House of the Mouse
Disney Princesses have only been an official thing for 18 years. Why?
… son-in-law Ron Miller recalls [Walt] Disney screening To Kill a Mockingbird for his entire family and declaring, "Boy, that was a helluva picture." Then he lamented, "I wish I could make a picture like that."
Recently, I came across a shocking fact: Disney Princesses, as a brand or an ensemble, are only 18 years old. That’s true! If you’re old enough to drink, you’re at least as old as one of the most venerable canons in little girls’ entertainment. Dinsey Princesses The Brand came out in 2005, and were a selection of Disney’s princess-adjacent characters. As a brand, it’s fascinating - how did Disney manage to rebrand so quickly? What can the House of Mouse teach us about the value of a brand?
Also the Barbie movie comes out next week so it’s not like we can’t get girly.
The Princess Diaries
To date, there’s thirteen official Disney Princesses (which is like a sub-brand of Disney), by order of apparition: Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora (“Sleeping Beauty”), Ariel (the Little Mermaid), Belle (Beauty and the Beast), Jasmine (Aladdin), Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana (Princess and the Frog), Rapunzel (Tangled), Merida (Brave), Moana, and Raya (Raya and the Last Dragon - no, I didn’t know about that one either). They’re also adding a new one called Asha after the movie Wish comes out this year. And no, Anna and Elsa aren’t Disney princesses, they’re part of a separate sub-brand for Frozen - and a similar sub-brand status goes to Tinkerbell and to someone called Elena of Avalor, apparently.
It’s really interesting that the Disney Princess canon feels so established as a timeless brand because it’s both very new and actually wasn’t even the same back in 2005: besides the eight original princesses, they also had Esmeralda from Hunchback of Notre Dame, Jane from Tarzan, and Tinkerbell. The whole concept of a “Disney Princess Cinematic Universe” feels astonishingly obvious today, but it very much wasn’t 20 years ago - this isn’t the Avengers and the Justice League, or even superheroes in general, that have similar settings, similar storylines, and come from the same time; these are very different, completely unrelated movies that came out 50 years apart from each other. The closest thing to this “canon” is classic movie monsters or King Kong and Godzilla, not the MCU or “comic books” in general.
Why those three characters (Tinkerbell, Jane Tarzan, and Esmeralda) got removed is an interesting question, because it’s almost definitely related to the brand. For Tinkerbell, they spun her off into her own thing (a separate Disney sub-brand, Fairies). There is no stated reason for Jane, but the most apparent one is that she’s the same colors as Belle, which is as good a reason as any. But why did Esmeralda go? It can’t be because she’s not a Princess, because neither is Mulan. Nor because she’s controversial, because so is Pocahontas. Jasmine and Aurora aren’t the main characters of their movies either, and she’s no more sexualized than Jasmine or Pocahontas. I also wouldn’t say that her not being popular enough, because Aurora as a standalone princess isn’t very popular either (she spends most of her movie conked out) and she’s still in the lineup. Esmeralda is like properly religious, but so do Pocahontas and Moana. She’s realistic-ish, but so is Pocahontas, or Tiana. And almost all the original stories are squicky as hell, so her being a sex worker and also part of some really racist plot points in Notre Dame de Paris is probably not very relevant here.
Anna and Elsa not being part of the official canon is another interesting case point - why did Disney spin off Frozen into its own subbrand, because it’s not like it had an IP dispute or something. And Frozen is pretty well integrated - most collections of Disney Princess stuff also has Anna and Elsa, in the way they sometimes throw in Tinkerbell or Mirabel from Encanto. Obviously there’s a lot of contrived reasons (they’re Queens, not princesses) but those are mostly made up - I mean Mulan isn’t even a princess and Aurora had 5 minutes of screentime, you could fit anyone you wanted in. It could be that them being a package deal makes them an awkward fit for a bunch of individual princesses, but the likeliest reason why they’re not included is scale - while some princesses are more popular than others, Anna and Elsa are fathoms above the rest. Frozen is a massive cashcow for Disney, and has been for a decade, in a way that very few individual princesses are. Some estimate that Arendelle’s GDP, so to speak, would run head to head with Mickey Mouse himself. A rising tide may lift all boats but a tsunami like this will just push them under.
Fans (?) say that there are a lot of rules for who gets to be a Princess, but those seem to be made up and mostly come from observing what the princesses have in common - and there’s basically no criterion that explains why Anna and Elsa aren’t princesses while Mulan or Pocahontas get to be, without including any riffraff like Kida from Atlantis. The reason is ultimately probably that Hunchback of Notre Dame doesn’t fit into the Disney Princess canon as a brand, and no amount of trying will get Disney to feel bad for its nonsensical princess selection criteria - and Frozen being kept out mostly responds to this same logic: it works better separately.
