Recasting the Disney Princess in an Era of New Media and Social Movements ed. by Shearon Roberts (review)

Disney as a corporation is built on a legacy of balancing various forms of cultural and social nostalgia with a constantly changing and growing society, updating programs and franchises to fit new audiences while attempting to ensure that the narrative foundation of the company remains recognizable to its already established audience with varying success rates. Part of the brand strategy has been a reliance on the idea of “happily ever after” as achieved by their franchise of fairy-tale princesses, who exist in dialogue with their antecedent version counterparts from canonical or classic Disney fairy tales, which in turn exist in dialogue with antecedent counterparts from tales by the Grimms and Perrault, among others. Recasting the Disney Princess in an Era of New Media and Social Movements, edited by Shearon Roberts, attempts to untangle the corporation’s attempts at evolving one of its core brand elements, the “Disney Princess,” in the face of the social changes of the last two decades, examining the creative responses to calls for more inclusive and accurate representation. While some of the work presented in this edited collection does take as its focus Disney productions derived from fairy-tale or folklore narratives, the volume’s scope is broad, also touching upon works from the Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm franchise umbrellas, and productions from the Disney Channel’s various outputs. It is not grounded in fairy-tale studies or discourse, but the chapters pull broadly from a variety of discourses in interdisciplinary ways that will enrich scholarly discussions around representation and adaptation both within the fields of fairy-tale studies, media studies, and cultural studies, and beyond, especially considering the evolution of the Disney fairy-tale princess as recognizable cultural icon.

The edited collection is framed by a prologue centering youth voices as they consider the legacy of The Princess and the Frog (2009) years after the release of Disney’s first animated film to feature a Black fairy-tale princess. It is then divided into four parts: “Rebranding the Disney Princess,” “Diversifying the Disney Princess,” “Deconstructing Princess Narratives,” and “Embedding Social Discourse around the Disney Heroine.” Shearon Roberts’ first chapter positions the book in Disney history and criticism, delineating a timeline from 2009’s The Princess and the Frog through 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and documenting studio, market share and impact, financial record, and acclaim of forty-three of the products made across the conglomerate in those two decades. The other chapters in this section examine the marketability of diversifying representation, and how choices such as the creation of the animated television series Sofia the First (2012–18) featuring the corporation’s first Hispanic princess, the casting of Marvel and Lucasfilm heroines, and the incorporation of pop and hip-hop into the Disney musical imprint all have moved the corporation into a new aesthetic space.

The second section turns to specific instances of more diverse representation and problematizes how increased visibility of certain identities can and does simultaneously erase or obscure a polyphony of ethnic and cultural identities. The third section, which might be the weakest section, claims to deconstruct the narratives and portrayals of several figures from the more straightforwardly “fairy tale” Disney narratives, such as Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Frozen (2013). Charity Clay reads of Shuri of Wakanda as more than a fairy-tale Disney princess and as a character contextualized by Black culture and womanism. Clay also delineates the various cultural tensions existing in this character, and the chapter stands out for its analysis and indication of further futures for this character, as well as representation within the larger corporation (227). The fourth section centers how increased social consciousness of various differences and marginalizations has provoked reimaginings of what and who counts as a Disney heroine beyond the icon of the princess, examining films including Zootopia (2016), The Incredibles (2004), and Finding Dory (2016). The volume closes not...