Film Theory: The Disney Princess Problem (Wreck It Ralph 2)

*Car engine* Matthew: Ohhh, I'm so nervous. Mickey Mouse: Oh boy, thanks! We'll be in touch! Ha ha! NEXT! Matthew: Oh boy, looks like it's my turn. Wish me luck, ladies! *Stomps* *thud* Matthew: My name is Mathew Patrick and- Mickey Mouse: NEXT! Matthew: But- Mickey Mouse: NEXT! Matthew: Uhh, excuse me, but I- Mickey Mouse: I said... (deeper voice) NEXT! (Normal voice) I am the mouse. You listen to what I say,

theory

boy, and you listen WELL! You will NEVER be a Disney

princess

according to our ratings. HA HA! Mateo: But what are those qualifications? Mickey Mouse: It's Walt's little secret!

You don't think our old racist movies are the only thing we're still searching for in the Disney vault, do you? HA HA! Matthew: GOOD! Wait, mouse! It's time for you to air your dirty little secrets. *DRAMATIC MUSIC x1,000,000,000,000 HELLO, internet! Welcome to Film Theory, making enemies with beloved pets around the world since 2015! Today I look at one of the most twisted and ruthless cinematic universes ever conceived: The Disney Princesses. All to answer the burning question we never thought to ask ourselves: "What allows you to qualify as a Disney

princess

?" That may seem like a stupid question.

You're a princess, who happens to be in a Disney movie, DUH! But the answer, in reality, is not so simple. You see, despite having been to Disneyland hundreds of times and constantly being the creepy old guy who enthusiastically waves at all the princesses as they parade, what really got me started on this little vision quest of mine was the trailer for Wreck-It Ralph . 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet, which included this scene where Princess Vanellope Von Schweetz goes to the Oh My Disney website and enters the Disney princesses' room. Pocahontas: What kind of princess are you? Rapunzel: Do you have magical hair?

Elsa: Magic hands? Vanellope: No Cinderella: Do animals talk to you? Rapunzel: Do people assume that all your

problem

s were solved because a big, strong man showed up? Vanellope: YES! Everyone: She IS a princess! Cue everyone on the internet giving themselves a collective high five over that sick burn in male prince types. I GOT THEM! *mic drop/comments/applause* Well, you have them until you forget that the Princes have literally risked their lives to save several women in this room. Jasmine, Ariel. Yes, Aurora. You did a really good job defending Maleficent, when she created that moat of thorns around the castle, and then she turned into a giant dragon, and she started spitting green fire everywhere.

Oh wait, no. You were asleep through all of that. It was Prince Philip who did all that. Just saying girls: it's one thing to be an empowered woman. It's another thing to be an ungrateful jerk to the guy who saved your life. Now this scene is legitimately amazing. Any crossover of this caliber will always be exciting. It's a literal 'Who's who?' of female Disney characters over the decades. But one thing it is not is an accurate representation of Disney princesses. You see, Disney Princesses is a separate media franchise created in the early 2000s. It's like the NSYNC of Disney animated female characters.

And, believe it or not, it includes only a very select part of the princess characters. Of the animation studio's nearly hundred-year history, technically only 11 characters are included as Disney princesses. Pause the video right now and try to guess who those characters will be. I'll give you a second or two to pause the video. Alright, have you placed your bets? Good! Some are pretty obvious: Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora aka Sleeping Beauty, Ariel from The Little Mermaid, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, and Jasmine from Aladdin. If this were a Scrabble game, they would be worth 1 point. They are like the "T's and E's" of the Disney Princess world.

They would be worth 3 points: Mulan, Tiana from The Princess and the Frog and Rapunzel from Tangled. Those are the 'M' and 'P' tokens. And the 10 leaders of our game would be: Pocahontas and Mérida, Pixar's first princess, from the movie Brave. DOUBLE WORD SCORE!!! Now, you may have noticed some pretty big snubs on that list, like, say, Anna and Elsa from Frozen. Literal princesses of Arendelle in what is the highest-grossing animated

film

of all time. No, invite them to this exclusive club for them! How about Moana, which is also not on the list? And it's not like they're too new either.

