Disney animated movies, their princesses, and everyone else

Abstract

In April 2021, The Walt Disney Company (Disney) announced the Ultimate Princess Celebration, ‘a year-long event spotlighting the courage and kindness these Disney heroines inspire in fans all around the world’ (Deitchman, 2021). Princesses have remained an important element of Disney’s identity and the movies they create. Broadening research beyond these characters and examining a larger sample demonstrated distinctions in the characteristics present in Official Disney Princess (ODP) movies, Actual Princess (AP) movies, and the 45 in the full catalog (All-Movies) that are or share characteristics with Disney Princess Movies. This article compares the race, class, and gender of the protagonist and antagonist as well as other story elements of 45 animated or partially animated movies that typify Disney’s ‘Classics Period’ between 1937 and 2017 across those three groups. This work examines the ways in which the ODP and AP are different from the overall catalog and violate some of the Disney norms to which we are accustomed while fully embracing others. The research found that while the Official Princess movies had more racial diversity in the main characters than the overall catalog, for example, they also had more stereotypical female villains, more magic, and more romance. Acknowledging these divisions can lead to more robust research where a research sample can be critically collected based on the topic of interest. This article provides a foundation for those examinations.