I find it pretty hysterical that the folks at Disney are freaking out and changing the names of their movies so they don’t alienate boys who won’t come and see a movie with the name princess in the title. Of course they would never freak out if girls weren’t coming to the movies. Disney believes that The Princess and the Frog did not do the numbers it should have is because boys won’t go see a movie with a princess.
But keep in mind that girls will see a movie with a prince in it because, you know, he is a hero. So even five year olds know that girls in movies aka princesses are not as worthy as princes.
So folks Rapunzel, is now Tangled. Last time I checked the word Rapunzel is not princess. So what’s the problem? I guess it’s more that the titles. It seems that there were too many films with girl leads. We can’t have that. Now that Pixar is fully integrated into Disney it didn’t take too long for the girls to be toned down and the boys to be given higher visibility. Pixar has never been known as a girl focused studio. 
They hadn’t hired a single female director of their films until this year when Brenda Chapman was hired to helm The Princess and the Bow which will be voiced by Reese Witherspoon.
Concluding it had too many animated girl flicks in its lineup, Disney has shelved its long-gestating project The Snow Queen, based on the Hans Christian Andersen story. Snow Queen would have marked the company’s fourth animated film with a female protagonist, following The Princess and the Frog, Tangled and Pixar’s forthcoming The Bear and the Bow, directed by Pixar’s first female director, Brenda Chapman, and starring Reese Witherspoon.
The Disney folks only have themselves to blame. They are the ones who took all the female characters from their films and repackaged them in a pink box with a pink bow and set girls afire. And they made a ton of money. Walk by the Disney store and you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the princesses that are everywhere.
I for one am happy that princesses are banished from the titles. Princesses make moms of girls who don’t want their daughters to be so focused on those types of things crazy. I know, my sister is one of them. She is fighting with all her might to free her daughter, my niece, from the pink box that so many girls live in. (Don’t get her started on the pink Dora softball mitts that the girls play with.) But I don’t want to see strong, smart and independent girls to disappear along with the princess titles, because we know that girls are so much more than princesses.
One good thing that could come out of this is to socialize boys at an early age to see films with feisty female characters — what ever the title. If they start to see and respect girls and women from an early age on film, maybe 20 years later when they are buying a movie ticket on a Friday night they might look at a film with women a bit differently.
Disney Wrings the Pink out of Rapunzel (LA Times)
h/t Margot Magowan
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This really pisses me off. Did anyone at Disney stop and think that both boys and girls don’t go see movies in the theater as often when their parents are unemployed? We are in the midst of a huge recession right now, with people losing their homes right and left. And a movie getting lower than expected grosses is because of the word “princess?” I suspect that they will see much better numbers in the rental market when a family can show several kids a movie for $1-$4 instead of $8-10 per person.
How convenient that the relative underperformance of The Princess and the Frog is blamed on girls and women. I think this is just part of the backlash against women in times of uncertainty and fear.
You made a good point about the princess hard sell. I, too, hate the boxing in of girls using that term (my niece is a full-fledged princess, unfortunately with the full support of her parents). And I’m with you too about Pixar–they’ve come up with beautiful ways to tell stories, but females in their world are just incidental.
And yes, the challenge is to socialize boys to realize(!) that boys and men are NOT the default for the human condition, and that girls and women make up more than half the world.
Excellent post, Melissa.
Anyway, Rapunzel is a really cool name. Tangled sounds like the title of a bad, crappy made-for-TV movie.
Disney has completely lost their goddamn mind. They’re ALWAYS freaking out that girls like their stuff better than boys. And quite frankly, a film that makes over 200 million worldwide shouldn’t be considered a failure – even if it only played to girls. It’s a sexist attitude.
But this is what Disney does: freak out over the lack of boys. They’re doing the same over the Disney XD problem: a channel they launched specifically for boys that does way better with girls. So they freak out despite the fact that the channel is doing ok.
And then they go around making pointless decisions like this one that doesn’t do anything but telegraph their own insecurity.
Fact: If Disney felt they had a leader at the helm that they could trust to make movies that kids would respond to, they wouldn’t be screwing around like this. Too much market research makes bad movies.
Not for nothing, Melissa, but I grew up reading fairy tales and watching the few Disney princess movies that were out at the time and it really didn’t damage the feminist sensibility I realized later in life. I still love fairy tales and the idea of princesses, and am perfectly able to separate fantasy from reality. I feel for your sister, but perhaps she needs to relax a bit about this. I’m sure your niece will turn out every bit the proud feminist that her aunt and (presumably) mom are! How could she not, with such terrific role models?
