Another 'feminist' Disney remake?

an overdue rant from a hardcore Disney fan

As somewhat of a Disney purist, I’ve always had opinions on the onslaught of Disney live-action remakes, but they’ve remained pretty nebulous (and a little bit tendentious, I’m aware)…… until Rachel Zegler.

Zegler, who’s set to star in Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of Snow White, has been catching some a lot of heat online for her comments on the portrayal of the character.

There are a few other interviews in which she and Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen, regurgitate the same spiel that was likely drilled into them by their PR team. The thing is, they aren’t just promoting the ‘feminist’ angle — they seem to be going out of their way to trash the original Snow White animation. And boy oh boy, does the Internet hate her right now.

IMO, the hate against Zegler is sorely misdirected. The 1937 film is rife with outdated representations of women, and the original tale itself is rooted in racism and ageism. I wholeheartedly agree that the necessity to tweak problematic storylines for inclusivity is more urgent than ever.

The problem is that Disney has gotten feminism all wrong. They’re on a straight path to self-sabotage, and here’s why I think so.

I remember vividly when Disney’s Cinderella live-action film dropped. I went to see it with my two best friends who are also huge fans of Disney. It was fantastic, surreal, and as magical as we’d hoped it would be. We cried a little bit after. It wasn’t because we love being dramatic, but because the film, to us, was so much more than a pretty girl cosplaying Disney’s second-oldest princess.

Cinderella (2015) represented coming home from kindergarten and begging our parents to put on our favourite Disney or Barbie films; of sparkly dresses and tiaras and playing make-believe. All of the above, individually, would sufficiently encapsulate the innocence and magic of childhood, but a beloved princess manifested in corporeal form took it one step further. It proved that the hopes and dreams we’d been consuming vicariously and solely through fictional characters are no longer 2D — they are realistic, tangible, and most importantly, attainable. With the film coming hot on the heels of its feminist predecessors, Frozen (2012) and Maleficent (2014), Disney seemed to be sprinting down the track of progressiveness.

And then came the Beauty and the Beast remake starring Emma Watson as Belle. As we know, Emma Watson dedicates a great part of her life to campaigning for women, so it was only natural for the character of Belle to get a few upgrades.

The corset was the first to go, Watson quipping that she didn’t want to be a "corsetted, impossible idea of female beauty” (which gossip-mongers fancied a jab at Lily James’ very corsetted Cinderella). Whatever, cool.

Then news broke that Belle was to be an inventor.

My initial thoughts: How fun! I’m excited to see how that will add dimension to her character and inspire girls everywhere.

My thoughts when the film ended: …Huh?

Unnecessary details aside (who cares about Belle’s mother’s backstory?), I simply could not see how this refurbished Belle is supposed to be a ‘better role model’ for girls and women than her animated counterpart.

In an interview, Watson says:

"Well, there was never very much information or detail at the beginning of the story as to why Belle didn’t fit in, other than she liked books. Also, what is she doing with her time?’ So, we created a backstory for her, which was that she had invented a kind of washing machine, so that, instead of doing laundry, she could sit and use that time to read instead. So, yeah, we made Belle an inventor.”

But, like, isn’t being a bookworm a perfectly good reason why Belle doesn’t fit in? She and her father were not shunned because of their interests, but because of what those interests imply: that they are intelligent and autonomous. They embody individuality and the opposition of herd mentality, serving as direct foils to the rest of the town.

Belle was open-minded and unprejudiced, likely due to voracious reading, and changed her perception of Beast when given reason to. This starkly contrasts the mob, who believed Gaston’s rallying speech without a second thought and proceeded on a murderous rampage. Similarly, when Gaston imprisons Belle and her father, it is her father’s kooky invention that breaks them out.

Yes, Belle did suffer under a patriarchal society (e.g. Gaston wanting to marry her and make babies). But these points were directly addressed in the animation — Belle rejecting Gaston is a running gag in the first quarter — so Disney’s crusade against Belle’s apparent blandness left me perplexed.

Likewise for the Aladdin (2019) and Mulan (2020) remakes. So many knee-jerk changes were being added to the films, specifically to the characters of Jasmine and Mulan, for absolutely no reason other than to bait the media and the chronically online, and for the opportunity to say “This film is feminist!” in Entertainment Weekly and GQ interviews.

