The Disney Princesses tell it like it is

“No,” replied Gothel; “Why do you ask?”

• Article via the Guardian: America’s $88 billion anti-aging industry: dangerous with no scientific backing

• Piece on Sociological Images: “Baby Lips”: Thanks for the Infantilization, Maybelline

• “The Double Standard of Aging” by Susan Sontag on Media Watch (published in 1979… how slow things are to change!)

“[Women] can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the convention that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women, they can become women much earlier-and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.”

• an article from Virginia Tech’s research magazine on ageism in culture

“Are you sure this movie was created in 2010?” Said the other Stabbington brother, in disbelief.   “And they think we’re the bad guys of this movie?  Talk about underrepresentation.”

“Well if you or Gothel are interested in reading more about it, I found a really good tumblr discussion about this entire issue,” said the first Stabbington brother.

(*POC: Person or People of Color)

haha, well, if you read back through the Rapunzel debate that’s been going on the past day or two, there are definitely strong reasons for people to like or dislike Rapunzel.    Personally, yeah, I don’t feel like her personality has as much of a focus as other princesses’ personalities have had. 

Yeah, they definitely could have gone darker!  Especially if they had made the evil character have more depth.   Ah well, not every movie can be The Lion King.  (not that Scar has amazing depth, but I think the characters in general in that movie do, for a kid’s movie.)

PS, this is the last Rapunzel response I will be re-posting for a while.  I’ve been out-rapunzeled for the day!

that’s a good point.  I love how the internet as a collective could probably write a 26 book set about Tangled and probably still not cover all the possible discussions.

I wouldn’t say that’s my biggest criticism of the film, but you’re right, that is a very important point.   It completely ties into the cultural standard of blond, long hair being the most beautiful/coveted while other hair colors/styles are considered, “okay, but not as great.” 

I could be neutral as to whether it’s bad or good that she sort of uses her hair as a weapon/source of power because I could see that validly being explained as re-defining the feminine as powerful, but I have to say when I saw the trailers, I really didn’t like the way it was portrayed at all.   There is something very offputting about how all her strength, as you say, is coming from something she doesn’t really have control over (in the sense that she did not have to do anything to gain the magic.  It’s like flexing your muscles.   Cool, but no mental exertion there).

I think also what bothers me about the end scene is that she really does seem to lose her powers, and there’s a metaphorical replacement of “her powers” with “Flynn’s love,” which seems to take away some of her independence as a character?  When she has the hair it allows her to do  a lot of very independent things (move around the tower, defend herself, allow herself to escape the tower) and the replacement is, “Well, you have your family and boyfriend now.”  

idk.  Seeing depictions like in the photo above vaguely disturbed me in ways I can’t even seem to fully articulate.  

Also as a note to anyone reading this: we’re not saying that this is the only thing portrayed in the film or that the film is horrible.   It’s just one aspect of it.  And yes, she does still have fun after she loses her blond hair, it’s just that the way this loss is portrayed in the film definitely implies a “loss” of something greater than just the magical hair.   (especially considering that, in scenes like above, the hair when it is long is shown as being something that is fun/playful/powerful). 

waltdisneyconfessions:

“Rapunzel is the princess that I relate to the most, so it gets to me when others dislike Tangled without a good reason.”

Since I dislike Tangled and have a lot of good reasons, would it not bother them?  Haha.   Which princess do I relate to the most, at that?   I think Jasmine, although I feel like I have a huge bias for the Aladdin movie so it’s hard to tell.

obsessivedisneydisorder:

Warning: Do not read if you are a hardcore Rapunzel/Tangled fan who gets offended easily.

Rapunzel → asked by disneyamor & anon

How I feel about this character:  Okay, God, where do I begin?  When I first walked out of that movie theater, I was like, “Tangled was amazing!  I love Rapunzel!  Flynn’s okay, but Rapunzel, she’s so cute”.  Yeah, in a month she made her way down to my least favorite princess.  I don’t know what drove the sudden change; maybe I overanalyzed, or maybe it was because I was frustrated with the movie’s underserving hype.