Most of the modern characters were crowned official Disney princesses about a year after their

film

was released. Rapunzel, Tiana, Merida. All of them had an interval of between 11 and 12 months before being officially baptized as Disney princesses. And remember! This listing is based on the official listing located at princess.

disney

.com, an official

disney

.com site! This is the real deal here! So what exactly is going on? What, in Disney's eyes, makes a woman worthy of being a princess? Would Vanellope von Schweetz really pass the test and would she deserve to be included in this Wreck-It Ralph 2 room?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is my goal today: to turn these empowered women into lists of their top attributes, so we can directly compare their worth and find out what methodology Disney is working with to determine their merit. So if we have any hope of figuring out the criteria for becoming a Disney princess, we'll have to reverse engineer it to see who's included, who's excluded, and then figure out what attributes unite those two groups. Now, as I just mentioned, the exclusion of Anna and Elsa from this group shows that not all princesses in Disney movies become the trademark Disney Princesses.

But that begs the question: Are all Disney princesses actual princesses recorded in Disney films? In other words: are they the daughters of a king or queen or are they married to a prince? Well, of the eleven, nine are easy. YEAH! But two, Pocahontas and Mulan, require a little more research. To Pocahontas, her father- (Ugh... I hate these moments when I copy and paste a harsh name into a script, and then find it in the recording closet, suddenly remembering that I have to pronounce that damn thing.) Her father , Wahunsenacawh, was he a powerful chief of the Sen-nah-ka-ma-ka?

He was a powerful chief of the Tsenacommacah Confederacy. So, she is the daughter of a high-ranking ruler, Ruler for lack of a better term, which would seem to qualify her as a princess, however, there is a

problem

here. Pocahontas' tribe had no patrilineal inheritance, meaning that Wahunsenacawh's sister's children would be next to inherit any royal power, not Pocahontas. That said, even though she falls into this strange middle ground of the princess realm, history seems to weigh in her favor. In 1808, James Nelson Barker wrote The Indian Princess or The Beautiful Savage, one of the first dramatizations of the life of Pocahontas.

Even before that, St. George's Cemetery, where Pocahontas was buried, hosted the announcement of Princess Pocahontas's burial, and later the cemetery was designed as Princess Pocahontas' Garden in 1958. So, although it falls into a As a middle ground, the consensus seems to say that Pocahontas can qualify as a princess. As for Mulan, well, not so much. If you judge her only by her main movie, she technically doesn't qualify at all. Remember, Mulan is a commoner who enlists in the Chinese army to protect her father. Sure, she saves all of China from the Huns and falls in love with Captain Shang, but none of that qualifies you for the technical definition of princess.

It's not until the direct-to-DVD sequel Mulan II, where, if you squint really hard, she turns into a princess for about five minutes. You see, Mulan is hired to escort three of the Emperor's daughters to marry three princes. Historically speaking, these guys would be better classified as warlords, but... It's Disney!! They are princes and the marriages will help ensure peace in China. When her love Shang falls off a cliff into a giant empty chasm- -No kidding, this is something that actually happens- -Mulan assumes what any reasonable person would assume upon seeing a fall like that: That it's son! dead! (?) So she agrees to marry one of the princes for the good of all of China.

She is then almost a princess, until it is revealed that Shang lived! She finds out about the marriage and rushes in at the last minute to stop it, thus ending Mulan's entire right to the title of princess before she even begins. So Mulan, no, not a princess. Almost, but not quite. So Mulan really demonstrates the lesson here that being a real princess doesn't matter to qualify in this elite group and if you want a real nail in this coffin, Mulan was included in the list of Disney princesses when the group was first created. time in 2000. Mulan 2 came out in 2004.

