In Defense of Disney Princesses: Cinderella

The problem with this series about the Disney princesses is that it is difficult to differentiate defending the princess herself and defending the actual movie.  I was especially intimidated by Cinderella because I love the movie, but I sometimes go back and forth about Cinderella herself.  So when I found this quote from Walt Disney himself about Cinderella, I began to feel much better about writing this post.  He said: “She believed in dreams all right, but she also believed in doing something about them...When Prince Charming didn’t come along, she went over to the palace and got him.”  For Disney, Cinderella is not a passive girl, she does not believe in letting others control her life and her happiness.  

Time and time again, I wonder if I actually even like Cinderella, but every time I watch the movie, something about her draws me in.  Is it because her story is one that is a completely archetypal rags to riches story, or is it something else?  I think it is because she has the ability to look at the situation around her and not only continue to dream and hope, but to dream and hope bigger than before.  The reason the fairy godmother says she has come to Cinderella’s aid is because even after her stepsisters have ripped her dress to shreds, she still believes in her chance to be a princess for a night.

Something else that draws me in towards Cinderella is her ability to hold onto something so precious to her and refuses to let anyone take it from her.  For Cinderella, “A dream is a wish your heart makes when you’re fast asleep.”  It is not something to be shared, but something you keep close to your heart, something sacred for your very self.  No matter what happens to her, she holds onto those dreams and wishes.  They are what keeps her going, she knows that if she dreams something big enough and seizes her opportunities as they come along, that something great is going to happen for her.  And when she keeps her faith in the most difficult time, her fairy godmother comes and helps to push her along the way.  The fairy godmother represents that person or that force in everyone’s life that seems to come through in just the right moment with just the right prescription for whatever ails someone.

I do not know if I will ever figure out whether I love Cinderella or Cinderella more, but what I do know is that Cinderella exemplifies what faith means.  There are times in all of our lives when our anxiety threatens to blind us to all the opportunities around us and the amazing-ness of the world we live in.  Cinderella reminds us that even as we feel we are backed into the deepest and darkest corners, somewhere in the distance, there is a light.

This is totally an aside, but this is my absolute favorite quote about feminism and it definitely connects to Cinderella, so I am going to put it in here :)  

“Feminism is the fairy godmother.  ‘Do you remember the story of Cinderella?  She is sitting at home rather pissed off, wanting to go to the ball, and not having a thing to wear, when the fairy godmother whizzes in and p all right.  One of the most important things about the fairy godmother is that she transforms all the old stuff around Cinderella into new and useful equipment: the rags, the pumpkin, the rats, and so forth.  This little girl’s fairy godmother turned out to be called Feminism.  As well as cheering the little girl up no end, Feminism also transformed all the old things around her.’” --Sara Maitland

**The Pocket Princesses are drawn by Amy Mebberson.  You can view her Tumblr by clicking here or by copying and pasting this link into your browser: www.amymebberson.tumblr.com.  

Our Bodies, Ourselves Campaign

Recently, I have found myself fairly infuriated by all the rhetoric coming from old white men in political power telling me about my own body.  Like they have a clue what it's like to have your rights infringed upon because of your sex.  But what really makes me angry is that they are using bad science and bad theology to do it.  Rape is a deplorable, heinous crime and I listened to a politician today telling me that if I am ever impregnated by a rape that it is a blessing from God.  That is really bad theology, friend and it is a really patronizing way for you to tell me that everything is going to be fine because you are going to make my decisions for me.  Just so all the people out there know, that is not okay.  It is not okay for you as an older white man to tell me with tears in your eyes that you are convinced that should I ever get raped AND pregnant that that is God's intention.  I'm sure that soon I will be hearing that children all over the world dying from preventable diseases while Americans struggle with obesity is also God's divine will and intention.  Give me a break.  Right now I feel like if I hear another politician tell me something horrendously stupid about rape, abortion, sex education, or birth control, I may run for office myself on the most crazy-liberal platform.  Maybe I'll ask Dennis Kucinich if I can be his running mate in the next election.  

Anyways, all that to say that the amazing people at Our Bodies, Ourselves have created a campaign that will send copies of the iconic book Our Bodies, Ourselves to every congressional office so that they no longer have the excuse of being uninformed politicians.  (Did they really have that right anyway, to be uninformed politicians talking about my fallopian tubes and how they will legislate what I can and cannot do and what medication I can and cannot have?  Grrr...) It's a great cause and even if you don't contribute, make sure that you VOTE on November 6th.  

