Presenter: Anna Lind
Faculty Mentor: John Park, Barbara Mossberg
Presentation Type: Poster 24
Primary Research Area: Design
Major: Digital Arts
The Disney Princess franchise, since its formation in 2000, has become a staple of American girlhood. The princess phenomenon has caused many to question the impact that Disney Princesses have on American culture. Since the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, Disney Princess films have steadily become more progressive in the ways they portray their heroines. However, because Walt Disney Studios takes a corporate approach to storytelling that prioritizes profitability, Disney Princesses still conform to trends of female misrepresentation in popular media.
For my honors college thesis project I decided to track how the fairy tale heroine is depicted over time. Looking at a total of nine films that span from Snow White to Tangled, I created my own set of criteria to quantify the main character’s agency in her own story. These categories include total percentage of screen time, number of Progressive Actions, and how many times the protagonist rescues other characters or herself. Female representation in Disney’s animated princess movies did get better over time, however, the trends that have persisted correlate to the broader struggles of female representation in the media. The princesses still conform to a very rigid standard of beauty and are out spoken by the male characters in their films. To respond to this lack of positive representation I will be responding to my research with concept art for a Disney-esque animated fairy tale adaption. Fairy tale adaptions have the power to reinforce cultural conventions or break them down, and my retelling will challenge current conventions by showing an example of female representation I would like to see in future of Disney films and popular media.