Flawed fairy tales

Disney's portrayal of women is being questioned

Next month Walt Disney’s most iconic creation — Mickey Mouse — will be completing its 90th birthday, but for the Walt Disney Company, celebrations have already started. Popular global brands such as Vero Moda and Volkswagen have come up with customised merchandise and discounts. Beats by Dre has launched special-edition wireless headphones depicting Mickey and designer Satya Paul has even worked on saris with Mickey’s silhouette. However, quite removed from this celebratory spirit, Walt Disney is also receiving a bad press for the portrayal of women in its princess movies.

Recently, two well-known Hollywood actresses expressed their deep concern about Disney’s fairy-tale movies depicting their female leads in an inferior light. Keira Knightley, who has often played feisty characters in her movies, has said that she has “banned” her three-year-old daughter from watching children’s movies because they send out the wrong message. Ms Knightley singled out Disney’s Cinderella “because, you know, she waits around for a rich guy to rescue her” and Little Mermaid because even though the songs are great but “do not give your voice up for a man. Hello”. Another actress, Kristen Bell, was quoted by the Parents magazine, criticising Snow White, especially the part where the prince kisses the princess without her consent. What lends further heft to these concerns is the context in which they are being voiced. Since last year, when the #metoo revelations hit social media globally, more and more aspects of everyday life have come under scrutiny.
 

Disney’s movies have, in fact, received some criticism in the past as researchers studied the changing manner in which its movies depicted the female leads. For instance, as against the Disney princess movies in the classic era — Snow White (1937), Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959) — when women spoke as much as or more than the male characters, the movies in the modern era starting with Little Mermaid (1989) and all the way through including Beauty and the Beast (1991), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1998), male characters spoke, on an average, three times more than the princesses even when the movies were about the princesses.

Another interesting analysis by PBS Digital found that as the years have rolled by, Disney princesses have looked more and more like kids. In other words, in the earliest movies, princesses’ body shape was quite similar to an adult woman. But over time, their heads became bigger compared to their bodies and their eyes got bigger compared to their head. So Elsa in Frozen (2013) ended up having the body ratio of an eight-year-old while Moana (2016) had the body ratio of a four-year-old. This child-like appearance presumably makes these princesses more “cute” but arguably it also undermines the way young girls see womanhood.  

While much of this discussion is about Disney’s depiction and what ails with it, yet the broader point — about inappropriate signalling especially to young girls about their role in the society and indeed their own life — perhaps applies in equal measure to most fairy tales. And while it might be easy for any society to criticise one movie company or one publication, the truth is there are many questionable aspects to the way women are represented in other forms of popular culture including religion and religious texts.

At a time when the Indian society is just waking up to women fighting back against abuse, it is important to realise that the next generation of women need not be enfeebled by unthinkingly serving them the same stories and fairy tales that the current generation finds faulty. In this context, efforts such as a spoof of Snow White — titled No Consent, No Fairytale — by Amnesty International Canada, which shows the Prince being reprimanded by a Frog and an Owl for kissing Snow White without her consent, are steps in the right direction. Or as Ms Knightley wishes to teach her daughter: “Rescue yourself, obviously.”