I am in love with Disney's new movie, "Encanto." It just hit me to the core on story and the music is pretty awesome too. So, I was surprised by the odd lukewarm initial reaction to it. This is an amazing story about the power of family; what's better than that? Yet responses tended to be either my form of ecstatic approval or a complete underwhelmed "meh" response. So, what gives?
I think it's a couple of things. I grew up at the end of the Disney classic era. All those silly princesses being saved by all those clean cut princes without a personality. It was all about the love story, and a particular sort of love story too. Pretty sheltered girl with special powers of niceness gets in trouble and needs a guy to bail her out and kiss her in the end. (Yikes, as much as I do love them, they make me cringe a little because it's so surface level. . . there's no character growth in there.) There were some exceptions. We had 101 Dalmatians and The Rescuers with its Down Under sequel for example which were pretty straight forward adventure stories with only minor love story elements. Still tends to be pretty surface level. The later classics like Lady and the Tramp and The Rescuers series has some real character development for the male protagonists (the Tramp and Bernard respectively) but the feminine protagonists are still pretty static. They don't develop, they are pedestal stranded ideals.
On a side note, have you ever noticed how many of the villains are female too? It's like we were being told as young girls that you can be a sickly sweet princess or evil broken (albeit powerful) bad guys. There's nothing in between.
I'm not going to go into the middle era. It was a bad, sad time with a few bright spots struggling under a shifting paradigm. Enough said on that.
The new wave of Disney that started in my adulthood, now that's something special. Something happened and the love story started taking a backseat if it's even there at all. First glimmers start showing up as early as Aladdin in 1992 (I was 12 :-P). It's not perfect, Jasmine is still being a treated as an object, but at least she's fighting it and the main story is centered on Aladdin who needs to do some serious growing up and it's this maturing process that really is the main story. Pocahontas is a step backward in more than one way, but by Hercules in 1997 we can solidly say goodbye to the fainting violet version of a heroine. (Meg don't take sass from nobody!)
Somewhere in there, it seems like there were people at Disney insisting that there were other sorts of stories worth telling and slowly but steadily things got better. Rescuers and Rescuers Down under are about saving children from abusive situations and protecting endangered species. Buddy movies became a more common story line - Treasure Planet (2002), Chicken Little (2005) and Bolt (2008) to name an early few. Special shout out to Zootopia (2016) that takes on the buddy narrative and issues of race all in one. Wreck-It Ralph (2012) and Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018) are about how to be a friend and how to stop being a codependent one. Seems way more important for kids to be seeing than that true love drivel. If we are lucky we have a solid romantic relationship in our lives, but friendship is what connects us to our communities. Good models for what that looks like are important.
The big change that happened for me though was in the way female protagonists got handled. Suddenly they have defined goals and it's not about finding a boyfriend (thank god). Mulan is about a young woman who bucks gender roles to save her father. Princess & the Frog (2009) features Tiana who is struggling to put enough money together to open her own her own restaurant. Yes, there's a love story in there but both characters need to do a lot of character growth to make it work. Tangled (2010) looks like a step backward until you realized that Rapunzel initiates all of the action until the last 10 minutes of the story. Poor Flynn is the helpless princess in that dynamic getting saved over and over by Rapunzel. Raya of Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) is a kick butt warrior for goodness sakes. This is much better than telling little girls that "someday your prince will come."
Finally, there's the non-traditional family narrative. There are a lot of orphans sprinkled in kids literature and movies. Disney dipped into that well too, but while finding family might be a result in those narratives, it doesn't tend to be the story. However, Lilo & Stitch (2002) is entirely about finding family even if you lost the one you were born into. Lilo's being raised by her sister after the death of their parents and Stitch is a critter created by a alien mad scientist who finds a family in Lilo. In fact, I think Lilo and Stitch is the beginning of the family focused trend that continues with Chicken Little (2005), Meet the Robinsons (2007), Frozen (2013), and now Encanto (2021). Another set of important models for kids. Family is tough and they aren't perfect, yet they are worth fighting for.
That's what I love about Encanto. It's not really an adventure story. There's no bad guy. It's about a family who's fallen out of whack and the kid (Mirabel) who's going to put it right. It doesn't really get better than that. I like where Disney is right now, but we gotta let go of the pedestal princesses to appreciate it.
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