First of all, I was really irked by the fact that everyone in the movie adored her, even the villain!  Just because you’re a Disney princess doesn’t automatically make you the most likable thing on the planet.  Look at Snow White, she had to work towards getting Grumpy to like her, look at Mulan, no one in the army liked her at first.  But Rapunzel?  She just has to sing a song about dreams, and all the thugs are waiting on their hands and feet.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised though, people with perfect personalities usually get along well with everyone, thus bringing me to another point.  if you notice, all the princesses had shown a flaw of some sort.  Rapunzel?  No, she’s just naive, but I hardly count that as a fault considering it’s a trait that most of the princesses share.  Honestly, someone needs to give me a list of all the flaws Rapunzel has, because to me, they’re nonexistent, or “there’s a good reason behind it”.  Third, all the princesses were able to bring something new to the table.  Ariel was flawed, determined, rebellious, Jasmine was headstrong and stood by what she believed for, shall I go on?  Rapunzel was just the outcome of all the princesses swirling around in a blender.  And just to top it all off, she gets no development.  Nada. None.  She stays the same the whole time… but I guess it’s because they couldn’t make her personality even more perfect than it already was.

All the people I ship romantically with this character:  Not Flynn.  Rapunzel and Flynn have probably one of the worst Disney endgame relationships I’ve ever seen.  The couple had very little potential to start with; there’s a fine line between the ‘opposites attract’ rule and just ‘they’re so different, it’s never gonna work out’.  I think Rapunzel is way too happy and outgoing for Flynn.  She’s like a puppy; she needs attention, she runs around the house too much, and she wants to go on walks, and she wants to play a bunch of games.  Yeah, Flynn’s not cut out for that.  Not to mention the whole execution of the relationship sucked.  First Flynn thought Rapunzel was a pest, following him and whatnot, and then, oh my God, her hair glows!  Now he’s just freaked out.  Then, they reach town, and BOOM, he’s in love with her.  Like what?  Excuse the Harry Potter reference, but it kind of reminded me of when Ron was ‘in love’ with Romilda in the Half Blood Prince.  It literally came out of nowhere.  There was no build up or anything.  Ugh, just no.

So enough of that.  I think if I had to ship Rapunzel with anyone, it would be Hiccup (from How to Train Your Dragon).  He’s just an all-around great guy, and he could get along with anyone.  

My non-romantic OTP for this character: Eh, I’m not crazy about any of the relationships in the movie… Pascal and her were kind of cute, I guess.

My unpopular opinion about this character:  Well considering almost everyone loves Rapunzel, I guess the unpopular opinion I hold is well… not loving her :P. Oh, and that I thought the whole thing with the tear healing Flynn = ultra cheesy, and not the good kind.  It was basically the lame version of the Belle/Beast scene. 

One thing I wish would happen/had happened with this character in canon:  She should’ve gotten more scenes with Flynn.  Even with my complete dislike for his character, I’d rather endure more scenes with them building up then dealing with the sappy ‘I love you, even though yesterday I thought you were annoying’ crap.  

detroitwaves:

Feminist Disney: Dreams are subjective II

detroitwaves:

feministdisney:

waltdisneyconfessions:

“I always get so mad when in tavern bar in Tangled they tell Flynn his dream is stupid. NO. Rapunzel’s is stupid. All she wants is to see some lanterns.”

bahaha. I feel bad for agreeing, but I completely agreed.

Her…

I don’t know why it won’t let me reblog with all of your commentary, but I read it all! Just wanted to say that before I start this. I don’t know, I feel like she spent all of her life being brainwashed. In the same way that someone raised from a baby in a specific lifestyle without any real outward influence may be too naive or too pushed in one direction to see beyond it. She spent her formative years being told everything outside is dangerous and that it isn’t safe for her- after 18 years of that, she still knows it, but she found Flynn, the one who could protect her long enough to see the lanterns. I also think applying “well a real girl would never think that” is a bit of a stretch, considering we’re talking about a magic land where a girl is affected by a magic anti-aging flower and her hair can do kung fu moves. I think bending your ideas of reality is necessary to watch it as an adult and comprehend things.

