A Tale of Two (Non)Disney Princesses
Warning: Minor spoilers to Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Mulan, Brave, and Frozen I and II
As many of us seem to be doing these days, I’ve been capitalizing on my endless nights in by catching up on movies I never saw, as well as rewatching my favorites. Recently, I revisited Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), in which nerdy linguist Milo James Thatch and a crew of eccentric characters journey to the bottom of the ocean with the help of steampunk-esque-pseudo-tech at the turn of the 20th century. They follow the clues in an arcane book called The Shepherd’s Journal in their search for the mythical land of Atlantis and the technology that put its people eons ahead of their contemporaries and permitted luxuries such as electricity and flight. To the adventurers’ surprise, they find not ruins and skeletons, but a living civilization disconnected from the rest of the world and ignorant of their own past. Milo quickly bonds with the princess of the Atlanteans, a fierce woman named Kidagakash ‘Kida,’ who disagrees with her father the King on their interactions (or lack thereof) with the outside world and what should be done regarding the rapid decline of their culture. I’m not going to dive in on why Atlantis is such a great and underappreciated movie here (even though it is), but it should suffice to say that Kida is awesome.
If you put a gun to my head and demanded to know my favorite Disney heroine (a realistic scenario, I know), I’d have a damn hard time choosing between Kida and Mulan. Both of them are brave, clever, and resourceful, and they remain true to themselves while also fervidly defending those that they love. In each of their respective films, Kida and Mulan find love, but this is neither central to their characters nor of their stories: essentially, Kida and Mulan are two outstanding models and phenomenal Disney Princesses.
My two main ladies, Kida and Mulan (Disney)
Except, of course, that Kida isn’t a Disney Princess… or not an official one, anyway. I had known—and was angered by—this years ago when the movie was more recent, but this forgotten realization boomranged me when a couple days later, I (finally) saw Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018) and Kida wasn’t there with the rest of the Princesses. For days, I was incredibly indignant that Kida—perhaps the bravest, fiercest, coolest princess—didn’t “count,” whereas more recent princesses like Rapunzel, Merida, and Moana (all of whom I also love, don’t @ me) were among the ranks.
The Official Disney Princesses (Disney)
So I’ve done the natural thing during quarantine and spent way too much time thinking about why Kida isn’t a Disney Princess. At first, I figured it was purely an economic slight: Atlantis performed only modestly at the box-office, and while there was a direct-to-video sequel, it wasn’t the typical commercial success to which Disney films aspire. Then, after stewing in my thoughts for a while, I comforted myself in that Kida wasn’t actually a princess by the end of a movie: she was the Queen Regent of Atlantis in her own right, and in that sense was ‘above’ her Disney royal peers.
This line of thinking is kinda further supported when I discovered that Anna and Elsa aren’t official Disney Princesses either, even though they were featured in Ralph Breaks the Internet. After all, Elsa became the Queen of Arendelle rather early on in the first installment, and by the end of the sequel, neither are technically princesses. (This being said, however, it still doesn’t explain why Anna wasn’t considered an official Disney Princess in five-year-period between the two installments, but maybe sibling-princesses don’t count in the Disney universe? Idk, bro—it works out for my theory at this point, I guess, so whatever.)
Fine then: Kida the Queen isn’t a Disney Princess and neither are Queen Anna and Elsa. That’s consistent, at least. I mean, yes, sure, there are other notable princesses who aren’t included in the Official line-up, but most of them, like Nala from The Lion King and Giselle from Enchanted are either not human or not-strictly animated, so it was easy—for me, personally—at least to dismiss.
But the one thing that continues to nag at me persistently that relates to my aforementioned other favorite Disney heroine, Mulan: why on Earth is Mulan an official Disney Princess? She’s neither a princess regent or a princess consort. Sure, she saved the emperor, but there’s a disconnect between that and a royal title for herself. According to an internet, the gift of the Emperor’s medallion maybe makes her an honorary member of the Royal family, but to me that’s a bit of a stretch and simultaneously very underwhelming.
Then I thought maybe it’s sort of rags-to-riches, self-discovery thing that’s integral to be an Official Disney Princess. The most literal level is the princess consorts who married into royal families by earning the love of a Prince on account of their bravery/kindness/goodness, etc like Belle or Cinderella. Then, on the one hand, some Disney Princesses didn’t know they were princesses like Aurora or Rapunzel and literally had to discover their identities; on the other hand, others had to reconcile their own desires with what was expected of them and find themselves that way, like in the case of Merida or Jasmine. Mulan certainly struggled between ‘♪♪ who I am inside ♪♪’ and the role given to her by everyone else, so that helps this theory. It also bolsters the warm-and-fuzzy sentiment that everyone can be a Princess and it’s a matter of heart and spirit rather than any official royal rank. There’s already a problem with this theory, because Mulan is the only one of the Big 12 who isn’t either a princess regent or consort, but whatever, I’m trying to rationalize this.