Disney is doing what Disney does best when one of its animated movies underperformed financially: blame everything but the quality of the movie itself. I didn’t think it was a bad movie, but it’s pretty uneven, especially in the middle, and there are loads of extenuating circumstances at play as well, like the economy, the effectiveness of the marketing, online pirated copies, etc. I have no idea how much relevance any of those have, or what other factors may be at work as well, but just blaming it on the fact that they have a female lead in a movie is hardly the whole scope.
But they did the same thing when they closed their traditional animation studios several years ago, citing that because all the computer animated movies were doing so well at the box office compared to their hand-drawn one, then clearly the medium of traditional animation itself was to blame. They can’t seem to admit that the problem might stem from their story department, and not because there are females and hand-drawn animation cells taking up their running time.
I enjoyed your post Melissa. I wonder why Disney is attributing the underwhelming success of the movie to the “Princess” title – what about the success of the “The Little Mermaid”, “Beauty and the Beast” and “Pocahontas”?
I’m going to go on a limb here, and say I like the title Tangled. But I like it for ideas probably having nothing to do with what Disney would imagine.
What I envision, other than the original story, is to really use the film to address specific issues with women and her hair. It’s been a while since I read the fairytale, so I forgot how it ends. But wouldn’t it be great if they portrayed her as being in major bondage to having such long hair – not literally, but the subtle cultural ones that women go through as well. Then by the end of the film Rapunzel is sporting a nifty short hair cut, and realizes the freedom of not carrying around all that hair. And the prince could love her all the more. So then Tangled wouldn’t just refer to the couple, but to the corrupt history of equating women with beauty, and specifically the beauty of their hair. But alas, this is Disney we’re talking about…
But Disney really is obsessed with boys. They just bought marvel so that they can get a boy audience. Not only is it flawed because girls read comics, but I would say Disney as a company was doing immensely better financially than marvel, so what makes them think acquiring them will provide any substantial profit?
Last thing, I don’t know if seeing strong female roles will help any. The people who greenlight pictures now grew up when? The 80′s? 70′s? Weren’t those times both much better in terms of showing films with strong and prominent female leads? I wonder if something else is going on.
I think the decision is lame to call the movie Tangles.
I think that a movie starring an adventurous woman going out to do cool stuff like find a treasure or fight off evil monsters or invent some machine that saves the world from pollution would be cool to see Disney do.
Entertainment such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Aliens movies are proof that men and women will go see entertainment with female leads.
The Princess and the Frog was good. But, it wasn’t their best. The actual quality of the film might be the reason why it didn’t do well.
Unfortunately, another thing to consider is that many white people will not go see a movie starring a person of color. That might have played a factor as well.
^
I sincerely doubt that’s the case considering Disney has had at least three successful animated movies in their history with ethnic characters in the lead (THE JUNGLE BOOK, ALADDIN and POCHAHONTAS).
Imo the obsession with ‘boy’ fans by Disney I suspect started when the execs looked at the consistent box office returns of Pixar’s output (and the movies, SHREK for instance, that followed in their influential wake) and aside from using it as an excuse to announce the death of traditional animation they increasingly seem to be using it as an excuse to announce the death of female leads in their own output.
What Elayne said.
The princess-in-pink phenomenon got very old very fast where my daughters were concerned. Kids move on, always. I have to say, though, I was troubled by the contempt my girls showed their former playthings — I really felt that they’d internalized the message that overtly girl-aimed fantasies were inferior and wrong. It’s one thing to naturally grow from one fantasy world into a new one, it’s another to take on self-hatred in the bargain. I try to raise them with the belief that they should like what they like and not care what popular opinion says, but it’s hard.
And of course, this all dovetails neatly into Disney’s attitude that boyz must be in the house or the house isn’t worth much. Nice to know it comes from the top.
Maybe The Princess in the Frog did do as well because people are bored of seeing un-revised gender roles in film (mind you it worked in Enchanted). I know it made me mad!
It’s crazy they are renaming Rapunzel to Tangled. Tangled sounds like a horror film. And is her hair ever tangled in the tale? Oh – or does she ‘mess everything up’? We see that a lot.
Too many female protagonists? Never! And also just straight up not true, seems about only every one in 4 or 5 films has a female protagonist. Mind you hearing this in the wake of Alice in Wonderland box office success is interesting timing as well.
“I sincerely doubt that’s the case considering Disney has had at least three successful animated movies in their history with ethnic characters in the lead (THE JUNGLE BOOK, ALADDIN and POCHAHONTAS)”
I’m honestly DYING laughing at you using those three examples.
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