PS. I adore your blog! I know it sounds like I’m attacking, but I’m not! 

haha, what you say is true, and I agree.  It was my fault for trying to make a “what this girl would do in real life” comparison because you slam into problems at every turn trying to run with that.   I addressed this in follow up re-blogs and put an edit at the bottom of my last comment here, but I don’t know if you saw those.  If she were a real person, she would have been really messed up by that situation in ways that no strange handsome man could fix in a day, so it’s true, a real girl in a tower with only a lizard and sometimes a kidnapping mother figure to talk to would probably have never wanted to leave in the first place so my whole point would be rendered moot.   So, yeah.   I mean, on a personal level I really never like super-metaphorical-yet-obvious dreams/goals/thoughts in children’s movies, but it clearly was sort of needed to push forward the plot in the movie. :P

detroitwaves:

feministdisney:

waltdisneyconfessions:

“I always get so mad when in tavern bar in Tangled they tell Flynn his dream is stupid. NO. Rapunzel’s is stupid. All she wants is to see some lanterns.”

bahaha.  I feel bad for agreeing, but I completely agreed. 

Her dream isn’t stupid, it’s a representation of everything she’s never had. Those lanterns are this image of being untethered and free to do what one pleases. For a girl who has been locked up in a tower for most of her life, alone, the idea of being free and having nowhere to go but up seems like a pretty damn good dream to me.

I mean, as a metaphor and representation of a dream, sure, it’s spiffy, but as something a real girl would actually desire, personally I still side with the original poster.   In real life she would be smart enough to connect “I want to see lanterns” to really meaning, “I want to get out of this tower and be free” and she would do it a lot quicker than she does in the movie.   It’s not that great of a cognitive jump for an 18 year old.*

*edit: assuming her real life personality would be similar to her character personality, which, granted, is quite the assumption because no person would be that well adjusted to living like that.   But in real life her childhood would have probably harmed her psyche in a way that would take more than a handsome stranger dropping in to get her to actually to leave, so… on and on it goes.

waltdisneyconfessions:

“I always get so mad when in tavern bar in Tangled they tell Flynn his dream is stupid. NO. Rapunzel’s is stupid. All she wants is to see some lanterns.”

bahaha.  I feel bad for agreeing, but I completely agreed. 

that’s a good point to think about.  I disagree though about the assumption that she actually loved Rapunzel.   In the beginning I shared your reaction and I really liked the first scene of them in the tower where they were sort of a playful pair, and I thought some of the conflict in the movie would be that the mother (whose name is Gothel) loved Rapunzel and would have to deal with her own urges to let her go, even though she wants to keep the “flower power” (heh) for herself.  Because that would have been deep and pretty cool.

Once the movie progressed, however, it seemed to me (although you’re free to explain to me if there’s a subtly I missed here!) that her love for Rapunzel was entirely engineered in order to make Rapunzel trust her, which ultimately makes her more evil than a lot of evil villains, because she was faking love in order to trap Rapunzel.   At least most of the villains are honest about their evilness, if nothing else!

What I thought was evidence of this:

-Even though she constantly tells Rapunzel “I love you most,” she never shows this in any of her actions.   I think it was meant as more of a red herring for the audience.   Consider, for example, how the mother refuses to listen to most of what Rapunzel has to say and cut her off multiple times, even while they’re getting along.

-The “love” in the movie is not used for affection, but as a tool in order to imprison Rapunzel because of her own natural love for her mother and desire to not betray her.

