Social media is a wonderful, dangerous beast of a thing. And sometimes gets me thinking in the weirdest ways.
A Facebook friend of mine commented on a link one of her friends (a fantasy author, actually) posted: "
Tangled, Brave, and Frozen All Made The Same Critical Mistake":
The basic premise is this: despite Disney's more progressive heroines (they don't need a man!) and story lines (look! relationships between women!), the minor, supporting characters are all male.
Disclaimer: To be fair, the original poster on Facebook pointed out that this was not a problem unique to Disney -- that it plagues a lot of popular media. (See, for example,
this i09 post on the Bechdel Test.)
But back to Disney -- and, more specifically, the three movies the author mentions.
First: comparing these three Disney movies is like comparing apples to oranges to bananas; it's not fair, because they're three different films representing three different Disney stages. Tangled is, I think, one of Disney's "transitional princess" films. It's a step in the right direction, feminism-wise, away from the "faux feminist films" of the 1990's, from The Little Mermaid up to, and even probably including, Mulan. I tend to view Tangled and The Princess and the Frog as ideologically similar, even while they're different in terms of animation. Both films purport to have more progressive heroines, but both films end by celebrating the heteronormative union of the male and female leads, effectively undercutting the focus on how this heroine was different (Tiana's career drive and Rapunzel's hair as her source of power).
And then there's Frozen -- a film that, I hope, represents Disney's first step in a non-transitional princess franchise. After all, it's the first princess film (co-)directed by a woman, and Jennifer Lee's other Disney film -- Wreck-It-Ralph -- was also one of my favorites precisely because it didn't conform to gender expectations.
So to compare these three films -- to lump them together as if they're the third wave of Disney Princess films -- isn't entirely fair.
Second--I have to say that the criticism is fair when you consider
Tangled. There are, to my recollection, three primary female characters in the film: Rapunzel (the typical damsel-in-distress), Mother Gothel (the traditional evil Disney villainess) and the Queen (the good-but-silent mother). All the other characters in the film are male -- Flynn, of course, but also Pascal and Maximum, and down to the thugs and goons in the Smugly Duckling and the palace guards.
I actually had a student write a
fantastic paper on this last semester -- he looked at
Tangled as a transitional film and argued that, while
Tangled wasn't necessarily a bad film with a bad message, it missed a lot of opportunities to be the progressive film it said it was. The hyper-masculine thugs all have traditionally feminine interests:
And while "Vladimir collects ceramic unicorns" may be my favorite line, my student had a good point: in the absence of female thugs, this just seems like poking fun at gender stereotypes. Why can't Pascal be a girl chameleon? Why aren't there female goons?
Third: Emily Asher-Perrin raises this question about halfway through her article:
This new era of films, represented by these three movies, are meant to bring young girls up with new ideas about what constitutes a fairy tale. But are they really doing the job when even the most basic concepts of equality—like having a truly gender-balanced cast of characters—remain undepicted?
And it's a good question...but I'm not entirely sure it's a fair one. After all, can we really say that one of the "basic concepts of equality" is having a "truly gender-balanced cast of characters"? Yes, I think it is a marker of equality, but I would argue that a more "basic concept" is having female characters do the same things male characters traditionally did, or breaking down the emphasis on True Love and Marriage As Happy Ending. After all, let's imagine two movies: one with a perfectly gender-balanced cast, but in which the female is useless, hopeless, and passive and ends up married at the end of the film; the second has a skewed gender-balance but a truly kick-ass, empowered heroine Is the first film "more equal" simply because it is has a balanced cast? Do the actions of the characters not matter? I would point to the
Lord of the Rings movies as proof: those movies have predominantly male casts, yet that doesn't mean that the female characters aren't kick-ass and empowering. Eowyn is one of my favorite characters and succeeds in defeating the King of the Nazgul precisely because she is NOT a man.
Fourth: Asher-Perrin then goes into an analysis of the supporting characters in the film and how they're all male. To do this, she raises two interesting points. First, she correctly notes that both
Tangled and
Brave had different titles (and even
Frozen did, if you consider the fact that Walt Disney himself wanted to produce a version of
The Snow Queen after the success of the
Snow White) -- titles that were changed in order to appeal to a wider audience (re: girls AND boys). Second, she points out that pretty much every single animal sidekick in a princess movie is male. Which is true...at least, I can't think of any at the moment. They ultimately lead her to conclude this:
Why Olaf or Sven couldn’t have been female is beyond me, where Frozen is concerned. At the very least, some of the dignitaries who stay behind with Prince Hans once Elsa runs away could have been ladies. And in a kingdom like Arendelle—where none of the subjects seem to balk even slightly at the idea of accepting a female monarch without a husband—it would have been equally compelling to see some women in their army. Both Elsa and Anna are forces to be reckoned with; we should know that the rest of the women in their kingdom are too. Otherwise the message boils down to princesses are special! Only princesses. So you better want to be a princess.
Questions like these...I don't know. They irritate me. After all, when you look at, the four primary characters of
Frozen are Elsa, Anna, Kristoff and Olaf: two girls, two boys. Equally balanced. And we only really read Olaf as male because he's voiced by Josh Gad. And Sven is an adorable reindeer--I don't think making him female would change much in terms of gender dynamics. According to Asher-Perrin's logic having a female reindeer instead of a male one wouldn't help girls in the audience know that other women in the kingdom are a force to be reckoned with. (And, sidebar, Elsa is a queen. Not a princess.)
