In the middle of last year after seeing Brave, I defended the fact that Merida was a princess, arguing that “being a princess isn’t irrelevant to the story, exactly, since it’s royal power which drives the dramatic shorthand of changing not just her own life but everyone’s, [but] it is nonetheless mostly perfunctory”.
Over the last week or so, it’s not Merida’s status as a princess that’s at issue, per se, but rather her reduction to stereotype when Disney designated her their official 11th princess. Gone is the bright-eyed, wild-haired, warrior princess in training, replaced by the frilly, age-inappropriate slink Disney applies to all its other princesses. Insult to injury, they even revoked her bow and arrows.
What makes some of this worthwhile, perhaps, is getting to see the degree to which Merida’s creative mother tears Disney a new one over its degradation of a character she specifically designed to be a different sort of role model for her own daughter.
Marin filmmaker Brenda Chapman, who won an Oscar for writing and co-directing the animated feature “Brave,” blasted Disney’s sexy makeover of her movie’s feisty heroine, Merida, as “a blatantly sexist marketing move based on money.”
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Chapman fumed. “When little girls say they like it because it’s more sparkly, that’s all fine and good but, subconsciously, they are soaking in the sexy ‘come hither’ look and the skinny aspect of the new version. It’s horrible! Merida was created to break that mold — to give young girls a better, stronger role model, a more attainable role model, something of substance, not just a pretty face that waits around for romance.”
Narratively speaking, Merida needed to be a princess partly to subvert the stereotype but mostly so that (as I wrote last year) the message and effect of the film’s story “is that we can change our own fate and ensure the power of others to do the same, [and also celebrate] that this change, this message, comes about mainly because of the story’s two strong, central women”. But she was never meant to be a princess princess.
As Chapman points out in her statement to the Independent Journal, it’s not as if Brave merchandise and the film’s version of Merida didn’t sell tickets, and by extension merchandise. There’s no rational reason to radically alter the character’s presentation. It only can be explained by an ingrained culture of sexism that can’t stop itself from offering a single, conformist body image of, and to, girls, as plainly evidenced by Disney’s own statement to Yahoo! Shine in which the company defended the change .
“Merida exemplifies what it means to be a Disney Princess through being brave, passionate, and confident and she remains the same strong and determined Merida from the movie whose inner qualities have inspired moms and daughters around the world.”
“Inner qualities.” It’s all well and good to be headstrong, brave, and demand the right to self-determination rather than have your life planned out for you by others, Disney is saying, but you’d damned well better be petite, svelte, and soft while doing it. In other words, despite Brave’s message about not automatically bending to your culture’s presumptions of conformity and of your value as a person generally and as a girl specifically, you really should abide by your culture’s presumptions of conformity and of your value as a girl, at least as it applies to your body.
This is an astonishing and brutal admission of Disney’s cultural and commercial cynicism — atop its innate sexism — and if anyone were inclined earlier to brush this off, I’d hope that it’s sufficiently brazen to shake them from apathy.
