Passivity is Passing; A Disney Story Most Americans are familiar with the Disney Princesses and their stories, but what most fail to notice in the early Princesses - including Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty - is the passivity of their characters. Snow White, for example, was a docile woman who waited for the male characters to take action. It is a recurring theme in these early movies that the Princesses are passive and the villain is an active character. As Disney progressed and made it’s second generation of Princess films the theme of passive heroins is dramatically lacking, unlike the first generation of films. A good example of this change is the film Pocahontas, which has a active heroin who displays wisdom and strength.
PROJECTOR: My focus question. Presenter: my presentation will be questioning how women are portrayed within Disney films, and whether Disney will ever be able to embrace feminism. My focus films are Tangled, Mulan and Cinderella and referencing Snow White, the little mermaid and 101 Dalmatians. PROJECTOR: screen grabs of various characters either showing the ‘damsel’ or an ‘evil’ character. These will include the evil step mother and Cinderella from Cinderella, Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians, Mulan, Snow White and the evil step mother from Snow White.
A superficial reading of her might cause one to think of her then as a complex character. However, a deeper look shows passivity, shallowness and importance relying mostly on outward characteristics. A student in class likened Phoebe to a ‘Disney Princess” and it gave a handy label to how I saw her. A princess in Disney movies commonly displays few traits besides good looks, a singing voice and a desire to change themselves for a man, not to mention commonly needing rescuing by said man. They often show an inordinate naivety about the world tending to land them in trouble.
Both stories, therefore, share a common idea that good overcomes evil. The two variations of the fairy tale of Cinderella have similar moral guidance as the original version of the tale, but the stories are different from what people expect. Each of the two stories touches on different issues like, for instance magic, spiritual, outcomes and miracles which are based on the beliefs and culture of its specific or respective society or community. Whatever the version may be, the fairy tale of Cinderella will continue to be a source of entertainment that will
Some Disney movies are filled sexism stereotyping such as “Beauty and the Beast”, “Aladdin”, and “Snow White” just to mention a few. Have we really moved past the sexist stereotypes that marked Disney's earliest films? Although Disney movies are beautiful to watch, they are are portraying harmful stereotypes. We all girls, dreamed to be a princess from a fairy tale. Who did not?
Yet Dorothy’s goal in going to Oz is so the Wizard can help her get back home. Dorothy is also very black-and-white when it comes to opinions. She either believes all witches are bad, or that all witches are good. And yet she is still tricked by Glinda. She never really makes her own decisions.
Unlike Romeo, Mercutio does not believe that dreams can foretell future events. He suggests that the fairy Queen Mab brings dreams to humans as a result of men's worldly desires and anxieties. To him, the fairies are merely granting carnal wishes as they gallop by. The repetition of 'O'er' when describing Queen Mab's actions are used to emphasize this point. By Mercutio’s same logic, lovers desire love and so dream of love, lawyers desire money and so dreams of fees and so on.
One of the obstacles is to go into the fairy world and get Io Dust for Nightshade. Nightshade is a witch who lives in Deep Fell and uses magic to create illusions. Willow tries to convince Ben not to go but Ben insisted: ‘That doesn’t change anything, Willow. I still have to go. But I’ll be careful, I promise.
Bettelheim Is Wrong In his essay entitled “Cinderella: A Story of Sibling Rivalry and Oedipal Conflicts,” Bruno Bettelheim argues that the popularity of the Cinderella folktale, especially among children, stems from children’s subconscious insecurities and emotions about real-life sibling rivalries. According to Bettelheim, the aspect of a “degraded heroine winning out over her siblings her abused her” appeals to children’s “agonies and hopes” in the face their own sibling and familial rivalries (Bettelheim). While his reasoning is partially correct, the core conflict in Cinderella is not sibling-based. It is much broader, and much more heroic than a simple sibling rivalry in which Cinderella prevails. Cinderella, in any variation of the folktale, is the story of an underdog, mistreated by everyone close to her but tolerant and patient in the face of hatred.
In traditional fairy stories one starts with the helpless maiden, especially with Sleeping Beauty. The audience knows that she will be rescued and a happily ever after will be following it straight after. However, one intresting pattern that develops in fairytales is that the rescuer of the bewitched person has himself or herself been bewitched or persecuted. Jane Yolen uses the name Briar Rose for another name for sleeping beauty. There have been many versions of the tale, which not many people know about, and they haven't always been for little children, they were more scarier and ruder than the disney - style and were told to a wider audience.Yolen has taken the story of sleeping Beauty which is (Briar Rose) she developed the parrallel stories of two women: Becca searching for her grandmother's story, and Gemma's story in the extermination camp of chelmmo and afterwards with the partisans of Poland during WWII.