But here's Asher-Perrin's bottom line:
All three of these films feature specific and wonderfully complicated relationships between women...these are all relationships that we should find on screen. Not just for young girls, for all children. But when you omit other women from these worlds, you rob the entire story of its credibility. Other stories have reason built in; Mulan goes off to war to fight in place of her father, so she was never going to be training amidst an army of women. In Mulan, the reason for making that critical choice is a logical one that is explained within the context of the narrative. But Tangled, Brave, and Frozen have no narrative reasons for the absence of women. What’s Arendelle’s excuse?
Is it a fair bottom line? Is it a fair or a foul criticism? Can we say that these films "lose credibility" because they don't feature other female characters? I'm not sure you can.
One of Asher-Perrin's questions, for example, is "what if Merida had triplet sisters?" pointing out that then all of the family members Merida was closest to wouldn't have been male. To which I ask, why is that a bad thing? Isn't it part of the point? That Merida does feel closer to her male family members than to her mother, with all of her emphasis on decorum and royal behavior and expectations? And the triplets aren't really individualized -- they essentially function as one character -- creating a gender-balanced family (mom, dad, daughter, son). Having three of them just allows for comic relief as they get into a fair amount of shenanigans. And to sideline the witch as a "cameo" in Brave is just...unfair. Disney just can't win.
To return to Asher-Perrin's final question above, "What's Arendelle's excuse?" -- I might concede that there is no narrative reason for the absence of women, but I think it points to a larger issue of "Disney criticisms." Aside from the four main characters I mentioned above (five, if we count Sven), the only other characters who play central roles are Hans and the Duke of Weselton. (I'm excluding the trolls because they largely function as a Greek chorus, and have a gender-balanced society, even if it is patriarchal.) There IS a narrative reason that Hans is a male (he's trying to steal the crown by marrying one of the sisters) but we could ask why the Duke of Weselton is male and not a female.
So let's play Devil's Advocate. What if there had been a Duchess of Weselton instead? What if it was a female who, at the first sign of Elsa's powers, cried "Sorcery!" and attempted to have her imprisoned? It's the same reason Elsa had a sister, and not a brother, requiring the villain to be a male. Because if Hans and/or The Duke had been female, then Disney would be falling back into old habits, focusing on female conflict and reducing women into "good" and "evil" categories. We've done that: Snow White vs. The Evil Queen, Cinderella vs. Lady Tremaine, Sleeping Beauty vs. Maleficent, Ariel vs. Ursula. Do you know how refreshing it is to have a heroine deal with an internal conflict? How refreshing it is to NOT have a female in the role of Evil Villain?
Incredibly refreshing. I fail to understand how these films lose credibility according to this logic. It's not as if there are no other female characters -- as if the townspeople and visiting dignitaries who form the background are all male and other females simply don't exist. They're there, they're just not the focus of the story. All of the films which had casts skewed in favor of women (see: the early princess films) are lambasted for their archaic and outdated ideology. I don't think it's fair to say, as Asher-Perrin does, that,
Without the presence of periphery characters, the films prevent young girls from gleaning a true sense of familiarity and never challenge lame stereotypes. Girls are friends with other girls. Girls and boys form strong friendships and bonds as well. Women can be found in taverns (doing something other than serving the ale) and armies and political spheres and heists. Women are everywhere. And they matter, even when they’re not royalty."
Again. I find statements like these inherently problematic. What is it about periphery characters that challenges "lame stereotypes"? That is, why must this duty fall to the supporting characters? (After all, when it does, like in Sleeping Beauty Disney gets lambasted for relegating women to traditional roles. *sigh*) Leaving aside the fact that these are FAIRY-TALE films in a PRINCESS franchise -- Disney could adapt a "Molly Whuppie" fairy tale that features an "ordinary" heroine -- I return to my main response when people criticize Disney:
Royalty is a metaphor. I would argue that films like Frozen and Brave don't teach little girls (and boys!) that only girls who are royalty and princesses matter and are important. After all, Disney princesses -- especially the modern ones -- are girls first, royalty second. The fact that Anna and Elsa are a princess and a queen matters much less to the story than the facts that (1) Anna is trying to connect with her sister and (2) Elsa is trying to figure out who she is as a person. Anna's royal status matters much more to Hans, the villain, than it does to her. The struggles that Anna and Elsa and even, to some extent, that Merida and Rapunzel face don't relate to their royalty: they face human struggles: Rapunzel is exploring a strange, unfamiliar world after leaving home and Merida and Elinor must learn to understand each other. This has very little to do with royalty (Merida is, perhaps, the weakest example here, since Elinor wants her to act as a princess should) but still.
I think that is perhaps why Asher-Perrin doesn't mention Tiana in The Princess and the Frog as part of her central argument: because Tiana isn't royalty and the female characters in that movie tell us that women are everywhere and that they do matter. Tiana works not one, but two, jobs and forms a friendship with Lottie. It's not a perfect movie, and I have a lot of issues with the ending, but Tiana does complicate Asher-Perrin's argument.
Most of the characters and films she examines complicate her argument -- and I'm not entirely sure she convinces me, even setting aside my knee-jerk defense of Disney. She does raise some valid points -- certainly, in the case of Tangled, Disney could have made some changes. But to add female characters to films just to make gender-balanced casts and to seemingly dismiss the actions of the individual characters just...seems an overly simplistic solution. Because I guarantee that whatever Disney does, they will be criticized for it.