This is a great PSA that you should watch if you can find a few free minutes in your day: "You Don't Own Me" PSA.

I know that this is a little angrier than I usually am, and I know I am coming off pretty crass, but this is a really important issue for me and I think it should be a really important issue for all women and all men.  The equality of women and the legislation crackdown on abortion, birth control, sex education, and rape and the rhetoric surrounding all of them are extremely important for all of us.  If you have any questions as to why feminism is still an issue, please watch this video.

In Defense of Disney Princesses: Snow White

Snow White (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) was, as many of you know, the first full-length animated feature film ever.  Not just from Disney, but ever.  I am going to be really honest with you, I am not sure that this post is going to convince all you non-believers that Snow White has qualities that we as human-beings should possess, but try I will.  

Snow White is a very passive young lady with a very abusive stepmother.  The viewers are not shown any direct violence, but it does not require very much observation power to notice that the young princess scrubbing the castle in rags is probably not living the life she or her father had planned.  It is probably not her choice to be cleaning, indicating that the evil queen has exerted a certain amount of control over her.  She seems docile and congenial, but not really in a good way. It is this part of the movie where the viewer wonders why anyone would put up with that abuse and questions her character and her strength.

I think, though, that where we see the real strength of Snow White is a little later on in the film when she has escaped the huntsman and is sitting in the forest with all her forest animal friends.  She sings a song called “With a Smile and a Song” found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQZ6zzLpoNQ.  This is a woman who has lost both her parents, has an evil, abuse stepmother, but no real friends, and she still has so much joy inside her.  What we see in Snow White is that we are responsible for our own happiness, no one else has the power to take joy away from us, we are the ones who “fill the world with sunshine.”  She is happy being in the forest alone, she is happy cleaning a filthy cottage, and she is happy even knowing that her stepmother is still after her.  This is a woman we could all learn from, how many times a day do we complain about something happening in our lives that is keeping us from joy?  Maybe Snow White is a little unrealistic, but the fact remains that she has learned to find her happiness and joy inside herself, excluding every single external factor.


Snow White is also very adaptable.  Not only does she go from an assumed high social position as the princess of her kingdom to a servant for her evil stepmother, she also is run out of her home after her stepmother attempts to murder her.  She survives each transition and even thrives while she is living with the dwarves; she becomes genuinely happy.  

She also exemplifies altruism, a fine virtue that anyone would be lucky to possess.  After her encounter with the huntsman and the very scary forest, the little animals lead her to the Dwarf Cottage and Snow White immediately begins to think of the “children” even after all that she had just been through!  She cleans the cottage, cooks dinner and, once she learns that the inhabitants of the cottage are dwarves and not children, she even offers to cook and clean for them everyday so that she can stay hidden from the evil queen.  Now I know what you are thinking, “Sure it’s great that she is still happy throughout all these trials and that she is able to keep going, but why on earth does it have to be ‘domestic, womanly’ things that make her happy?”  And I am here to tell you that I wish she had been able to be happy slugging it out in the woods, killing bears and toppling trees instead of cleaning and cooking for seven men, but that is not the narrative Walt Disney gave us.  (This is not to say that there is anything wrong with finding joy in cooking and cleaning, because it is perfectly fine to be happy doing those things.  I am trying to say that I enjoy when women (princesses) are portrayed as active outside the private sphere as well.)  We have to learn how to tease the good things out and keep wrestling with the parts that are difficult.  Whether we like it or not, this is how we have to deal with just about every aspect of life.  I am in Theology School right now and I was quick to learn that there are many parts of the Bible and Christian history that I love, but there are just as many that I do not love and I must keep wrestling with them (just like Jacob wrestled with a stranger at Peniel in Genesis 32: crazy connections between Snow White and Jacob for the win?)

Well, that was a little bit of a tangent, but I do think it was fairly important to say those things so that you know that even as I write about defending Snow White, I still have some struggles with her and her narrative.  To some extent, we have to accept that Snow White was created by white men in the 1930s and was based on a fairy tale that is hundreds of years old.  That does not make it okay that she only portrays “womanly, domestic” interests along with several other feminine stereotypes, but she is a product of the culture(s) that created her and we have to figure out what that means for us.  I personally choose to view her as a strong young woman who must overcome several obstacles throughout the movie and remains strong and true to herself for its entirety.  She is able to hold on to her innocence and her compassion, something many of us lose without going through half of what she does.  I love her and you should too, but if you do not, I still love you!  

