- Last weekend, the fiery Scottish lass from the film [Brave] received an official coronation at the Magic Kingdom — not as the rebellious girl introduced in Brave, but as a sparkling, made-over princess.
- Disney's redesign of the character tamed her unruly hair, expanded her breasts, shrank her waist, enlarged her eyes, plastered on makeup, pulled her (now-glittering) dress off her shoulders, and morphed her defiant posture into a come-hither pose.
- The bow-wielding Merida of Brave — a character who explicitly fought against the princess world her mother tried to push her into in the film — was becoming what she hated, and inadvertently revealing the enormously problematic nature of Disney's Princess line.
- The evolution of Disney's princesses was stymied by the arrival of the Disney Princess line in the late 1990s. The Disney Princess franchise doesn't celebrate the increasingly diverse world of princesses; instead, it pulls back the progress the company had made, pushing the more forward-thinking female characters back into the reductive feminine stereotypes of the past.
- Virtually every Disney princess has received a redesign that makes her look more like the others: Narrower jaws, larger eyes, smaller noses, and waists narrowed so drastically that the characters look as if Disney has marched them into a plastic surgeon's office for liposuction and rib removal. The characters of color have it even worse, with their features audaciously whitewashed: Mulan changes from a young Chinese woman into a girl with white, ruddy skin and plump lips; Pocahontas, meanwhile, gets lighter skin, chin implants, larger eyes and lips, and a much smaller nose. (Jasmine's makeover is more subdued — but like Mulan and Pocahontas, her skin lightens with every updated look.)
Read the full (fascinating) article by Monika Bartyzel for The Week here.