Therefore, I concluded that the qualifications for Disney Princess status are as follows:
Qualifications Needed for Official Disney Princess Title (Maybe?)
(1) Must be 100% animated
(2) Must be human
(3) Must not be an actual ruler of anything
(4) And must have undergone some sort of identify change/metamorphosis/self-improvement
(To be fair, there’s also maybe a fifth qualification about animal sidekicks, but that’s immediately tenuous at best for many reasons, one of which being that Merida’s sidekick would be her mom that she turned into a bear in an act of poorly-planned teenage rebellion which is…you know…not the best, in my book, so I’m not counting it.)
Based off of this, it seems like most characters rejection from Club Princess is justified: (1) characters like Giselle from Enchanted don’t count because they aren’t entirely animated; (2) characters like Nala from The Lion King and Sally from The Nightmare before Christmas don’t either because they aren’t human (and low-key the latter movie still terrifies me); (3) Elsa and Anna (and Kida) still wouldn’t qualify as they are Queens; and (4) Mulan does qualify because even though she has no official princess title, she has the “soul” of one.
This theory worked great for me for about five minutes, until I remembered characters like Jane from Tarzan or Vanellope from Wreck-It-Ralph, each reconciling their own desires with expectations placed on them…and also both being technically princesses in one way or another. So my rule set is a bust. I have no answers.
Separately from all this, there’s an argument that Mulan is a Disney Princess for Asian representation in the royal line-up. While this is obviously admirable in message, it’s also sort of infuriating in practice because then it effectively reduces Mulan to being the token Asian Princess because she’s the one female Asian lead in any of their movies, instead of—you know—just making more movies with Asian protagonists and in the process including a more obvious, irrefutable princess. And hell, it’s not like Disney needs to be completely original with a story line here, either: there are tons of historical royal influences to choose from like Seondeok, Lady Xian of Qiaoguo, or Himiko just to name a few.
Making Mulan a Disney Princess has the same sort of feel like if they had made Lilo a Disney Princess instead of later making Moana to check off the ‘Pacific-Islander’ box. And I think this problem speaks to a larger problem in Disney’s attempts at inclusion: it does feel like they’re just checking off racial boxes instead of actually diversifying their movies. Look at the picture again:
The Official Disney Princesses (again) (Images still from Disney, but I edited it to put them in chronological order and slapped on the dates)
There’s a Middle-Eastern Princess, a Black Princess, an Asian Princess, and a Pacific-Islander Princess, and I sincerely absolutely mean it when I say that’s progress and that’s great!
At the same time, there’s also seven white Princesses, and that makes me wonder why can’t we have more than one Black Princess? Or Middle Eastern Princess? Or another Asian Princess—or, I guess, a new one, since I suppose in the end I’m suggesting that Mulan be dethroned—particularly when 3/5 Disney POC Princesses were in films made over 20 years ago. Hell, maybe they don’t even need to be Princesses, but just like how there’s room for multiple white protagonists, there’s certainly also room for multiple POC protagonists of the same ethnicity, isn’t there? Admittedly, when you expand outside of Disney Princesses this gets a bit better, with characters like Esmeralda and films like Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Brother Bear, The Emperor’s New Groove, Big Hero Six and Coco, each featuring a diverse cast but as a whole, Disney is still unbalanced, to say the least. When you shrink it back to the Disney Princesses, it’s hard for me to look at that line-up and not feel as if they’ve just counted the Asian Representation as donezo, since hey, Mulan’s awesome.
And Mulan is awesome. Any way you slice it, Mulan is a wonderful role model, and she is someone that I think everyone, regardless of race or gender or whatever else, can admire. Be that as it may, I think lumping her into the Disney Princess is almost an insult to her character (and if she were ‘real’ something I would bet she certainly would not want). There should be nothing wrong with our favorite characters not being Disney Princesses, but the way that Disney seems to arbitrarily assign Princess-status or not makes it feel like a club some of our favorites just aren’t worthy of entering; separately, it makes it feel like some are put there for reasons other than their stories and people they were supposed to inspire.
In each of Disney’s Europe-based movies (featuring white Princesses), we get to explore diverse worlds inspired by different cultures and landscapes, from the Scottish Highlands to (loosely) revolutionary France and medieval Denmark. Just like how it’s silly to shrink ‘European’ into one story, it’s lacking and disappointing to have cultures elsewhere reduced to a singularity: to have just one Princess for all of Asia, all of the Middle East, all of indigenous Americas, and one for everyone who identifies as Black, is to ignore the intricacies of a global culture.
