Films and Feelings

  Walt Disney was famous for his philosophy of making films not just for children, but for the child in all of us. It's a nice tagline, for sure, but for long-time lovers of the Disney mythos, this isn't just a marketing tool. It is the dividing line between that commercial-fare that oversaturates animation as an artform and the legendary storytelling that Disney has come to define itself by. And it is the measurement against which all Disney enthusiasts weigh each new offering from the sorcerer's workshop.  Yet Disney's newest offering, which presents itself as a tribute to the studio's 100 year legacy, plays more like a film made for children. The film is not without magic or wisdom, I would be remiss to not acknowledge that I did tear up no less than three times, but for Walt Disney Animation's centennial capstone, viewers would be better directed to something like their short,  Once Upon a Studio , which traffics in similar Disney-specific shorthand yet ach...

Thus far, we've looked at the lack of credibility that the anti-princess backlash floats on as well as the emptiness of the criticism itself . I want to spend this final section looking at the fallout of this backlash that has come to define this modern age of Disney Princess hysteria, and I use the term "fallout" somewhat tenuously because I do think this modern epoch of Princess-hood has offered some exciting developments. But, you probably already know what those are because that's where the headlines tend to go first. There has been a dearth of coverage, meanwhile, on the more negative consequences of a brand of princesses marketed solely on the premise of not being weak (like those other princesses ...)      While it might feel like Princesses have always been the backbone of Walt Disney animation, princesses have entered the chat at very irregular intervals. Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora came over a twenty-year period, and this was followed by a thirty-...

    As we discussed in the last section , Disney Princesses are often held accountable for things that did not actually happen in their films--things they did not do. I feel like a part of this is the means by which said scrutiny typically takes place. There is, after all, a sort of stigma around watching "cartoons" as an adult, especially "princess cartoons," let alone watching them intently. And so I feel like a lot of the conclusions people come to about Disney Princesses comes either entirely from second-hand sources, like the memes, or from having it on in the background while babysitting as they scroll through their phone.      I'll use an anecdote from my own history as an example: my very first week of film school, the professor drifted to the topic of female representation in the media. This professor dropped a sort of humble-brag that he had actually never seen Disney's Pocahontas , but that he didn't consider this a real omission because he...