-At first I thought the scene where the mother agrees to get shells from 3 days away indicates some sort of love for Rapunzel, but if you look at it from the perspective of, “She is trying to manipulate Rapunzel into staying in the tower forever,” that was the obvious choice because she thought it was the only thing that would mollify Rapunzel and stop her from asking about leaving.  She only goes, after all, after Rapunzel promises not to ask about leaving ever again if she does.  

-She ultimately betrays Rapunzel with absolutely no show of remorse, and she does it twice.   First, she betrays Rapunzel when she more or less leads Flynn Ryder’s enemies, the Stabbington Brothers, right to him.   Then, after finding out Rapunzel is in love with Flynn, she still makes the choice to stab him so that Rapunzel never has a choice to be with him.  She doesn’t even kill him as a bargaining piece, because she has already bound and gagged Rapunzel, she just wants him out of the way; it is only after Rapunzel is able to get rid of her gag and says she will fight Gothel for the rest of her life unless she allows Rapunzel to save him, in which case she will be compliant to Gothel and not protest her imprisonment, that Gothel allows her to do it.

-Rapunzel is only able to try and save him after she promises the mom that she will always do what the mother says, and basically never have her own life/be happy.   The mother’s desire for this to happen would seem to indicate, especially to the intended younger audience, that her love is false and only existed to manipulate Rapunzel.   If she really loved Rapunzel, would she be happy to confine her for the rest of her life, knowing it’s exactly what Rapunzel doesn’t want, and knowing Rapunzel can obviously survive in the real world?

-Flynn is used as a contrast here- because he truly loves Rapunzel, he sacrifices himself in order to save her (cutting the hair before it could save him), recognizing that Gothel will have no use for imprisoning Rapunzel if her hair is no longer magical.  He is intentionally being used to showcase that this is the way Gothel would act if she “really” loved Rapunzel, because Disney is all about sacrificing for true love :P

-At some point (if it wasn’t so late I would pull up the movie online!) late in the film, The mom says, “I love you,” but Rapunzel does not repeat her line, and I think this indicates that Rapunzel is starting to realize that the words were, in fact, nothing more than words because they were never genuinely felt.

-Additionally, if Gothel had been intended to have inner conflict over her love for youth and her love for Rapunzel, it ultimately never really revealed itself in any of the final scenes with her and Rapunzel, which leads me to think it was not intended to be a part of her character since Disney movies are usually pretty obvious in their examinations of good and evil and the conflict between them.  

So, ultimately, I would have to disagree and say she did not seem well rounded.   But I’m also the type of girl who is unimpressed by people saying “I love you” without it being actually demonstrated, so maybe I’m biased!

She did look like Cher, and that was cool.

You’re completely right, that definitely is an important image metaphor, and it occurred to me after I wrote the whole blog and was looking for pictures to add into it (and so so many of Rapunzel with the pan).   However, I was more on the fence with whether it was good or bad so I didn’t talk about it since… I wasn’t sure.  

I agree that it was great when the other characters started using the pan, too!   Showing that the female strength/props are something that can be coveted by others, even men.   But I don’t mind what they did in Mulan, because even though it is taking a traditional male weapon, it is also taking a traditional male weapon and making it a female weapon?   Or maybe I’m not really examining that the right way since she is pretending to be a man.

It’s also interesting that you never actually see Rapunzel hit Flynn with the pan (she lifts pan, and there’s a cutaway with the “gonng” sound and he wakes up later- but the actual contact is only implied).   I don’t know if this says something either way, but the film sometimes seemed to shy away from actually showing the princess using her weapon of choice sometimes.  Which I guess is fair because they have to play the Rating Game, but still, a little awkward.

I think overall I agree with you, but am very wary of falling into the trap where weapons (or anything, for that matter) have to be gendered somehow in order to be feminist-friendly, etc.   Not everyone would want to reinforce the idea of “cooking instruments” as a defining female symbol.  Especially because it is still rooted a bit in… tired cliches.   I still overall like the pan but once of the first things I thought of was that very old cliche scene of a harried wife chasing/sometimes beating her husband with a rolling pin.   And I wouldn’t say that is a very feminist-friendly type scene, so I think a lot of it depends on context and not just the literal weapon used.   If that makes sense?

