Walt Disney Pictures
2010
Rating: Maybe (G)
Overview: Tangled does a good job of playing to Disney's strengths. Through animation and dialogue, the characters come to life with a lot of personality and humor. The songs are catchy and fit into the plot. My favorite character is Pascal the chameleon, who--without ever saying a word--manages to make his opinions perfectly clear.
The story is an updated version of Rapunzel, where the stolen princess longs to escape her emotionally manipulative mother and the tower she's trapped in to see the lights that appear on her birthday. When a dashing young thief accidentally lands in her tower to escape pursuit, she knocks him unconscious and hides his loot until he agrees to take her to see the lights. Adventure ensues. Tragedy is at hand. The princess and prince live happily ever after.
The Good:
Gender- The princess isn't spending her days pining for a man to rescue her. She uses the prince only because he has the knowledge for how to get to the lights. She isn't looking for a husband, and once the journey takes off, she's an active participant in solving problems. What's more, she doesn't only solve problems through critical thinking, but also through strength and physicality (swinging across chasms on her hair, digging into a pile of rocks to avoid drowning). This princess is no weakling, and she could definitely stand in as a strong role model.
The prince also has some positive gender characteristics. Like the prince from The Princess and the Frog, Flynn undergoes some actual character development during the film, a great improvement over earlier princes who remained static in their role as strong, unemotional heroes. His love for the princess is a genuine growth out of friendship and respect, and we watch him soften from a greedy thief to a more complex person with real emotional responses.
At one point, the prince takes the princess to a bar full of thugs to try to scare her into giving up the quest. Timid, but undeterred, the princess asks the men if they've ever had a dream. Their responses involve dreams of interior design, cupcake-baking, and knitting. At the end of the film, many of these men are living out those desires on a public forum, so the film does make some strides toward normalizing stepping out of gendered roles.
The Bad
Gender- Look, I'm not anti-marriage, but the plot doesn't always have to end in one. Isn't escaping a deranged woman who pretended to be your mother and kept you locked in a tower for eighteen years thrilling enough?
There are also some subtle gender issues that the film raised for me. The princess has a penchant for knocking around anything threatening with a frying pan, which reeks of stereotype and suggests that violence is funny as long as it's a woman beating a man, and not the other way around. Also, the idea that blonde hair is "magic" and that brown hair is the remnants of destroyed magic hair is problematic as far as beauty standards.
The body image portrayed in the film is typical of Disney. Pretty women are ridiculously thin and big-breasted. Handsome men are tall and muscular with small waists, big chests, and bulging biceps.
Race- Race? What's that? The characters in this isolated magic kingdom are overwhelmingly white.
Bottom Line-
Tangled takes steps in the right direction to move Disney princesses into roles where they are more than simply husband-seeking victims. Rapunzel is a capable woman who shows off her power and personality at every turn. While there are still overtones of the typical princess-needs-a-prince motif, I don't want to dismiss the progress outright.
What Other People Say-
See some other equality-based critiques of the film at The Stir, Feministing, and NOW.
Childhood is a time of innocence, and it's easy to dismiss children's media as harmless because of the simplicity with which most of its audience will approach it. The truth is all media is created with a message, and the messages we send to our children may be the most important of all. The same innocence with which they approach the world leaves them less equipped to analyze the underlying intentions. As an offshoot to my main blog, See Jane Juggling serves as a place for some analysis on the messages children's media send. My perspective is admittedly biased toward gender and race concerns, but I would love to hear from you about your other viewpoints as well. Rate the media (explanation of ratings to the right) and leave a comment, and together we can shed some light on these complicated decisions.
I definitely get the marriage problem you mention. I think it's a hard one for producers to overcome, though. I once heard a theater buff say that marriages make great finales that tie up loose ends. Often audiences demand that there be a happy ending in romantic comedies (You should look into the movie The Prince and Me with Julia Styles where they had to re-write the ending because of the audience response in pre-screenings.) Rapunzel is also a classic tale that does end in a marriage. That being said, the mention of marriage at the end of the movie was only like two lines of dialogue and could have easily been scrapped. The audience has imagination. They can assume what they want.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds are excluded from this movie is problematic. In my opinion, no exploration of diversity is just as bad as creating characters that play to societal stereotypes about their ethnic backgrounds.
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