Disney isn't exactly known
for its most diverse range of characters. With a grand total of 24 non-white
main characters in its major feature films, not including animals of which
there were 61 and 59 white main characters. Of the 144 characters I counted,
16% were non-white. With a total of 4 main characters with mental illnesses, no
main characters with a physical disability, you start to wonder are Disney
changing or sticking to their formula of Blonde blue eyed girl gets saved by
the man?
Disney certainly started
off in the Male saving the Female formula, with the 5 of the first 6 being a
man saving the woman, with the exception of Beauty and the Beast; Technically
Belle saves Adam by loving him but he trapped her and whatnot, not the best
female empowerment. Their lives appeared to revolve around some sort of
suffering they did nothing to change about and then get out of the suffering by
finding and marrying a man of some sort. But after these 6, we have
Pocahontas and Mulan. These Women are interesting for two reasons. Both are
People of Colour and women who save their 'man'. Pocahontas, released in
1995, follows Pocahontas who was going to have to marry Kocoum from her Native
American tribe but then falls in love with the Englishman John Smith.
Kocoum gets mad and gets killed which starts a war between the Natives and
the English, and Pocahontas saves John Smith from execution. It's a shame that
Pocahontas is underrated as a Disney film, she decides she doesn't want to
marry this man, falls in love of her own accord and then saves her love. Not
only is she strong and independent, she is smart and teaches John Smith about
the important things in life. She goes against her Father and her tribe to love
this English man, who the Native Americans hate. It was a great stepping stone
for reversing gender roles in children's media.
Skip forward 3 years, and
we have the iconic Mulan. Plot of Mulan, Mulan gets sent to matchmakers, messes
up matchmaking, and brings dishonour on family. Father gets called to imperial
army to fight against Huns, he's too old. She takes his place in the dead of
night, joins the army. After a period of failing at being a solider, she
figures it out with her own intelligence. She almost single-handedly
defeats the Hun army but is discovered as a girl and is left in the mountains
in disgrace. Goes to capital and defeats Huns again and saves the whole of
China. And after all that the general follows her home to apologise and gets
invited for dinner. There is no kiss, not a hug, but a simple invitation to
dinner. She doesn’t gain a husband,
captured a suitor by being herself, a woman who doesn’t take no passes, a woman
who fought for her country and family’s honour and a woman who broke a patriarchal
law to save her elderly father. Mulan is the Woman who didn’t have the attitude
to fit into the perfect bride formula, the soldier that didn’t have the body
shape to fit the perfect soldier formula. So she created her own criteria for
herself. A person with the body of a female, the attitude of a man and the
aspirations of a human being. She broke the female gender role in a society
where superstition and discrimination occurred against women every single day
of their lives. Their role was to bear sons. This film came out in 1998, the
turn of the century, things were getting better for Women, but this film was a
little late to the party, with the equal pay act starting in the early 70s. But
this was one of the first great representations of strong women in the media
and is still an amazing representation of women, especially with the recent win
for the sexual discrimination of women in china.
Lilo and stitch was a
strange film in the Disney formula with the idea of a dog like alien coming to
earth learning the power of family love it certainly wasn’t the princess
romance film they had shown before then.
But Lilo and Stitch showed something different, it showed that a young
female with an older female as a parental figure could carry a whole film without
a male human main character to accompany them along their journey. The whole
film was about the bonds of family, with a slight side of romance from Nani and
David, but the whole film wasn’t centred on them. It was centred on little
Lilo. The girl who fed peanut butter sandwiches to a fish that control the
weather, when the weather killed her parents, the little girl who was called a
freak, but she remains strong throughout thanks to Stitch. He helps her as she
helps him. She teaches him the rules of living on earth while he doesn’t want
to know about it, he wants to get away from this island to go destroy cities.
But Lilo with her quirky attitude and strange insight into life sees the good
in him and helps him adjust to life on the island with her. She doesn’t change
to suit him; she changes him to suit her, making him a better being than he was
before.
Another example of the
woman changing the man to make him better, although this man isn’t the blank
slate stitch is. Tiana is a strong and hard working woman, who gives up all her
time to get her restaurant and what is she met by racism and sexism when she
clearly can achieve what she strives to. And she holds strong in the face of
that racism, she doesn’t hate the racists, the people who said she couldn’t,
she just bounces back with 10 times the force and strive so they can’t deny her
offer for the restaurant, which does coincidentally involve an alligator but that’s
here nor there. She knows what she wants and sacrifices everything to get it.
While Prince Naveen is a spoilt, pampered who doesn’t know how to keep it in
his pants. She doesn’t simply compromise with his nasty attitude and love him
nonetheless, she falls in love with him, because he is what she isn’t and he is
willing to fix his flaws to get her and keep her. He was willing to get a job
to help her. He can do nothing while she does absolutely everything. He starts
to do more for her, like he should, and he learns. He is in the passive royalty
position in this relationship, while she has the male centred drive and determination
in the relationship, while still being herself the beautiful confident Tiana. The
princess and the frog have the gender roles from earlier films completely
reversed and that especially for their first African American princess, it was
the perfect time to completely flip the roles.
Disney has certainly
improved throughout the year, with their Princess growing from weak passive
women of royalty to a diverse range of active strong women of all classes. They’ve
taken a big leap over the years and it shows. With Frozen, the latest set of Disney
princesses and Queen, the strength of these two women really shows, with Women
and Men identifying more and more with these women than with Snow white or
Cinderella whose lives seemed to revolve around getting married or just finding
a man. So in this sense, Disney has really diversified its range of gender
roles for both women and men.
