If you’ve ever been out searching for a gender-specific birthday present for a young girl, you’re no doubt aware of the impact Disney and its bevy of animated features have had on generations of young women. The “Disney Princess” archetype has endured for decades, fromSnow WhitetoAladdintoFrozen, and it shows no signs of slowing down. However, recently a group of researchers decided to look a little closer at the Disney Princess oeuvre, specifically at the roles of women vs. men in the features.
First let’s take a look at the data. Perthe Washington Post, linguistsCarmen FoughtandKaren Eisenhauerhave been “working on a project to analyze all the dialogue from the Disney princess franchise,” and their results find that in the original Disney Princess films—Snow White,Cinderella, andSleeping Beauty—the amount of dialogue spoken by women and men was either 50-50 or skewed towards women. But in the movies from 1989-1999, however, men took the bevy of the dialogue.
InThe Little Mermaid, men speak 68% of the time; inBeauty and the Beast, 71% of the time; inAladdin, 90% of the time; inPocahontas, 76% of the time; and inMulan, 77% of the time with Mulan counting as a woman.
The trend changes with the modern era, as women have 52% of the lines inTangled, 74% of the lines inBrave, and 59% of the lines inFrozen, but the researchers are suggested that after the initial trio of Disney Princess films, when the archetype was resurrected withLittle Mermaid, Disney went male-skewing despite the lead characters being female.
But I’d argue that this data alone doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, men speak 77% of the time inMulan, butMulanis the story of a woman embedding herself with a group of male warriors and proving she’s just as good—if not better—than them.Of coursemen are going to have most of the dialogue in that film, because it’s the story of a woman invading a traditionally male-dominated space. InThe Little Mermaid, the title character is speechless for a great deal of the film, andBraveis a mother-daughter relationship story in which the mother becomes a speechless bear.
Moreover,whatthe female characters say is sometimes more important than how much they speak. The impact of the ending toFrozenis gloriously feminist and empowering for young girls/female relationships, and that’s thanks to the dialogue, not how often Elsa is talking.
So while this data is interesting from a purely technical point of view, I’m not sure it actually reveals anything controversial about these classic Disney films that inspired generations of young girls in a multitude of ways.
The dialogue quantity is only one aspect of Fought and Eisenhauer’s research, which is also examininghowfemale characters are addressed (ie. The older films focused on looks over personality, but this trend inverted in the 90s), so if you’d like a closer look at the research head over to the Washington Post.
