When new images emerged of the Polynesian girl at the center of Moana over the summer, many took instant notice of the heroine’s solid-looking, realistic body. “That was a deliberate attempt, partly inspired by wanting her to be different,” co-director John Musker told BuzzFeed in July. “We wanted her to be an action hero.”
Although Musker saw Moana’s muscular body as a mark of her difference, some Disney fans might have heard something familiar in his declaration. “I wanted a real girl,” Brave’s writer-director Brenda Chapman told the New York Times in 2012 of the arrow-slinging Merida. “Not one that very few could live up to with tiny, skinny arms, waist, and legs. I wanted an athletic girl.” Brave, she said, upended fairy-tale tropes.
Fourteen years earlier, Ming-Na Wen, the voice of Mulan, told USA Today that her character was “the antithesis of Cinderella. She doesn’t wear a gown. She wears armor.”
Asserting that a Disney heroine has broken ranks with her predecessors is a tradition that dates back to 1989 with Ariel, the defiant princess in The Little Mermaid. In 1990, Ron Clements — Musker’s co-director on both Moana and The Little Mermaid, along with other Disney movies — told the Scripps Howard News Service that Ariel’s red hair shocked some people. “But we felt it was important,” he explained. “It made her different.” Saying this princess is not like the ones who came before her has become almost as essential to the Disney princess formula as an animal sidekick or a parent who just doesn’t understand.
A very early Moana and Maui by Moana story and development artist Sue Nichols.
Courtesy of Sue Nichols; Walt Disney Co. / Courtesy Everett Collection
But Mulan’s masculine aesthetic and Moana’s athletic proportions may not have made it to the screen without the women behind the scenes who, sometimes quite literally, shaped them. “The women involved in the film, our producer and some [others], were … pushing, ‘Let’s not have her be a wasp-thin woman. Let’s have her be a more realistic body shape and feel like she’s not going to be blown over by a strong wind,’” Musker said of Moana in the same July interview with BuzzFeed.
The truth, of course, is that no one princess has completely thrown out the royal playbook, but ever since Ariel, each one has bent the rules. And it’s increasingly been women at Disney who have pushed for change — making the characters smarter, braver, and more independent. While Disney internally debated whether princess movies only appeal to girls, a class of women began to rise at the studio to challenge the very nature of what it means to be a princess, and to remake her in the image of a 21st-century woman.
Brenda Chapman in her home studio.
Jeff Singer for BuzzFeed News
Between Walt Disney’s death in 1966 and the late 1980s, the animation wing of his company slumped. But as the influential animators hired in the ’20s and ’30s — the Nine Old Men, as they were called — began to retire (and, in some cases, died), a new but still mostly white and male group of artists took their place and brought with them a fresh approach to female characters.
In the 1980s, there were still very few women in animation with enough power to effect major change at Disney. Through most of the decade, Disney had no female story artists to plan out scenes visually before they were sent to animators. There was a pipeline problem: The studio lost seven female artists to a Disney defector’s new company, Don Bluth Productions, in 1979. One woman among the exodus, Lorna Cook, explained that Bluth had been one of the few people at Disney at that time who actively promoted women.
Chapman's iconic shot in The Little Mermaid.
Walt Disney Pictures
But early on during production of The Little Mermaid in 1987, Disney took a tiny step toward gender balance — one that paid immense dividends at the box office. Chapman was hired to work on the film fresh out of art school, initially as a story trainee. She recalled being dismissively told by the man who hired her that she was getting the job “because you’re a woman”; later, she became a leader in Disney’s story department, head of story on the blockbuster The Lion King, and eventually, the writer and director of Brave.
On The Little Mermaid, she was the only woman out of seven credited storyboard artists. As the newest person in the room, Chapman was assigned to sketch out a section of the “Part of Your World” reprise with Ariel watching Prince Eric on the beach; the artist drew a wave crashing behind the smitten teen, which is now perhaps the most iconic shot in the movie.
