From "Cinderella" to "Frozen," this is how Disney's heroines have evolved since Snow White in 1937.
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00:00I'm going with you.
00:01Anna? No.
00:02Excuse me, I climbed the North Mountain, survived a frozen heart, and saved you from my ex-boyfriend.
00:06So, you know, I'm coming.
00:20I definitely feel that the prince's character has evolved,
00:23and that Disney is trying to present role models for little girls that are more appealing and stronger.
00:31It was the first kind of feminist of the Disney princesses.
00:53She was kind of a departure from these young women who were waiting to be saved,
00:58and she kind of is such a departure from that.
01:01She really doesn't want to marry the hottest, cutest guy in the village.
01:04She wants to see the world.
01:06She wants to empower herself through learning and reading, and I love that about her.
01:11Moana is 100% in our house.
01:13She's strong.
01:14She saves the world.
01:16There is no romance.
01:17She's friends with a guy.
01:19Brilliant.
01:20Frozen.
01:21Sisterhood.
01:22Here's a movie, finally, with not just one, but two princesses.
01:42Two princesses.
01:43And so, if any movie you would think would have more female characters, it would be that one.
01:49But no, there were twice as many male characters.
01:52Male characters in Frozen speak much more than the female characters.
01:56They speak about 60% of all the words spoken in that movie.
02:01Female characters were much more likely throughout the Disney movies, the Disney princess movies, to be complimented on their appearance rather than their skills.
02:10And that holds true up through the most recent movies.
02:13With body type, women in Disney have traditionally been represented very poorly, and princesses are represented with a very traditional, very thin, very unrealistic body type, and that's really frightening.
02:28One of the things that I think a lot of people found exciting about Moana, the most recent princess, is that in that one, she is not represented with that body type.
02:39One of my favorite role models in some way, in terms of the princesses, is Jasmine, because one of the things that we didn't see at the beginning was physical skills.
02:49Jasmine does a lot of things.
02:51First of all, she plots an escape from the castle.
02:54She pole vaults over a high building, and there's some joking about it where Aladdin is surprised that she's physically skillful and brave.
03:02Merida doesn't want to get married, and in fact, she beats the suitors in an archery competition.
03:09So I think women being shown having physical skills among the princesses is a really good evolution.
03:15I also really like Tiana, who wants to own her own business instead of simply getting married.
03:22So these are all strong, positive evolutions.
03:32There are studies showing that little girls who watch a lot of Disney movies do tend to have more traditional ideas about gender roles, that a woman maybe should stay home if she has children, or that being a firefighter is not a good job for a woman.
03:56Hopefully when we have more women writing things and more women working behind the scenes, we'll get more feminist productions.