Frozen in Time: How Disney Gender-Stereotypes Its Most Powerful Princess
This is a peer-reviewed essay published on March 26, 2017, on MDPI, written by two students named Madeline Streiff and Lauren Dundes, who are from Hastings College of the Law, University of California. The essay mainly focuses on the hidden gender rules conveyed by Elsa. Although Else seems like a novel role for a female character, the film indicates that a female can’t have both power and romance at the same time. To develop gender norms on Elsa, the authors started by revealing the fact that the audience thinks Elsa is the focus of the movie while Anna should be the main character in the script. Our group wants to compare and contrast the old and new Disney characters, Elsa is one of the characters who present feminism that we plan to talk about. However, what I learned from this essay can be a contrast to what we thought about Elsa. “While some might consider a princess focusing on power to be refreshing, it is significant that the audience does not see a powerful woman model a balance between exercising authority and a relationship. Instead, female power is all-encompassing and a substitute for romance. ” (Steiff and Dundes). This is an interesting point that I have never thought about the balance of power and romance, it will be a great point that can be added to our podcast to let the audience ponder about, it also increases the complexity of Elsa’s characteristics.
Does Hollywood Still Have a Princess Problem
The podcast is an episode from a podcast named Freakonomics, and the episode is produced by Stephen J. Dubner on October 23, 2019. In this episode, Dubner invites her daughter who is at the age of college, to talk about her thoughts about the gender roles in Beauty and The Beast. Stephen Dubner also invites the president of the production at Walt Disney Studios, Sean Bailey, to talk about the new and old version of Beauty and The Beast. Since our topic will be comparing Disney movies overtime, Beauty and The Beast is one of our best choices since it has a 2017 version compared to the old one, it would be good for our podcast by having a director from Disney to talk about the changes they made in movie production. Bailey talked in the podcast about the changes they made in the 2017 remake, “the Beast saves her from the wolf attack. And he’s in mortal peril. And so she stays with him because she’s such a good soul that her conscience couldn’t allow her to leave him to die, which gave them a little time to bond”. Bailey also mentioned that they gave Belle a chance to escape from the castle, by having Emma Watson said: “Could anyone be happy if they aren’t free?”
Gender Norms Thaw in Disney’s Frozen
This is a movie review written by Cordelia Chan on May 18, 2016. In her article, Chan argued about the feminism of the two main characters in Frozen, while acknowledging the progress of feminism in this movie, she also brought up some counter-arguments about it. Chan said Anna is a female character that has masculine traits, some transformations are not seen in the past princess films. Some moments are when “Anna asserts herself and decides to search for Elsa on her own despite the pleading of her then-fiancé, Hans,” when “she commands Kristoff to take her up the North Mountain. She is smart in that she bribes him with goods he originally wanted to buy at the trading post and assertive when she refuses no for an answer”. Also, she “assists Kristoff in fighting off a pack of wolves attacking their sled” and “single-handedly saves Elsa without the help of a male”. However, the song “‘Love is an Open Door’ is a song that sums up the love stories in most of the older Disney movies. It seems to poke fun at “love at first sight” but nonetheless describes a romance prevalent in the film subjecting Anna and Hans to the same stereotypical gender standards as historic Disney films”. I like the contrast Cordelia Chan made in her article, both the feminism and false feminism arguments can be used in our segments. Although her overall article is arguing that Frozen is not a false feminism movie, we can use the counter-arguments in her article and develop our own thoughts on it.
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