**Pocket Princesses by Amy Mebberson.  Her tumblr is here.  

In Defense of Disney Princesses: Introduction

Many people seems to love talking about how terrible the Disney Princess Franchise is for feminism, society, blah, blah.  Believe me, as a Women’s and Gender Studies major, I am constantly subjected to how backwards and submissive the lovely princesses are.  I have an issue with this for a few reasons.  I think that many times we get so angry that we forget the good qualities of whatever it is we are hating on in that particular moment.  I do it all the time.  Somebody says something about certain religious figures or about certain political leaders/ideas and I immediately say all the bad/wrong things about the person or idea just mentioned, without considering the positive aspects of them/it.  

Therefore, I would like to take a little time to do a short series that looks at the princess movies and the princesses themselves from a more positive viewpoint while still acknowledging the less than desirable aspects of them.  I will do them in chronological order from Snow White to Rapunzel, remaining within the Disney Princess canon.  This would include Snow White (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), Cinderella (Cinderella), Aurora/Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty), Ariel (The Little Mermaid), Belle (Beauty and the Beast), Jasmine (Aladdin), Pocahontas (Pocahontas), Mulan (Mulan), Tiana (The Princess and the Frog), and Rapunzel (Tangled).  Hopefully, I will write about Alice (Alice in Wonderland), Wendy (Peter Pan), Esmeralda (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Meg (Hercules) at some point, but they don’t really fit into what I’m doing with this series.  

This is not to purposefully anger or enrage anybody, but to illustrate the way we interact with people, culture, and ideas.  No one is going to agree with anyone else 100% of the time, so we really have to be intentional in how we start dialogue.  In my experience, people love disagreeing with each other as long as everyone’s voice is heard and everyone is respected.  I hope that by doing this series, I can show the importance of listening to less than popular or loved opinions in order to create a more harmonious world.

**Pocket Princesses by Amy Mebberson.  Her tumblr is here.  

Brave: A Different Kind of Princess Movie

I had been waiting to see Disney/Pixar’s Brave for a very, very long time for several reasons:
1) I LOVE Pixar movies and I LOVE Disney movies, especially ones of the Princess variety and Brave possessed the potential and promise to intertwine the two.
2) Pixar had not done a (full-length) movie with a female lead, EVER!
3) I have always been a proud feminist and have always wanted to see a princess movie marketed to little girls with absolutely no romantic interest whatsoever.  Brave definitely fits the bill.

My dreams of seeing Brave in theaters opening weekend (before everyone decides to tell me what they think before I’ve even seen the movie) were nearly shattered when my fiance’s faith in the movie and Pixar began to waver after he checked out a few trailers and the Rotten Tomatoes page.  Thankfully I was able to convince him that I needed to see it terra-bad and we went opening day for the matinee.  

We had extremely different reactions to the movie at first.  We both agreed that the artwork and music worked beautifully together, but that was about it.  He argued that, as a movie, it did not live up to Pixar’s standards.  He especially noted the cinematic genius of Up!, Wall-E, and Toy Story 3.  The character development, he claimed, just wasn’t there, the story moved too quickly, ergo, even with the beautiful marriage of music and art, it just didn’t feel as good as those other Pixar giants.  His ultimate opinion upon seeing it was that Brave was an okay movie, but it did not live up to the Pixar brand.

I couldn’t disagree more.  Up!, Wall-E, and especially Toy Story 3 were not created for children, but for people like us, people past their teenage years, people looking for movies that make us think, movies that enable us to experience our full range of emotions.  Brave is a different kind of Pixar movie in that it was created for children, specifically young girls.  Merida is a princess that never falters in her desire and resolve to control her own fate.  Merida is a princess that craves her own independence and craves the ability to be known as her own person, independent of anybody else, especially a suitor.  She wants the freedom to choose her own husband, and the freedom to choose no husband.  Merida is a princess whose creators, directors, and producers allowed to remain her own person, unattached to any romantic interest for the entire duration of the movie, including the scene after the credits, in fact, at the end of the movie Merida is seen joking with the suitors as friends.  

Name one movie marketed to the female demographic that has done that because I truly want to see it.