So there is absolutely no way that Mulan could have qualified any angle I cut it from, so apparently being the dictionary definition of princess doesn't matter. So what does she do? Which connects those eleven characters but still leaves out Moana, Anna, Elsa, not to mention other classic Disney women like Meg from Hercules, Esmeralda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and even Princess Eilonwy from 1985's Black Cauldron. One literal princess based on Welsh fairy tales who was saving the male protagonist of her story three decades before any of modern Disney's strong women came to town. I mean, my mind immediately went to box office performance, since those last three movies underperformed in theaters, but clearly that doesn't apply to Moana and Frozen.

Heroic acts? Clearly not, since Moana has more heroism in her little finger than Aurora, who spends 90% of the movie asleep. In fact, it's Brave's Merida who calls into question many of the qualifications one might expect to work here. I mean that's the whole premise of her movie. Her queen mother tries to convince Mérida to be a perfect princess and Mérida defends herself: "I am the princess. I am the example. My whole life is planned. But from time to time there is a day when I don't do it." . She doesn't have to be a princess." First of all, as I mentioned before, Merida was the first Pixar princess, so being part of Disney Animation Studios to be a Disney princess is no longer a qualifier here, which just shows how ridiculous these qualifications must be.

Secondly, she was the first official Disney Princess to not have any kind of romantic attachment, every other one of those eleven characters has a Sometimes Husky, Sometimes Husky, but boyfriend. Was there always a man present? No. But the last difference here is probably the biggest. Merida doesn't sing, I mean, I'm sure there's a song about her in the opening of the movie, but Merida herself doesn't sing. a single note in the entire movie, while all the other Disney princesses up to that point had. So what is this magical ingredient that I'm missing? And how does Moana fail?

Maybe I can understand Anna and Elsa. At the end of her movie, Elsa becomes Queen and Anna is in her shadow for the entire movie and let's face it, two pale princesses from the frozen north aren't the most diverse additions to your princess list. But Moana literally ticks all the boxes: She's the heir apparent to her father's chiefdom (maybe not a princess in name, but a princess in function), who sings and has her own theme song, performs heroic acts, selected As special by fate, she represents a culture and ethnicity that is not present in the existing roster of 11 characters, her movie made a lot of money and came out over a year ago, meaning her coronation is already overdue at this point .

I mean, even her movie explains it clearly: Maui: It's called orientation, princess. Moana: Well, first I'm not a princess. I am the boss's daughter. Maui: Same difference. Moana: No. Maui: If you wear a dress and have an animal companion, you're a princess! Wait a minute. Is that really all?! I mean, sure, it's a joke, but it's being told directly to a character who obviously hasn't met this invisible barrier to being a Disney princess. Which I have to admit makes the subtext of this scene really weird, but even though this meta-joke is meant for laughs, Maui might not be joking.

When Andy Mooney, creator of the Disney Princess initiative, was interviewed by the New York Times about how he came up with the idea of ​​grouping the princesses together, he had this to say, quote: "Line up in a Disney arena at Ice Show I was surrounded by girls dressed as princesses from head to toe. They weren't even Disney products, they were generic princess products that they had added to a Halloween costume and the light bulb went on. So the next morning I told my team: "Okay, let's set standards and a color palette, talk to the licensees, and put out as much product as possible that allows these girls to do what they're doing anyway: projecting themselves into the characters of these classic movies." end of quote.

Translation:Let's monetize the hopes and dreams of these impressionable young women as much as possible. But what if the only two qualifications are: one dress and two animals? Let's look again at our list of candidates. Pocahontas? Dress up Meeko the raccoon and Flit the hummingbird. Ariel? season and flounder the fish. Jasmine? Dress and Rajah the tiger. Mulan? Dress and Mushu the dragon. Rapunzel? Dress up and Pascal the chameleon. Tiana? Dress and Lois the crocodile. Belle? Dress and Philippe the horse (or I guess you can consider him the Beast himself). Cinderella? Dress and his mice Jaq and Gus.

