Disney Stereotypes

In general, people get their ideas about gender from a young age. Boys are told to be active and the sort of person who “rescues the princess” in media such as Disney movies and children's TV. Girls are told to be passive, rescued and treated like they're really only there to be “the token girl.” This is a societal problem, and Disney is one of the main perpetrators.

Female characters often show more skin than their male counterparts; in The Little Mermaid, Ariel and her sisters wear bikini tops instead of torso-covering shirts when they are mermaids, while Prince Eric is clad in shirt, trousers, and shoes during the movie. Ariel wears two long-sleeved dresses, a blue and black one and a pink one, and both of them seem to impair her movement because she's unused to them; there's also a scene where her nudity is implied when she's turned into a human, and she has to be put in a primitive form of a dress.

 

 Although King Triton, Ariel's father, is shirtless, we don't see other mermen in the movie. The male characters are either humans, talking sea creatures, or King Triton. The villain Ursula's shirt covers her stomach, though she's overweight and her shirt shows cleavage because she has a larger bust than Ariel. The wardrobes of King Triton, Ariel, and Ursula, however, don't improve the clothing situation in The Little Mermaid; rather, they highlight how the animators had a problematic view on the way female characters should dress.

 

Women also have incredibly tiny waists and other idealized body characteristics. This is a way of showing that the “good” characters are slender and the “bad” characters aren't. If a woman isn't slender with an impossibly tiny waist, she'll be presented as a slob or otherwise lacking.

One of the ways people can tell Ursula is the villain of The Little Mermaid because she's overweight. Mermaids are expected to be attractive, and Western culture views being slender as attractive. Negative traits are piled on Ursula, and she's given no real motivation beyond simply being evil and disliking King Triton. She's not supposed to be viewed as sympathetic in any way, which is good when creating a children's villain, but because of her appearance, children will internalize the idea that being overweight means someone is inherently a bad person.

Gender representation is problematic for Disney in general, since the company is based on the ideal of a princess being saved by a prince and finding her happily ever after with him.

In Mulan, the titular character saves China and manages to become a renowned warrior...after she gets discovered. Her squad, a ragtag bunch, crossdresses in order to get to warn the emperor about General Shang attacking, and they use their disguises to great effect because Mulan manages to model female behavior. Men couldn't get through to the emperor, and while it seemed as though women had saved China, in the reality of Mulan, it was one woman and three crossdressing men.

However, despite Mulan needing the help of her fellow soldiers, she was the mastermind of the plan, and the emperor lauded her for saving China. This is problematic because Mulan wasn't able to succeed as a warrior who saved China. Rather, she had to be a woman instead of a warrior in order to pull off her plan. In a sense, while Mulan escaped the gender box she was thrust into at birth, she had to conform to the feminine gender role in order to succeed in the end.

 

In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is an exceptional singer. This proves to be a plot point not because she wants to sing, but rather because of the male characters in the movie. Her father, King Triton, wants free-spirited daydreamer Ariel to sing for him because she's the star of an orchestra performance that she tends to skip out on. Prince Eric, Ariel's love interest, falls in love with Ariel not for her free-spirited personality or tendency to daydream about the human world, but rather because she can sing. While he does show concern and attraction to Ariel, she can't speak, which lessens the appeal. Eric is only interested in the woman who saved his life. That woman has a beautiful voice and sang to him before he was rescued by his people. Ariel might seem familiar, but she isn't the woman who saved Eric before she regains her voice.

Ursula steals Ariel's voice, and disguises herself as a human woman who will appeal to Eric. Reinforcing the idea that slender is beautiful, her human body is as slender as Ariel's, and she introduces herself as “Vanessa.” Virtually none of Ursula's negative physical traits are given to “Vanessa,” and it's easy to understand why Eric would mistake “Vanessa” for the young woman who rescued him. She's elegant, slender, brunette, and possesses Ariel's voice. Eric falls in love with Ursula despite Ariel's attempts to the contrary, and the two are to be married. King Triton soon finds out about the deal and signs to protect Ariel—who could protect herself, but the movie has her acting because of men rather than out of her own agency beyond finding human objects she doesn't know the use of. After that, Ursula proves she's evil and starts to attack, taking King Triton's trident (which, apparently, was her motivation all along) and growing to titanic size before she's run through and destroyed by Eric.

Because apparently Eric is actually in love with Ariel after hearing her voice, Triton gives them his blessing to get married, and Ariel stays a human. Eric doesn't have to change a thing about his current princely lifestyle, but Ariel has to give up her entire life under the sea in order to marry him. This is treated as a good thing, since their love has won out against all odds, when in actuality the representation is problematic because Ariel's identity essentially becomes an extension of Eric's when she had her own identity prior to meeting him.

These aren't the only examples of problematic gender representation in Disney, but both Mulan and The Little Mermaid show how Disney interprets gender as the woman staying “in her box.” If Mulan had put her armor back on and rushed to battle the Huns after she saw they were planning something against the emperor, she'd have been punished in the movie for continuing to fight instead of “femininely” making a plan that relied on her actual gender. If Ariel had figured out human writing instruments and told Eric via writing that she saved his life and just lost her voice for a while, the drama with Ursula would have been removed; however, Ariel would have taken initiative when she's expected to wait to be rescued by a man instead of figure out how to rescue herself.

The Disney narrative is built on the prince rescuing the princess and them living happily ever after. There isn't room in the narrative for the princess rescuing the prince or the princess rescuing herself and the prince falling for her personality. There isn't room for princesses that don't fit modern Western standards of attractiveness, so even though plump women have been viewed as attractive for much of history, a Disney film set in fairy tale times won't reflect this and will instead show women that fit our standards of what is attractive.