The character development in the beginning of Brave seems fast, especially for a Pixar movie, because it is.  This is a movie that has a good screenplay, but it isn’t the greatest screenplay that Pixar has ever done.  It didn’t have to be, though.  If one were to watch Brave without the dialogue (just the visuals and the music) it would make sense, which is what makes it a brilliant children’s movie.  The people at the head of the project wanted to make a different kind of impact with this movie.  They wanted to provide young girls with a princess heroine that at no point in the movie ever feels that she needs a husband to make her happy.  I looked up some of the people at the helm of Brave and it turns out that Mark Andrews, who co-wrote the screenplay for Brave and directed it has a daughter.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Andrews_(filmmaker)).  Two other women credited for the story and screenplay, Brenda Chapman (story, screenplay, and original director) and Irene Mecchi (screenplay) both worked on Disney movies that feature strong female leads.  Brenda Chapman worked on the stories for Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Chapman).  Irene Mecchi worked as a co-screenwriter for Hercules and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Mecchi).  What if one of their main purposes in making Brave was to show their daughters that, like Merida, they do not need a romantic partner to matter?  They do not need to measure their worth by whether or not they are in a relationship.  

Merida as a character looks very simple (except, of course, for that absolutely gorgeous red hair).  This, in effect, allows girls to be able to identify with her more easily (http://blog.visualmotive.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/mccloud-uc-triangle.jpg).  One of the reasons Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga is so popular and successful is because Bella (the main character) is so nondescript and simple in her features and personality.  Do not misunderstand me, I am not trying to compare the strengths of the two characters.  I actually think Merida is a much stronger (read: better) character than Bella, I just mean to point out a possible reason Merida is such a simple-looking character compared to many of Pixar’s past characters (think the witch from Brave, a very realistic character, http://www.deathfall.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=29793&d=1309114141).  My fiance pointed out a web comic to me called XKCD, which often features very simple stick figures in situations that resonate with readers.  Simplicity allows for us to insert ourselves into the situation, or allow characters to stand in for ideas.  A great example of the XKCD characters and a situation is this comic: http://xkcd.com/150/.  

In addition to Merida’s physical appearance being identifiable, her situation and personality are also relatable.  Merida is a typical fifteen-year-old young woman who feels her parents, especially her mother, are too controlling and do not understand her.  The overbearing-parent-teenager theme has been seen in several Disney movies (Freaky Friday, The Little Mermaid, Tangled) so I will not talk about it very much, except to say that it is a common, but very necessary aspect of the movie in order to make Merida as accessible as possible.  What I will talk about a little bit is her situation.  Merida is a fifteen-year-old that responds to her situation as many other fifteen-year-olds would.  When she is told she must do something, she huffs and puffs until she decides whether to obey or not.  She makes a rash, hasty decision when she chooses to also participate in the archery contest which ends up creating quite a mess for her parents and herself to clean up, something I’m sure she never foresaw happening.  She lives in the moment, she is a free-spirit, she is strong.  These are all qualities that people, especially little girls, want to possess.  Everybody wants to stand-out for something, everybody wants to be strong enough to stand up for what they believe in and everyone wants to determine their own fate.

What is a remarkable piece of Merida’s characterization is that her creators allowed her to remain feminine and powerful throughout the movie without sexualizing her at all.  Merida wears a dress throughout the movie and is a beautiful girl, both examples of her femininity.  Her power is especially seen at the end of the movie when she battles her father, the king, for the life of her mother.  She knocks the sword out of his hand and absolutely refuses to let this giant, powerful, immensely strong man have his way.  And with this beauty and power, Merida is never sexualized.  Jasmine and Ariel are arguably powerful and both feminine, but they are definitely sexualized.  Merida remains a normal teenage girl struggling with her family, country, and growing up without sexualization ever playing a role.  Because Merida’s creators made her accessible, beautiful, feminine, powerful, and non-sexual, the little girls who see this movie have the chance to see and understand that beauty does not come from sexuality, but from being exactly who you are.

As Belle inspired me to read, Cinderella taught me to never give up hope, Mulan taught me to always be true to myself and Ariel to dare to dream against the impossible, it is my hope and prayer that Merida shows little girls today that they are beautiful, worthwhile, amazing people, all on their own, with or without a romantic partner.

A Note:  I talk a little about the art and drawing and physical character of Merida, but I am not able to talk about it intelligently very much because I have no background in art, I mostly have a background in literature, sociology, theology, and women’s studies.  Please do not hit me too hard on that part of the writing.  I am putting a link up here to my fiance’s blog because he does have an art/film background and hopefully he will be able to talk about character design at some point in the near future :)

http://marcdoodles.blogspot.com/