Disney’s heroines

Call it artistic license or creative thinking, Disney’s version is almost always different from the original fairytale.

April 25, 2015 02:20 pm | Updated 02:20 pm IST

Elsa, the Snow Queen, voiced by Idina Menzel, in a scene from the "Frozen."

Elsa, the Snow Queen, voiced by Idina Menzel, in a scene from the "Frozen."

I always wanted to be a princess. Not the ilk with rules, regulations and repercussions, like Audrey Hepburn’s Princess Ann in  Roman Holiday , but more of the feisty kick-ass kind that stood up to the bad guys, rescued the prince and kissed him as he blushed. I would have found role models in girls like Rapunzel of Tangled or Anna of Frozen had I been a child of dreaming age in a more recent time. They were strong, clever, funny and brave, talked a lot and whopped villains and the hero alike when they (usually men) needed it, which was fairly often. And they were derived from characters written many years earlier, long before cinema was even thought of.

Much of this vicarious dreaming came via the work of Walt Disney and his teams, animated features that streamed into my consciousness and made me want to be something or someone I was not, except in my own imagination. But as appealing as the stories were, as sing-able as the songs were, as fun as the movies were, Disney was not, is not and will never be, infallible. Sometimes someone got it kinda wrong, though that was evident only a while after you stopped humming the catchy times and smiling at the goofy-looking hero who is eventually got his girl.

Yes, it’s indeed true. Disney did go off track every now and then. While the appeal of the actual story and characters is a matter of subjective opinion, nitpickers often find holes when they compare the original story with the Disney-fied version. Consider Tangled , the story of Rapunzel and her astonishing hair. In the original, the hero is a prince who somewhere along the way jumps off the tower when confronted by the unsavoury Mother Gothel and is blinded by thorns but is eventually found by his faithful love and regains his sight. Disney preferred the sunny, happy ever-after version and ended the story sooner than that, with all the ends tied up and everyone joining in the song. Call it artistic license or creative thinking or just sheer laziness — not wanting to do a whole new story, so cashing in on something with proven value, etc, etc — these tales may be tall, but they have something in them that makes them watchable. That ‘something’ is Disney magic. Sprinkled on a princess, it helps her morph from a common garden variety girl to one who can enchant with her outsized eyes, cast spells with her celebrity-voiced tone and put everything into perfect perspective with her sassy one-liners.

Like it has with Anna of Frozen , the newest sensation from Disney. Based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Snow Queen , Frozen has two princesses, orphans, estranged from each other because the elder wants to protect the younger from her power of causing a freeze. Elsa, who accidentally hurts Anna while they are playing, runs away to her self-created ice palace to protect her sister. Anna — being a good Disney princess with shades of a Karan Johar heroine who puts all her energies into bringing the family together and believes in love, the warm fuzzies and all that jazz — journeys into the mountains through snow and ice, battling wolves and monsters to make a reunion happen. In the original story, the two are not girls, but a boy and a girl who are best friends and grow up next door to each other. The boy is — as boys tend to be — mesmerised by a gorgeous woman, the Ice Queen, and is frozen after a scorching (ahem!) kiss, losing his memory in the process. His best bud rescues him, also with a kiss, showing that it’s all about the lipstick rather than the family. And, of course, obviously, that a kiss is never just a kiss.

But the Disney heroine went a step further when she walked out into the real world and evil entered into the feel good equation in films like Maleficent , rooted in the classic story by the Brothers Grimm, Sleeping Beauty . Angelina Jolie made a superb baddie, chiselled cheekbones and all, in the 2014 movie, scaring more with the potential of untold horror rather than the actual badness of her onscreen persona. Bringing her back into the sunshiney realm of animated sugar-coated flowers will be a tough one for even the tech dwarves of Disney to pull off. I thought perhaps this year’s Cinderella could have returned the princess to her candy-coated throne, but it didn’t, sadly enough. Until that actually happens, I will leave my little girl self in that happy land where the only shadow lurking in the dark is the evil stepmother who will, everyone knows well, vanish at the end, just like all bad characters do. Shall we sing now?

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