Disney seems to think they’ve gotten a winning narrative down pat, but the more they blow their own trumpet, the more tired and senseless their ‘feminist’ remakes become. And I reckon this mulish endeavour stems from two main reasons:

(a) a misunderstanding of the original animated films and;

(b) a misunderstanding of what feminism means in this modern era

The original films are not anti-feminist

…as everyone makes them out to be.

The Disney princesses (especially the older ones) get a lot of flak for being helpless and whiny damsels in distress. Many of them are saved by princes in the end, and it is through the means of a man that they achieve their happily-ever-afters. People see this and are quick to cry “chauvinism”. But is this really true?

Let’s look closer at the storylines of the Big Three:

Snow White
Sure, she was forced to be a maid by her wicked stepmother, but even after meeting the prince, sis didn’t spare him a second thought after she was forced to go on the run. He only came into play because she (a young girl) was manipulated by her stepmother (a grown-ass woman) and cursed with a spell that could only be broken by a kiss.

Cinderella
My girlie just wanted to dress up, look pretty, and go to a party. She danced with the prince without even realising he was the prince! Another big criticism of Cindy is that she did not fight back, acquiescing to her wicked stepmother’s whims and punishments. A valid point, but we should remember that not every domestic abuse victim has the capacity to go against their abuser. There was no hotline for her to call, and her only known means of survival was to obey and keep her head down — a continued reality for many victims today.

She was simply making the best of her circumstances. We need to stop telling victims to stop being victims and start telling abusers to stop abusing.

Sleeping Beauty
A young girl is forced by a jealous enchantress to prick her finger on a spindle and fall into a forever sleep.

Do you see a common thread here? Because I do, and it isn’t three useless girls pining for a prince.

The Disney Princess Formula™ was never really about feckless girls being saved by a man. It was about leveraging women’s fear of ageing, which, as Camille Froidevaux-Metterie explains in The Experience of the Feminine, is categorically different from that of men.

Men too are confronted with aging and degeneration, but—and this is what makes all the difference—they can live fully while being ignorant of or denying it. This is because nothing of their power to create in the world is threatened by the passage of time; no temporal limit obliterates their procreative ability; no physiological modification abruptly changes how they are seen; no urgency commands them to plan out their existence.

The woman, however, is sentenced to count, to chime out, or to plan in order to take account of the potential to give birth, which she cannot escape and which she knows is limited.

Thus, The Hag is born.

It is also the capitalisation of Anglo standards of beauty, and the consistent portrayal of women as catty, jealous, and vindictive. It is about pitting woman against woman before The Man — a deus ex machina guardian angel — arrives on a heaven-sent cloud of chivalry to mitigate and neutralise the chaos and horrors created by The Hag.

It’s not un-feminist to dream of love

Decades later and Disney said “REMIX”. They decided that their new mission was to create the ultimate Girlboss Princess. They’ve been going at it for a while now, and with good reason. For the most part.

According to Dictionary.com, a girlboss is “a woman, especially a young woman, who is ambitious and successful in her career.” The girlboss-ification of feminism began in the 2010s, a period when the feminist movement was insanely catalysed by social media.

It was highly effective at distributing its message to the masses: Girls, you can do it too. And to corporations everywhere: Save some boardroom seats for the women, we’re coming upstairs. You want to review your harassment policies while you’re at it. It empowered women and lit a fire under many companies to be more inclusive and less sexist.

Disney hopped on the bandwagon and started churning out princesses like Tiana (The Princess and the Frog), Merida (Brave), and Rapunzel (Tangled), who, while strong and independent, go through arcs that focus primarily on personal growth and self-discovery. They were most certainly NOT to be saved by men.

But like anything, when taken to the extreme, ‘girlboss’ backfired; and it was our own who took the brunt of it.

The Girlboss was supposed to be a symbol of change and progress — women can achieve what a man can in the office; women have as much to offer as a man in male-dominated industries; women can be scientists, astronauts, CEOs, and directors.