Snow White and Sleeping Beauty? Stresses and forest creatures in general. Merida? Dress and Angus the horse, and now let's look at that excluded list. Meg from Hercules? No animal. Princess Eilonwy of Black Cauldron? No animal. Hunchback Emerald? Okay, she has a dress and a goat, but she is also an outlaw who is treated as an object of sexual desire by the men in the movie, she has a few more things going against her in this rating. Ana Elsa? Sure they have Olaf, but he's not technically an animal and honestly, they make the cut when it comes to a separate roster of Disneyland theme park princesses, where they are the only new additions.

Frankly, most dressed animal is the only set of ratings that clearly delineates princesses from non-princesses. But that still leaves out Moana. What about her? She clearly has Heihei the rooster, so what's stopping her? It's the dress. Although what Maui might call her attire in the first place is not technically addressed in the dictionary definition, it is a one-piece garment for a woman or girl that covers the body and extends to the legs. . However, Aladdin's Jasmine also doesn't wear a traditional dress for most of her movie, so that's not the main issue going on here. The question is what Moana's dress represents.

Consider this According to an interview with the site Tyranny of Style, Neysa Bové, visual development artist and key costume designer for Moana, emphasizes the goal of staying true to Pacific Islander culture, citing: "The biggest challenge of the film were the limited materials. We only had two, 'tapa' and 'pandanus'. The tapa is made from the bark of the mulberry tree and they go through an arduous process of making a paste and finally they beat it and They put it together, hence the name "tapa". A similar story with pandanus weaving. Pandanus is actually a tree and they tear off the pandanus leaves and shred them into strips, which are then taken and woven! braid them! you can find it on the island, you can do it." end of quote.

Staying true to the materials, history and culture of the Pacific Islands was essential to this film and its characters. Now look at the eleven existing princesses. Each and every one of them wears fairly generic outfits that, at best, vaguely allude to their culture of origin. Times are different now and Disney is under more scrutiny than ever for its appropriation of other cultures for money. It's a topic that's been on Moana's mind since before the film's release, and she continues to do so today, with a specific focus on the costumes. And if the goal of all Disney princesses is for little girls to wear your dress and look like the character, Moana's costume, while beautifully designed and culturally sensitive from a cinematic standpoint, becomes really problematic when you start to produce cheap copies to sell then. to its Sunglass Huts shopping centers.

So what makes a princess? Well, according to Disney, it's not about who you are, what you do, or even who you choose to marry. It's what you wear that counts, and isn't that the best message to send to girls? Next time in our exploration of the Disney Princesses, we'll focus on that specific scene from Wreck-It Ralph 2 because the list is much broader in that room, all in an effort to determine if Vanellope could really become the next princess. Disney, despite what everyone else says. the girls could tell him. Speaking of what you wear, the theoretical merchandise is now available for a super limited amount of time.

Just in time for back to school, you are guaranteed to receive it very quickly after ordering. It is true that this round of products focuses mainly on game

theory

. But don't worry, next time there will be specific Film Theory topics. But if you want an amazing, sturdy backpack, an amazing shirt that may not make you feel like a princess but will make you feel like a million dollars, these have become my favorite pair of socks because of how soft they are. A theoretical plug for your phone so it doesn't fall on your face while you're watching Disney movies lying in bed at night OR a theoretical notebook of your own that might contain a mystery you need to unravel.

Click the link in the description below. Hey, you can tell a Disney princess by what she wears, why not also be able to tell a theorist by what she wears? Looking chic in a bright, dazzling neon green, I'd like to see a Disney princess pull it off. Click the link in the description to see that merch, that every purchase comes with additional little gifts sealed in there too, which is cool, we like to give them little surprises. Be sure to bow to the subscribe button so you don't miss next week's episode where we do a review of Vanellope Von Schweetz in time for Wreck-It Ralph 2.

I'm excited about that. Any time blatant corporate greed is exposed, it's usually a pretty exciting moment. It's an episode I'm always very excited to do, so check it out anyway, hit the subscribe button, and most important of all, remember it's just a theory. A film theory aaaaaannnnnd cut.