof to all that she is GOOD and the ones who beat her down are EVIL, and how both gets their just rewards.

    Aurora- Not exactly true. Aurora was betrothed to Philip at the beginning of the movie, but Philip had no desire for her until he actually met her, and that was without the royal trappings. Aurora was a simple country girl then, with no idea that she was actually a princess. So, Philip was in love with her before she even had any sexuality (if sexuality=clothes and power). He was willing to defy his father and King Stefan to marry her. As for Maleficient…she was so far above the mere humans that they were simply her pawns that she manulipiated through her slow-burning anger. She was never jealous of Aurora’s beauty or talents. She was the personification of evil, anger and revenge.

    Ariel- Sort of true. Ariel had no lack of sexuality, but it was her voice that Eric fell in love with at the beginning, and herself later on. But that love was never complete until Ariel herself was whole. Yes, Ariel had to become a human to win Eric, but that’s more of a location thing. Eric could never come and be with her since he wasn’t aware of her existence as it was. She had to go to him. In that, she was much more aggressive than the other princesses. She knew what she wanted, and she went and got it.

    Belle- Very not true. Belle was beautiful, true, but she was very unaware of her beauty and preferred to develop her intellect. She loved to read, and when she met the Beast, Beast used that to help him get in her good graces by gifting her with his library. Belle also taught him to read. The reactions of Beast and Gaston (the villain) to Belle are very different. Both began at odds with Belle, who knew her own mind and wasn’t prepared to change it for anyone. Gaston wanted Belle because she was beautiful and he deserved her. Changing himself never entered his mind. That was all. Beast was tongue-tied when he saw how beautiful she was, but he had to work hard to get her to like him. They fought and argued and both had to change; Belle in understanding Beast, and Beast in getting rid of all his bad qualities. In this movie, a man had to change to be with the woman he loved, and I don’t mean his external appearance.

    Jasmine- Not really true. Jasmine did use her sexuality at certain parts of the movie, where she took Aladdin the Pompous Prince down several pegs and where she tricked Jafar in thinking she loved him, but Jasmine never tailored her sexuality to a need for a man. She always had an agenda in mind. For the first, it was getting rid of an annoying prince, for the second it was allowing the same annoying prince a shot at Jafar. Jasmine was instrumental in saving her kingdom, the same one she was going to be Sultana of, by the way. Jasmine was a lonely princess who never compromised her ideals. Aladdin learned this the hard way when he thought Jasmine wanted only the superficial prince instead of someone who would be her true friend.

    Hope that wasn’t too long!

  3. I completely agree with every analysis in this photograph…except the Belle one. Beauty and the Beast is a great movie, with what I would even describe as feminist messages. From the start, Belle is a heroine who defies expectation. She enjoys reading, science (as per her helping her father, the inventor), and is brave – she saves her father from the Beast’s dungeon, and then returns later to save the Beast from Gaston. It is absolutely problematic that she had to be the Beast’s captive in order for them to spend time together and for their relationship to develop. However, the Beast voluntarily lets her go, showing a redeeming development in character. In addition, Belle fell in love with the Beast despite his frightening appearance, showing that her feelings were more than skin deep. Belle saves the Beast in the end not with her sexuality, but through the actual love that developed from their spending time with each other and becoming friends. The Beast loved Belle too, not because she was beautiful, but because of the person she was. Not once did she compromise her identity or her beliefs, despite what Gaston tried to make her do. (It should be noted that the reaction of Gaston and the other villagers to the Beast is one of fear: “We don’t like what we don’t understand.” The positioning of Gaston as someone who thinks he is doing the right thing, even though he is obviously hurting the Beast, is an anti-racist message, and a message promoting tolerance and acceptance). Disney has made a lot of problematic movies, but I would argue that Beauty and the Beast, on the whole and in comparison with the others, is not one of them.

  4. I’m convinced Pocahontas and Mulan were only added–and, iirc, they were added years after their respective movies came out–because people kept pointing out that the ‘official’ princesses didn’t really DO anything.

    And to make things worse, neither of them was a princess. Pocahontas can only be seen as a princess if we decontextualise her culture to make it fit Eurocentric ideas of royalty–in reality, she was just the favourite daughter of her father, from one of his fifty wives and had no power within her tribe. And Mulan? Peasant warrior. Didn’t even marry royalty; married a military captain. Disney must’ve been pretty desperate.

