I resent my brain for making me think about this

[rinue]

It occurred to me yesterday that neo-Disney's "princess don't need a prince" romantic story template* just flipped the script on girl-stuck-in-tower-or-behind-dragon; somebody still needs to get rescued, but it's now the guy. But since they're guys, they don't have to be rescued from a lack of institutional power; they need to be rescued from their overweening male privilege. Beast is selfish and an ass to poor people. John Smith is selfish and a colonialist. Mulan's guy is a sexist jerk. Aladdin is selfish; I don't even know where to start with the Princess and the Frog dude, who I despise above all others.

Thank god Disney turned an about-face from the hellish world of Cinderella and Snow White, in which two kind people meet and like each other.** What a strong woman wants is an opportunity to devote her life fighting to reform some patriarchal asshole. Oh, Disney, you have understood us feminists.

* Romantic story template = princess films, but by Disney standards where they don't always involve princesses. So Mulan counts, but Tarzan and Hunchback don't. When I say "neo-Disney," I put the dividing line just after The Little Mermaid and just before Beauty and the Beast. Mermaid was the first in what's now called the Disney Renaissance, and was made basically as a love letter to the older films. Beauty and the Beast is kind of a mix of the old and new, and the new got a lot of PR mileage out of the idea of "new classics," with "new" implying an improvement from the bad old days. Never mind that the older Disney films always courted a female audience by flattering them, and gave their princesses a lot of agency.

My theory does not address Tangled and Frozen, partly because I haven't seen them and partly because 3D's a different medium with different traditions and personnel, in much the way film is a different working environment from digital and this influences the stories you tell.

** Even Prince Eric, who gets a bad rap. The worst you can say of him is that he thinks he's mistaken the identity of someone he met once after she transformed into somebody else. He was still nice to her afterward, and set to work to make things right when he got clued in. Mermaid has never been one of my favorites, but it's definitely old-school Disney playbook.

Comments

[valancy_jane]

Also, because I'm thinking about it, you know Beauty & the Beast is my favorite. But I will note I was always a little sad that he's a jerk initially, though he does do SOME wooing. My mother, of course, is extremely attached to the 1946 version (the one that supposedly elicited "Give me back my Beast!" from a teary-eyed viewer during the red-carpet viewing). In that version, he is so humble, adoring, and kind that it's really more about the woman's personal struggle to be able to get past his physical beastliness. All of which is to say, sigh, you have a point, but dammit, I still love Belle.

Of course, you know I adore the Duvall version - perhaps most of all. Susan Sarandon, no less.

[rinue]

I enjoy Disney Beauty and the Beast even though it's not my favorite version of the fairy tale by a long shot. As you observe, I like versions of the story with a kindly beast, with Beauty going through a hero's journey of growth to realize that it's what's on the inside that counts, and that loving someone makes them beautiful to you.

The Disney version tells a worthwhile story, that through loving one person unselfishly, you can transform yourself and become more compassionate generally, but in that story it's Beast who is really the protagonist; Belle doesn't change. In a story sense, she's the audience surrogate, the Watson, if you like. You could have the whole story narrated from inside the castle by Mrs. Potts or Lumiere, and it would be really obvious that Beast was the protagonist and Belle's basically just a story event. I like that it's from Belle's perspective mainly because this lets us see Gaston, a character pretty much invented for the movie (I don't remember there being an external attacker in most versions), who works as a great foil for Beast, to underscore that the problem of selfishness exists in beautiful people also, that Beast's beastliness wasn't his fur.

So, good story, story worth telling . . . which they then repeat with less nuance in Aladdin, in which it's explicitly the guy's story, and then keep repeating in later movies while telling us it's about the girl. It's not about the girl.

[knaveofstaves]

Do you have the same problem with Mulan? I've always felt like Shang-as-a-love-interest was really tangential to the real plot to the point where Mulan herself could honestly give a crap about him because she kind of has important stuff to do. The ending puts that viewpoint to the test I guess. I dunno. I have a hard time wading into this stuff.

[knaveofstaves]

Well I just rewatched it because I hadn't seen it in ages, and I see your point. The love interest does follow that pattern.

[rinue]

Mulan is pretty interesting. I've only seen it once, and I liked it. You're right that it centers Mulan and that the romance felt totally extraneous. Which I don't mind; I'm fine with extraneous romances. However, it does once again do that thing where you have this really cool chick who is for some reason attracted to a guy who is a jerk to her, and the romantic triumph is that he becomes less of a jerk so then it's ok.

There was a lot of critical pushback against the Li Shang plotline when the movie was released because of the way it undercuts a lot of the main character beats. It's particularly galling because as far as I can tell, Disney made it up whole cloth; the legent of Hua Mulan doesn't have a romantic element. Shang really reveals what Disney thinks a badass chick wants: some manly man to tell her she's pretty even though she's not like other girls.

I'm not an expert on the original folktale, though. Here's a breakdown of what Disney did and didn't focus on. She's a weird fit as a princess going through an arc of self-discovery; as I understand the legend she's more like a Robin Hood or Sir Gawain, a generalized badass going around doing badass things.

[knaveofstaves]

Yeah as far as I can tell, the Disney version and the original body of folklore are basically two different narratives with the same skeleton.

As far as Disney goes, Mulan's been my favorite since it came out. Some director somewhere reined in Eddie Murphy to a point where he's actually funny. Some of the imagery is crazy genius. Mulan climbing the post to retrieve the arrow as her previously antagonistic fellow soldiers cheer her on while the sun comes up? Daaaaaamn. Bowing before the sword? Daaaaaaaamn. But mostly, I love the fact that the thing, ultimately, that separates Mulan from everybody around her (and elevates her above them) is her capacity for lateral thinking. She's smart. And that's why she wins.