But as the hype grew, so did herd mentality. All of a sudden, being a girlboss meant women had to make it their life’s mission to storm the castle, throw all the stupid pig men into the dungeon, and instate themselves at the head of the table. Uncertainty, display of emotion, and alternative ambitions to climbing the corporate ladder were seen as weaknesses. Housewives, stay-home mothers, women in the service industry, and women without jobs were deemed lazy and excommunicated from this supposedly supportive community. We told girls it’s shameful to be soft, and that kindness and bravery aren’t valuable unless they’re being used exclusively to fulfil your personal needs.

It is at this point the girlboss stopped advancing the fight for gender equity. What was once an empowering movement has been reduced to the simple assimilation of women into the very social structure that upholds all the chauvinistic traits and values we said we hate about men. As such, we have collectively forgotten and turned our backs on the qualities that make the female experience unique.

Can we not retain our softer qualities without being strong, independent women? Do the two states of being have to be mutually exclusive? Like, it’s okay to give in to our inherent femininity sometimes! It’s okay to show tenderness and compassion. It is okay to want to be loved. It is these things that arguably make us more discerning and introspective than men.

Froidevaux-Metterie puts it more eloquently:

Although women have the freedom to refuse to marry, procreate, or make love, they are not diminished as lovers, mothers, and objects of desire. Release from domestic imprisonment need not lead to a likening of their conjugal, maternal, and sexual aspects to mechanisms of enslavement against which it is advisable to remain vigilant. These aspects continue to be challenges of female existence in the age of emancipation…

[…]

We must understand the feminine as the principle of a relationship with the world and others marked by the inevitability of embodiment. […] although men can fully see themselves as disembodied and abstract beings […] women cannot extricate themselves from a relation to others and themselves that passes through the body.

So, just as we refuse to universalise the traditionally gendered role of women in keeping house, procreating, and being mothers, we should be vigilant against universalising the other extreme as well.

Not every woman wants to be a model white-collar worker found well by a dozen emails, an entrepreneur who made it to Forbes 30 Under 30, or to monetise their passions and hobbies. Some women just want to coast through life, go to their little job at a small-town cafe, then go home and nap. Others dream of finding their one true love, and of marrying and living in the countryside baking pies and gardening.

Many want to experience both.

Despite having lofty goals and ambitions, most of us also desire to be loved, to live softly and be treated gently. Yes, even the go-getter career women. After all, it is only human to want so. AND THAT IS OKAY.

The thing is, most of the world has caught up on this by now. We see it in the increasing resistance to capitalism and the popularity of aesthetically-feminine trends like cottagecore and angelcore. Meanwhile, ‘girlboss’ has become somewhat of a derogatory term, often used satirically to criticise commercialism and the glamourisation of overworking.

The only outlier is Disney, which is a timely reminder that no matter how beloved its legacy material, it is still, at the end of the day, a faceless corporation headed by money-hungry boomer C-suites who just cannot keep a firm grasp of what it is their target consumers truly want.

The slew of live-action remakes are already obviously lazy cash grabs. Yet, Disney continues to insist on dressing them up in faux-feminist livery and masquerading them as progressive films meant to inspire little girls to… disdain romance and the natural experiences of womanhood?

It’s perhaps noteworthy that this failure isn’t exclusive to Disney. Other conglomerates, for reasons that elude me, still look to Disney as the only trendsetter for successful animations, leading to B-films with awful writing and dialogue so cringey it’ll make your toes curl. Amazon Prime’s Cinderella (2021) featuring Camilla Cabello is the silliest and most unnecessary ‘feminist’ iteration of the fairytale I’ve seen so far.

At this point, if Hollywood disdains the old princesses so much, why bother remaking the films at all? They’re clearly capable of original ideas that speak to the hearts of both children and adults (see: Luca [2021], Coco [2017]). If they’ve run out of creative juices, why not opt for a retelling, like Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and Mirror Mirror (2012)?

I suppose nostalgia will always reign over creativity. And thusly we shall continue to be served one-dimensional remakes featuring hard-boiled princesses played by out-of-touch actresses reciting outdated PR spiels at their own expense.

Zegler was totally made the scapegoat in this media furore, and I feel bad for her. Really, I do. But, I’m also lowkey hoping Disney either reworks their angle or cancels the film entirely.

Or!!! here’s an even better idea: Stop remaking shit. Literally nobody asked.