  6. Here is my brutal truth: I want all of those dresses for my very own. I can’t deny it.

    ‘cept for the blinder ’round snow whites neck… that’s gotta go.

  7. I don’t know when the original image (that the text boxes are on) is from, but…..er, only one of the four excluded princesses is white, and only one of the ones in the image is not.

  8. For one, most of the real princesses (versus the airbrushed princesses in the franchise) are disinclined to go around all day swishing their dresses around. Belle for one, is never shown with a book!

    truth.

    also – I have not been able to watch Beauty & the Beast since a friend pointed out to me that the moral of that movie is: “If you love your abusive boyfriend enough, he will change for you.”

    also, Mulan is a legitimate fucking badass and the “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” song/sequence is, in the context of that movie, way more clever than I would have ever expected Disney gender commentary to be. the opening of the movie is all about how Mulan totally sucks at traditional femininity, & the awesome part of the movie is – she never gets any better at it! instead she saves first her father, then her country, without ever learning how to be a “good girl!” and at the end, the hot dude comes for HER, but we don’t see them get together because that’s not the point of the movie! I love Mulan way, way, way too much, hence all the exclamation points!

    who the hell is Giselle???

  10. Gasp! You must watch “Enchanted”. That’s the movie Giselle is in. It’s totally Disney making fun of themselves. Everything is subverted and there’s so many references to various Disney movies all seamlessly woven into the story of “Enchanted”. It’s a fun movie!

    I agree with FW, I want those dresses! Just the logistics alone in making the dresses look exactly as they look in the movies would be a huge, fun challenge for me!

    Isabel, I’m sorry your friend ruined Beauty and the Beast for you! Just remember, a real abusive guy will never ever change, and will make the woman change for him. He’s all sweet talk and cruel action.

    The Beast had a huge temper and he had to go pretty far in changing before Belle even realized that she could love him. Her kindness in bringing him back to his castle after he was injured heading off the wolf pack was more of her not being able to leave him for dead after he saved her life. Belle didn’t start falling for the Beast until the winter scene with the birds. Beast had already changed by then.

    True, Belle was a prisoner in Beast’s castle, but I think Disney did a pretty good job pushing that in the background and focusing on how Belle and Beast related to each other.

    The original story had Beauty doing her own thing in her own wing of the castle, a true prisoner in a gilded cage with Beast showing up to eat dinner every night and asking her to marry him. Original Beast was ugly but courtly. Not very deep, is it? If I was turned into an reflection of my inner ugliness, I would be pretty pissed too, which is what Disney ran with.

  11. I interpret the Beauty and the Beast fairytale as equating Stockholm syndrome to love. Belle is imprisoned in the enchanted castle in exchange for her father’s debt to the Beast. The Beast’s transformation is a metaphor: the imprisoned woman will sympathize with her captor and come to love him, seeing him as a good man rather than him transforming into a good man. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the Disney movie, but Belle was still a captive and the Beast still expected his affections to be returned despite their dynamic.

  12. I don’t really agree with a lot of the analysis in the pictures, but I think Disney movies are very problematic for all sorts of reasons they’re bringing up…and I think Mulan is actually one of the worst. The entire movie is reinforcing the notion that the only values worth upholding are traditionally ‘manly’ ones – and ‘manliness’ is defined through violence. Mulan even says at one point something about how she wanted to be something, make her life worthwhile… as if the lives of millions of Chinese women aren’t worthwhile! The whole movie is a gigantic romp through hatred of women and women’s cultures in favour of everything to do with men. Not to mention the utter racism – even putting aside the way over-the-top stereotypes of China, the villain in the film has FANGS and YELLOW EYES. Dehumanization, much?

    In Little Mermaid, Ariel seems like a fairly empowered heroine, fulfilling her lifelong dream of becoming a human… until you realise that the whole film is basically a colonialist narrative of the oppressed woman from a backwards place (“bright young women, sick of swimming, ready to stand…”) wanting to find a place in the enlightened, developed capitalist world (and has to leave her entire former identity behind in order to do so). It doesn’t help that the world under the sea is portrayed with all the worst racial and ethnic stereotypes that suggest it is supposed to be Carribean, and the world above the sea looks quite European. Even if you think that’s reading too much into the film, the basic plot structure still fits a colonialist structure.