“If it was the Nine Old Men, Ariel would have been very different,” said Kathy Zielinski, who animated Ariel’s sea-witch nemesis Ursula. The titular mermaid is a tenacious young woman who leaves the sea to pursue a human prince: In contrast to her uncommonly accommodating predecessors Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty’s Aurora, the redhead in the clamshell bikini was defined by curiosity and rebellion, operating in defiance of her father. According to Mermaid story artist Ed Gombert, “It was a different time from Walt’s time, so I think there was a natural instinct to treat her differently.”
Animator Kathy Zielinski.
Emma McIntyre for BuzzFeed News
The Little Mermaid became one of the top-grossing movies of 1989 and won two Academy Awards for its music, despite Disney’s top brass worrying it would only appeal to little girls, as James B. Stewart reported in DisneyWar. The film was by and large a triumph, but the New York Times quoted director Musker saying he’d been “given a hard time by some women because Ariel is not complete without a prince.” Likewise, the Los Angeles Times reported that Clements and Musker, who were unavailable to be interviewed for this story, were put on the defensive at a screening at the University of Southern California: An audience member questioned them about the meager opportunities for women behind the scenes.
Disney brought in screenwriter Linda Woolverton for its next princess film, Beauty and the Beast, a lush musical about the romance between a bookworm and the misunderstood prince who holds her hostage in his castle. “There was no mandate from on-high to counteract the finger-pointing,” Woolverton — who’s still a top writer at Disney — told the Los Angeles Times around Beauty and the Beast’s release in 1992. “But I think the studio felt confident that, as a woman, I wouldn’t write a sexist character.”
Woolverton, along with Chapman and lyricist and executive producer Howard Ashman, shaped Belle into a multifaceted female heroine. The screenwriter’s vision demanded a greater sensitivity to gender issues. Zielinski, who was at Disney at the time but didn’t work on Beauty and the Beast, remembered a male story artist requesting input on the scene in which Belle resigns herself to life as a prisoner. “‘Would you cry if you were in this situation?’” she recalled him asking her. (Yes, Zielinski told him. But no blubbering.) Chapman drew storyboards for the scene in which Belle bandages the Beast and challenges his cruelty; the Beast falls silent after she angrily tells him, “You should learn to control your temper!” When Chapman presented the boards depicting this confrontation, the 10 men who were also on the story team heartily approved.
The Beast and Belle in Beauty and the Beast.
Buena Vista Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
But not all the boundary-pushing went so smoothly. “Every single line of [Belle’s] dialogue was a battle,” Woolverton told Entertainment Weekly in May 2016. As opposed to Cinderella, who cheerfully accepts her fate as a servant to her harsh stepmother, Belle shouts in her captor’s face. “You have to understand that the whole idea of the heroine-victim was baked into the cake,” Woolverton said. “I’d been through the women’s movement in the ’60s and ’70s and I definitely couldn’t buy that this smart, attractive young girl, Belle, would be sitting around and waiting for her prince to come. That she was someone who suffers in silence and only wants a pure rose? That she takes all this abuse but is still good at heart? I had a hard time with that.”
Sue Nichols, who worked in visual development on Beauty and the Beast, wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News that it was her idea to give Belle a female confidante, who eventually took the form of Mrs. Potts; she explained that the young woman needed female support to “eventually feel safe enough to fall in love” with the Beast. Lorna Cook, who returned to Disney after years of working with Don Bluth, shot footage of herself to reference when she was animating Belle’s tender, hesitating caresses of a transformed Beast at the end of the film. As the one woman on the seven-person team that animated Belle, she explained that she was comfortable drawing “the female form.”
“Belle is a feminist,” Woolverton declared to the Los Angeles Times, quite boldly for 1992. She explained that she “wanted a woman of the ’90s.” Belle is a voracious reader who longs for more than her “provincial life.” The villain, Gaston, is a churlish misogynist who pursues Belle romantically over her objections. It’s still a love story, yes, but Belle was a step in the proud spinster direction. And it was women who pushed her there.
Animator and storyboard artist Lorna Cook.
