"Where Happily Ever After Happens Every Day": Disney's Official Princess Website and the Commodification of Play

A few years ago, it seemed that princesses were a dying breed. One sign of their decline was the explicit mockery of saccharine Cinderella stories in the Shrek movies. In Shrek the Third, for example, a simpering, beautifully coiffed Snow White transforms into a hard rock heroine, ready to fight her enemies to the tune of Led Zeppelin's Viking-inspired "Immigrant Song." Another sign was the proliferation of fairies, from Sesame Street's fairy-in-training Abby Cadabby in 2006 to Disney's Fairies franchise, begun in 2005 and built around a pixie named Tinker Bell. Fairies, after all, have magic wands and can fly. What princess can compete with that?

Disney, the main purveyor of princess (or Princess¹) consumer goods, has repeatedly demonstrated the enduring power and prestige of the princess archetype nonetheless. Despite the parodies in the Shrek films and the competition from rival gangs of fairies, Disney's Princess films (featuring Cinderella, Ariel, Belle, and other heroines) continue to remain popular, in part because, as one of the three biggest media groups in the world ("Sectors") and the largest licenser of supplementary products (Hatch), Disney has unprecedented opportunities to shape the lives of consumers. The trademarked Princesses, like many other Disney staples, are not simply characters in films but painted faces on sippy cups and backpacks, flesh-and-blood creatures at theme parks, and the subjects of their own website. Thanks to Disney's mastery of corporate convergence, they are literally almost everywhere.

For years, critics of Disney culture such as Henry A. Giroux have scrutinized Disney's ability to "monopolize the media and saturate everyday life with its ideologies," arguing that the dreams fashioned by Disney "must be interrogated for the futures they envision, the values they promote, and the forms of identifications they offer" (7). While many of these critical explorations, by writers like Giroux, Elizabeth Bell and her colleagues, and Jack Zipes, focus on the products and resorts of the Disney studio, in this article I will interrogate Disney's web presence as manifested in its official Princess website, <http://disney.go.com/princess>, in an effort to examine the ways that Disney uses this new media platform to commodify play and to create a compelling, profitable vision of girlhood.

Like other websites geared toward children, the Disney Princess site is frenetic: it almost bursts from the screen with huge blobs of bright, oversaturated colour. Each click (or even twitch) of the mouse brings a new blip or beep or the possibility of a new form of play. Awash in sugary signifiers like animated fairy dust and soaring string music, it immediately reaches out to a dual implied audience of young girls interested in princess culture and their parents (primarily mothers) who have purchasing power. Like other corporate websites, the Princess site features custom-made online games and activities in addition to products, blurring the boundary between ludic activity—activity with elements of playful spontaneity—and brand-specific advertising.

In turning my attention to this site, I recognize the challenges of examining potentially ephemeral texts like websites. I acknowledge a point made by Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh that, unlike traditional media, "websites are continually in flux" and may be "summarily altered or obliterated" for a variety of reasons (142). In fact, since I began exploring the Princess site, Disney has made several cosmetic changes and a few substantial additions.² Despite their mutability, web texts like these are nonetheless worth interrogating, in particular for the way they seem to promise interactivity. Differing from televisual entertainment, which tends to be more passive, web environments (including those run by corporations) "can evoke feelings of telepresence, a perception of being present in a gaming environment" (Lee et al. 134). Users may be led to feel as if they are agents in this multi-sensory world and that they are individually hailed by characters within it. This happens immediately on the Princess site, when the seductive introductory voice-over welcomes the user to the "enchanting world of Disney Princess, where...