    In Aladdin, Jasmine is quite similar to Mulan and Ariel in her wanting to escape from an oppressive world, but she’s rather useless at it. And every other female shown in the film (okay, maybe there are one or two exceptions, but not more than that) is scantily-clad, overly-sexualised and swooning over Aladdin. It could be like a textbook in Orientalism…

    I could go on for ages, but yeah, these films really make me angry.

  13. They also left out Yum-Yum. Everyone always leaves out Yum-Yum. Poor abandoned cult animations….

    Btw, Yum-Yum, the female protagonist in The Princess and the Cobbler, totally gets cred from me because she constantly expresses her frustration at just being viewed as a pretty face and not having her potential other contributions taken seriously, and then ACTUALLY INSISTS SHE BE ABLE TO CONTRIBUTE. Yum-Yum is awesome.

    It also gets points for : Animal companions eating their master; positive use of the crone archetype; enslaved women defeating their enslaver; chase scenes in an escheresque palace.

    Shame about the giant orientalism.

    Sigh, sorry, got all nostalgic.

  16. JessSnark, I’m just using the language that was in the original picture to call into question Disney’s opinion of it’s most marketable brand.

  17. OMG—does this mean as the mother of three adult daughters, that I spent their youth endorsing negative role models? What is a mother to do….HELP!

  18. poncho, Disney chose these tales to adapt– not all of them folktales, not all of them even particularly old.

    As for Mulan not being a princess, I consider that a feature, not a bug. I’ve never seen Pocahontas so I’ll stay out of that one.

  19. I understand that in the eras these movies take place in there were few other viable options for women, but it always really bothered me that Disney went through the trouble to make these very feminist and opinionated characters and then their whole goal in the movie is to get hitched. I mean, I suppose it was progress that Jasmine’s dad changed the law so that she could marry ANYONE, but how about a Disney “princess” who can be smart, kick some butt, and doesn’t have to fall in love? You know, take one of those 3D movie characters and make it female and it can have an adventure and everything without any sort of love interest whatsoever. Wouldn’t that be loverly?

    And am I the only one who thought Beast was way uglier as a man than as a beast? As a kid I remember always being a little horrified when he appeared first in his human form. Kind of like finding out you won a prize and it’s a toaster or some crap.

    If I had a companion animal, I’d want it to be a talking piece of cake. I know that’s not an animal. But cake doesn’t poop and you can probably bring cake into the mall with you (but not an animal).

  20. Their micesploitation in The Rescuers was also repellent. Bernard was a total Nice Guy. Madame Medusa was a veiled swipe at second-wave feminists.

  21. Here’s my question: Why don’t any of these women have moms???? Seriously, check the Disney fairytale collection.

    Snow White: Mom dead
    Cinderella: Mom dead
    Sleeping Beauty: Mom alive, with no speaking role, appears in 2 scenes as background
    Ariel: No mom, no mention of a mom
    Jasmin: No mom, no mention of a mom
    Belle: No mom, no mention of a mom

    That’s where I got off the Disney train, but I’ll bet you money the trend continues. it’s not just that mothers never appear-they’re never even mentioned. Do princesses hatch from man-eggs or something?

  22. this picture is sexist, not the movies.
    also mulan and Pocahontas are not princesses
    giselle is not a disney princess, shes a princess in a disney movie
    tiana’s film has yet to be released, she’s not yet made it into the club

  23. Heh, I think the reason why there are barely any mothers in the fairy tales is because mothers are the ultimate protectors and stabilizers. Without one, the world goes wrong, and the hero/heroines have to rely on their wits, magic, or outside help to defeat the wrongness in their world, whatever it may be. It’s not really Disney, but the ancient fairy tales that do this.

    I just don’t see how the Disney movies are that awful. So far, I’ve read about Stockholm Syndrome, BDSM, two-faced misogyny, bad sexuality, etc. in this thread and the other one.