The happiest place on Earth
Why doesn’t Disney address the direct to video sequels in its materials? A lot of those have daughters for the princesses, at the very least. Well, it’s mostly because they’re not especially good - the Aladdin sequel couldn’t even get Robin Williams back (because he was in the middle of an extremely public feud with Disney over breach of contract allegations involving how much advertising the Genie was in. This got resolved by shoveling money at Williams until he relented).
Disney is not wrong about this - brands really are everything. Research shows that consumer preferences for brands are long-lasting and built on past experience, meaning that people consistently like certain things they good memories of, and that it is largely driven by “brand capital”, as in how much the company making the products turns itself into a brand. On the firm side, having a good brand has benefits since it reduces the elasticity of demand (i.e. consumers are less price sensitive), which means that prices can be or remain higher. Additionally, brands themselves are considered valuable due to these higher cash flows, resulting in equity gains. For consumers, trusted brands have value too - consumers might enjoy the same product more because of its positive associations (think Disney World vs Epcot), brands might have a built up reputation because of their quality, and (relatedly), brands make searching for products easier. This last factor is crucial: the costs of searching for products are pretty considerable, in ways that make it very very convenient to have a useful shorthand for what’s good and what’s bad.
Thus, brand management is a big concern for any company, and doubly so for Disney “brand integrity” is what the House of Mouse is known for. Preserving the integrity of the Disney brand has always been a top concern, to the point that they even hesitated to release any of their movies on VHS because it was thought it would devalue Disney as an experience - and when they did they started with “lower rung” outings like Pinocchio or Bambi, which sold like gangbusters and changed corporate’s mind. Maintaing its prestige while monetizing it was a big question for 90s Disney, especially for the older princesses - flog too much Cinderella merch and she won’t be special, push her too little and there won’t be a Cinderella to profit from. This concern for integrity was a big reason why the Disney Princess label, while seemingly obvious in today’s day and age, was actually an extremely controversial leap back in 2005 - many at Disney felt that lumping all the princesses together, sans content, would devalue each of them as specific characters.
The value of the brand is centered not just directly as entertainment (many Disney shows are turned, quite profitably, into live spectacles), but especially in its largest cash cow, licensed merchandise. Merchandise is a pretty new phenomenon: gendered toys are something from the last 30 years mostly, and (allegedly) Disney costumes were invented when an executive going to Disney on Ice with his family noticed how many girls were wearing knockoff or homemade princess costumes. The mouse corporation is zealous with its IP precisely because it wants good associations with itself through products, which is usually priced at a premium but not outrageously - expensive enough to turn a good profit but not expensive enough that parents are going to recoil. Its movies are all in brand, which is why the bad ones have been memory-holed: nobody wants Cinderella 3: A Twist In Time to be the face of the company.
A helluva movie
Walt Disney was, supposedly, a huge fan of the 1962 film To Kill A Mockingbird. He held private screenings of the film at his house, and said he wished he could make a movie like that. He solidified Disney into a beloved brand, but the company also branded itself into a corner - and had very little luck producing content between Disney’s death shortly after those remarks until the 1980s and 1990s.
Disney being the sole major film studio to have its own brand identity (as a “family brand” with cartoons) was a major issue for it after Walt Disney’s death, and the studio struggled mightily, both creatively and financially, until the 1980s. While originally the animation department was going to be shut down entirely, a series of strong performances and megahits got the company to keep it open - and movies like Beauty and the Beast received major acclaim to boot, up to a Best Picture nomination. Disney’s CEO Michael Eisner took note, putting together more and more ambitious projects (including Pocahontas, which was just a cynical ploy to secure an Oscar win). Eisner also gambled enormously with the brand, starting with putting the Disney catalogue on VHS and following with direct-to-video sequels of animated classics, a string of sucky live action remakes that you’ve never heard of for a reason (the OG live action Cruella played by Glenn Close was the last gasp of this), and other major endeavors such as Eurodisney.
As a matter of fact, these “cheapenings of the brand” were a major reason why Eisner was pushed out of the company by members of the Disney family in 2005 (part of this involved members of the animation department leaving the company for Dreamworks and, supposedly, making the Shrek villain of Lord Farquaad look like Eisner). The brand continued in crisis for another five years or so, and didn’t really get its footing until sometime into the 2010s - with yet another change to its brand identity.