Emma McIntyre for BuzzFeed News
The next two Disney heroines — Jasmine and Pocahontas — were somewhat more troubled. Aladdin and its princess, Jasmine, drew reprobation from Arab groups for visually whitewashing the heroes and making the evil characters look and sound more “ethnic,” among other problems. Rebecca Rees, a story artist on the film, recalled no effort to hire Arab women (or men) to work as artists on Aladdin. But still, Jasmine seeks a husband on her own terms and against the wishes of her father, the sultan. (Though Jasmine is in the Disney Princess pantheon despite being the love interest and not the protagonist, not every princess discussed in this story is actual royalty, nor necessarily part of the official Disney Princess brand.)
Even more so than with Ariel, we see Jasmine’s royal father coddling and stifling her; we also see her rail against male entitlement. As Aladdin, her father, and Jafar discuss her marriage prospects, she yells, “How dare you? All of you, standing around deciding my future? I am not a prize to be won.” Rees, one of the two women among the 16 story artists credited on Aladdin, portrayed the conflicting father-daughter impulses visually in a garden scene where the sultan places a dove back into a cage full of birds, and then Jasmine impulsively opens the cage and watches the flock fly off into the wider world. “I had the idea, Maybe we could just show that she wants freedom,” Rees told BuzzFeed News. For all its faults, Aladdin depicts a woman who wants to be self-determining and — like the Genie — “free.”
Pocahontas is the first Disney Princess movie to end without a wedding, actual or imminent.
Nichols, the second female story artist on Aladdin, boarded the scene where Jasmine seduces Jafar as an act of self-defense. Jafar expects the Genie to force Jasmine’s love through magic, and she plays along to create a distraction, riffing on the “cute little gaps” in the villain’s teeth to keep his eyes on her and off Aladdin’s attempt to save her. “This was a smart lady,” Rees said. “She knew what she needed to do.” Ultimately, the “prince” does rescue her, but he does it with her help.
To an even greater degree than Aladdin, Pocahontas tells the story of a smart, capable young woman who flouts convention: The 17th-century heroine falls in love with a colonist and saves him from execution, staving off an armed conflict along the way. However, the film tells its story through stereotypes and historical distortions. The film's Powhatan consultant, Shirley Little Dove Custalow McGowan, famously disavowed Pocahontas. “My people are concerned because our story has already been changed so much,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1995, saying she’d been misled by the production. The credited story artists on the film were all men, and none were Native.
There was also only one woman on a team of 17 that animated the main character, but the unglamorous and yet essential Pocahontas cleanup crew — which takes rough drawings and turns them into animation — was overwhelmingly female. As Emily Jiuliano, a key assistant in cleanup on the film, explained, “We would preserve the best of [the animators’] artwork and make it better.” Cleanup catches a lot of errors. In particular, Jiuliano remembered fixing a scene in which Pocahontas would breathe in, and her ample chest would rise, and then — instead of descending — would just keep rising. The cleanup crew made sure her breasts stayed firmly attached.
Despite its perpetuation of pernicious myths about colonization, Pocahontas is still noteworthy as the first Disney Princess movie to end without a wedding, actual or imminent. Instead, Pocahontas chooses her community over her man. When an injured John Smith asks her to come to Europe with him, she declines, and the film ends with her watching him sail out of her life.
Having learned something from its poor track record on racial representation, Disney made some pointedly different choices for 1998’s Mulan, a movie about a young woman who cross-dresses to serve in the Chinese army in her father’s place. Producer Pam Coats told BuzzFeed News the studio made a push to hire members of the ethnic group they were depicting onscreen. In particular, visionary character designer Chen-Yi Chang and screenwriter Rita Hsiao helped to round out the crew. Nichols, who again worked in visual development, wrote in an email, “By the time we started developing Mulan, we were actually asked to make sure the ethnic races were visible in our designs so as not to offend our audience.”
Caroline Hu, who worked on the visual development team, said it was a struggle to design a character who had to be feminine and pretty and still pass for a male soldier. “She has to wear a man’s armor,” Hu said of Mulan. “She was a girl that had to live in a man’s world. So she was not a feminine character. How do you still keep that girl female while she’s doing these manly things?”
Mulan in her warrior wardrobe.
Buena Vista Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
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