    Sure, the fairy tales are not perfect (especially the unsanitized ones, yikes!), and the older Disney movies do have some cringe-inducing moments, but I really think that the fairy tales are a reflection of one’s own self. What people read into them are what they read into themselves. I think the Disney movies have their negative sides, but the positive intent outweighs that.

    Take Mulan for example…someone up above said that manliness and violence was shown as positives and feminine frou-frou was shown as negative. Does this mean that real-life female soldiers hate being women? No…Mulan was rebelling against being exactly like every other woman…with her personality buried under the same exact made-up face, manners and abilities. Being honorable for a woman meant being silent and not ruffling any feathers, which Mulan refused to do since there was the greater honor of protecting her father. Mulan never hated being a woman…putting on the armor and pretending to be a man was a means to a end. She was never shown as preferring one over the other. Mulan also failed boot camp until she started using her brains, which led to her having more confidence in her abilities. It was also the very female Mulan who saved the Emperor and was bowed to by everyone in the palace square. The laws deeming women as inferior in China was her main opponent at every turn, and was obviously shown as wrong.

    If I had a daughter, I would let her watch Disney movies, no problem. I would also let her play with whatever toys she wants to play with, and dress however she wants. If she asks me questions about why doesn’t Cinderella do anything, I would have a discussion with her about that and let her take the lead.

  24. “Snow White: Mom dead
    Cinderella: Mom dead
    Sleeping Beauty: Mom alive, with no speaking role, appears in 2 scenes as background
    Ariel: No mom, no mention of a mom
    Jasmin: No mom, no mention of a mom
    Belle: No mom, no mention of a mom”

    OMG that is so weird I haven’t even considered that before.

  25. Oh, oh! Mulan has a mom! She has a largeish role, too, or at least as large as a role as her family can have considering how much time Mulan spends away from home. Pocahontas’ mom is dead too, but she has Grandmother Willow for a mother figure, which is something. I guess.

    Giselle’s not really “excluded” from this pic; she isn’t a Disney Princess at all, because they would have to pay royalties to the actress who played her. So every Disney Princess excluded from this picture is a WOC.

  27. Sleeping Beauty is much easier to watch from a feminist perspective when you realize that it’s not really about Aurora. It’s about the three Good Fairies who raise her. They have the most screen time, they protect the prince, they rescue the prince from the villain and ultimately it is their power that defeats her. The prince is little more than decoration.

    It blew my mind when I realized that Sleeping Beauty passes the Bechdel test. So does Cinderella, come to think of it. I don’t think any of the other “princess” films do.

  28. I didn’t really like Enchanted. Everyone was telling my how funny and subversive it was, so I watched and discovered that even when disney is making fun of itself, the princess still has to marry SOMEONE (whether it is a modern day prince or a fairy tale). AND it really annoyed me the way the male lead’s girlfriend was portrayed. Basically, the message seemed to be “We act all enlightened, but what we really needed was a fairy tale prince/princess to be happy!” I mean, yeah they made fun of the fact that animals help princesses out, but they didn’t actually subvert anything. There is still an evil step-mother, still a innocent and good princess despite all the bad things that happen to her, and still a prince who ‘saves’ her. The fact that it takes place in New York isn’t all that subversive. And the feminist, career woman, was also bad with kids. They also made it seem like parenting a girl to be a mature woman and try to keep her away from princess stuff was a horrible thing to do. But of course Disney would think that, they have a corner on the market.

    Sorry, I was always mad because I was really hoping it would be a better movie than it was. I mean, don’t even get me started on Ella Enchanted.

    I always thought Belle and Jasmine were fairly independent. At least they had minds of their own and were active most of the time instead of passive. I also agree that the Beast was creepy as a real man – the Beast barbie doll that we had was always the bad guy in our games we’d play as a kid.

  29. I totally agree with Lisa, especially about Belle! Belle was witty, smart and stubborn – I always liked her best.

    And if we include the sequels for Cinderella (especially #3) she’s way more than a pretty face and you do get to see more of her hidden “bitchy” side or as I like to call it “kick-ass” side.

  31. I agree with Stacy. I really couldn’t get past the beginning, where the father is portrayed as a terrible person for wanting his daughter to read about Madame Curie. Little girls don’t want to be scientists, they want to be princesses! Terrible movie.

    And don’t get me started on the Disney Princess franchise.

Comments are currently closed.