Eisner, who wrote a letter to Paramount shareholders proclaiming that he only cared about profits back in the 1980s, was widely seen as someone who would pursue profits even at the detriment of Disney’s brand - and that is why he had to go. His replacement, Bob Iger, is/was also a ruthless capitalist, but he also presided over far more ambitious bets - big, safe purchases of merchandiseable IP. Disney now owns Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic, The Simpsons, The Muppets, Pixar, etc.
“I’m a damsel, and I’m in distress” - Megara (Hercules)
Iger’s purchase of “boy” IP like Star Wars and Marvel helps with a major issue the brand has: the gender skew of its products. Until Disney devoured the entire entertainment landscape like some sort of Hindu deity, the brand was mostly aimed at little girls.
In fact, the initial Disney Princess brand was as much a cynical ploy to sell merchandising as it was a cynical ploy to get little girls hooked on Disney, especially since most of the movies in their catalogue were popular with either grandmothers or mothers specifically. Children’s toys and entertainment weren’t really gendered until the 1980s and especially 1990s: there were things “for girls” and “for boys”, but the kind of aggressive half pink half blue toy shop layout we see today is also relatively new - and is, of course, a cynical ploy to sell more toys. The Disney brand was extremely skewed towards girls, and its merchandising even moreso - there were attempts to create a male equivalent, in both “Heroes” and “Adventurers” (a similarly strange ensemble of male characters).
The Disney Princess brand had a very strong identity at first, associated with traditionally feminine values and divorced from the context of the movies: all of its dolls were Barbie-style fashion dolls made by Mattel, and most of the material focused on a more delicate and “girly” presentation of even active princesses like Mulan. Originally, this was positively received, with the ensemble being a “good example” for girls - compared to more overtly sexual dolls (????) like Bratz. The 2000s were so weird. But with the lash came the backlash (?) and there was a pretty extensive series of controversies: race in Princess and the Frog (a movie set in the Jim Crow South… eesh), the outdated gender roles, the weirdly sexist ideas of how women play, and then how Merida from Brave (and Mulan) got “girlified” when they got added to the lineup.
This slew of criticism of the actual products came among a wider societal reevaluation of the Disney Princess stories, which was generally not positive and was generally focused on how non-feminist they were - from a largely white, very surface-level, very heteronormative way of understanding the stories1 Regardless, these critiques stuck, and they started to manifest more and more into the actual content Disney was putting out - first by making Tangled turned into an actually entertaining movie and not a more traditional vehicle called Rapunzel, then endless meta commentary about princesses in Brave and Moana, and then all of Frozen - like, all of it.
Overall this was another identity crisis for the brand of Disney princesses, because what it meant to be a good example for young girls changed (for the better, I’d say) very very quickly and the company was stuck in the middle. Besides the actual contents and plots of new movies, Disney also changed toy tie-ins from Mattel (i.e. the Barbie company) to Hasbro, which mostly made action figures.2 The last source of commentary on the Princess brand, and on Old Disney as a whole, came from Live Action Remakes: a series of not always live action, not always remakes that updated Disney content - starting with Maleficent, and now becoming so widespread Mufasa, Simba’s dad, is getting his own movie. The remakes, besides expanding on the plot and tacking on a musical number or two, are infamous for tacking on superficial feminist plotlines (or for changing the entire movie to suit a certain autocracy’s censors and also adding a shoutout to what is tantamount to the Gestapo) to deflect from criticism.
Conclusion
So, overall, it seems that being a brand with a recognizable identity has benefits and demerits - especially during times of rapid cultural shifts around the very objects the brand centers itself around. Disney Princesses are relatively new, and a smart business idea, but also very very vulnerable to changes in culture around gender. Woke Disney is not an ideological project to turn kids onto Horkheimer and Shulamith Firestone, but rather, a cynical business move to garner good publicity and merchandise sales for the largest media conglomerate in the world. Like I’ve said before, go woke and not necessarily go broke.3
This is to say, all of Mulan but also specifically the hot guy have been bisexual, The Little Mermaid has largely been appropriated as a trans story, Ursula was based on numerous drag performers, and one of the writers for most of the music of this Disney era, Howard Ashman, was gay and died of AIDS during production of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. So it’s not like there’s not a reasonable concern here.
Also I do hope they make a Hunchback of Notre Dame movie again because it was mostly about Wokeness being good, and also about racism against the Romani. But fun fact, the goat sidekick was actually in Victor Hugo’s original novel.
Thank you for a wonderful analysis!