Sorry it took a while, I was thinking it over before I replied.  Good question since she’s the newest princess!

I’m not super impressed with Tangled.  I enjoyed watching it, and it was very pretty, but even removed from all potential criticism it didn’t seem to have the same fresh spirit as earlier Disney films of the 1990’s.

I thought Rapunzel was decent, but she’s been done before.   Sure, she is “spunky” and “rebels against her Mom,” “sort of saves the guy herself even though he ultimately saves her in the end,” but Disney princesses have been doing that for the past 20 years to the point that their personalities are almost becoming formulaic in this way? 

I think one of my main feminist/film criticism would be the portrayal of evil characters.   Disney has been following the same formula for this ever since their first animated films came out in the early 20th century, and it’s getting old.   Children are not as easily… horrified?  Naive? As people assume and I think Disney’s movies would be more widely appealing (to adults, especially) if the evil characters were more well rounded, and a mix of good and bad.   Like, you know, real people.  Their Princess films at this point have a tired feeling to the evil villians because they’re almost all the same- evil more or less for the sake of being evil. 

I think it is also unfortunate that this is the umpteenth time that “woman obsessed with her looks/looking young” is centered as the evil character of the film.   I think it is reflective of a culture that both pushes young women to strive for physical perfection, while simultaneously then shaming/punishing them for desiring it (like how people will rip apart a person who gets plastic surgery, or people will declare such pity for women who don’t revel in their “natural beauty” and make “I wish you didn’t feel like you have to cover  yourself with makeup!” statements).   It still feels incredibly about-faced that Disney both props up the princesses as the epitome of beauty and then seems to wonder with wide-eyes, “Why would anyone ever desire beauty and youth so much?”

The film was incredibly lacking in diversity- it’s almost like Disney had this mentality of, “Well, glad we got that covered in Princess and the Frog!   Now time to get back to the good stuff, what our princesses really are.   Blond, tiny, blue-eyed, white.”   I mean, it’s pretty well documented that fantasy movies (and children’s movies in general) tend to be completely dominated by white faces.   And considering that 51% of the babies being born in America in 2009 were not white, I think this is more than a  bit problematic for the children who are actually watching Disney.   This movie does not give them the chance to see someone like them being a part of the Disney magic.  It’s like saying, “You can watch, and you can admire, but you cannot join us.”  Disney is past the time now where they can “accidentally” make an all white cast.

And going off of that, women- just women- were incredibly underrepresented in this film, as you probably noticed.   All the animals- male.   All the “tough characters with dreams” in the tavern- male.   Soldiers- male.   Disney is also past the point where they can accidentally only have one prominent, non-evil, female character in their films. 

I thought the ending was… so meh.  There was really no reason to throw in the “So I bet you’re all wondering, did we get married?”  narrative.   And it especially irked me that not only did they feel a need to include it, but felt a need to position it as if the AUDIENCE is the one creating this, rather than the producers of the movie.   Because honestly that was the last thing on my mind since like all the Disney princesses RAPUNZEL WAS STILL A YOUNG TEENAGER.   It didn’t even seem to fit in with the general feeling of the movie, it was like a throwback to before the 1990s.   There actually weren’t many in-film marriages in the past 2 decades and it seemed to reduce the entire film to, “The real goal is always marriage!”   And a good point from Girlwpen: “The movie makes a POINT of emphasizing, [he] proposed to her, not the other way around.”

Basically I am just disappointed that they really have a chance to do a lot of new and exciting things to revive their genre, and instead they are pretty much following the incredibly well-trod patterns they have laid down for the past century of Disney animated films.   Like what they did with Enchanted?  It was overall, amazing.   And sadly, still one of a kind for them.