Prompted by Disney’s new line of Princess products, Barbara Ehrenreich rails against the studio’s entire family of female animated characters at The Nation. Her key arguments:
- “Today, there is no little girl in the wired, industrial world who does not seek to display her allegiance to the pink- and-purple clad Disney dynasty.” Read: your daughter understandably wants you to buy her shiny things, but she’s too young, impressionable and greedy to understand what consumption of those things mean. It’s up to you to decode the messages she’s unconsciously slurping through her Princess toys. This is of primary importance because…
- “Disney likes to think of the Princesses as role models, but what a sorry bunch of wusses they are.” Ehrenreich is particularly concerned that these so-called heroines generally “have no ambitions and no marketable skills,” and are prone to allowing themselves to become intoxicated at the hands of men and/or devious older woman. No work, free booze––I guess your daughter’s supposed to wait until college before indulging in that dream.
- “No need for complicated witch-hunting techniques–pin-prickings and dunkings–in Princessland. All you have to look for is wrinkles.” The Princess films fail to give middle aged and elderly women the respect that they’re accorded in … um … real life?
My favorite takeaway, and my own conclusions, after the jump.
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This series of side-by-side comparisons of frames from various Disney films (via WIRED’s Underwire blog) is meant to show how Disney recycles frames from one 2D animated flick to another in order to save time, money and labor value.
But more impressively, it’s also solid proof of the animation factory’s tendency to recycle themes across decades. The tableau above tracks the “nubile nymph dances for plump (read: impotent) male onlookers” theme, first seen in 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and then resurrected 36 years later for Robin Hood. And surely there are more examples of such a scene playing out across the Disney ouevre–it’s been at least 17 years since I’ve seen it, but The Little Mermaid immediately comes to mind.
For all the films collecting dust in the Disney vault, there are really only three or four stories being told–young males, abandoned my their families, turn to nature; stubborn young women find themselves through the action of civilizing one man or a group of them; brutish men demonstrate their strength, only to later face humiliation and comeuppance. Did I miss any?
