Disney has a history of taking classic fairytales and retooling them into family-friendly cartoons. Arriving in the fall of this year will be the Disney version of Rapunzel. The movie will not take on the title of Rapunzel, however. The film will be called “Tangled” in order for Disney to tap into a key demographic: young males. After failing to find success with this audience in their ticket sales for “The Princess and the Frog”, Disney is taking measures to ensure that their numbers improve. It makes one wonder who the original intended audience was for these fairytales was. In modern times, fairytales have adopted the stereotype of being ‘girly’, and it will be interesting to see how Disney attempts to adopt the original story so that it may appeal to modern day young men.
After undergoing some major changes from the original Brothers Grimm fairytale, Disney’s Rapunzel looks barely like the Rapunzel versions we’ve read in class. The Brothers Grimm’s Rapunzel is a very innocent and superficial character who instantly falls in love with another
generic and superficial male prince. As we’ve seen in our readings of Anne Sexton, the character with the most potentially interesting plotline is the witch. Disney’s movie, however, focuses mostly on the relationship between the blonde-hair, green-eyed typical Disney girl and the Errol Flynn-esque male prince. The film will portray Rapunzel as a cloistered 18-year old girl who comes into contact with and attempts to figure out a prince who has seen the world. Disney’s Rapunzel will apparently be a “feisty teen”, and the prince (named Flynn Rider, haha) will be an “infamous bandit who meets his match”.Sure, Disney will undoubtedly propagate some of the same values and stereotypes that it has since it released Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Attractive and beautiful people will fall in love, and the ending will be a happy one. However, by ‘tangling’ the components of the original story, the Grimm’s tale will be challenged and we will hopefully see a more complex and developed relationship between Rapunzel and her prince.
Disney reports that the film will transport audiences “to a stunning CG fantasy world complete with the iconic tower, an evil witch, a gallant hero, and of course, the mysterious girl with the long golden tresses. Expect adventure, heart, humor, and hair…lots of hair.” The movie will be out in November of this year.
The attempts made by Disney to attract a greater male audience to its fairytale films have existed in nearly every generation of its films. The advertising for Disney's Cinderella (1950), as the first princess film since Snow White (1937), heavily emphasized the return to the traditional classic princess story. To balance the attempt to draw in female viewers Disney also strongly promoted the characters of the mice in order to specifically attract young boys. The film itself uses the drama between Lucifer and the mice to serve as a plot parallel to the drama between the evil stepmother and Cinderella so as to please a variety of viewers watching the film. While some movie posters from the time especially highlight the romantic elements of the film, others enlarged Jaq and Gus so as to draw in a male audience as well. Disney specifically played up the comedy and sense of adventure of the mice's story to attract more male viewers.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to note that in the production phase of The Little Mermaid, which began around 1984, producers were hesitant to create a film with a female protagonist because of the fear of losing half the audience. Between Sleeping Beauty in 1959 and The Little Mermaid in 1989 the protagonists of all the Disney animated films were male (except for those few instances where the main characters are a male-female pair). "Oliver and Company," which was the last film produced before TLM, was considered a "boy's film" and was in fact very successful at the box office. It took a great deal of persuasion to really get TLM approved and adapted in such a way that would not isolate the male members of the audience. It is suggestsed that Prince Eric was built up as the stereotypical strong, athletic, handsome young man to attract both female and male viewers.
Another interesting tidbit about Disney's movie past is that Beauty and the Beast was specifically promoted as a date movie. The phrase "Tale as Old as Time" became almost immediately recognizeable and the romance of the film was seriously played up in the film's advertising. The original trailer itself presents the film as a story about two unlikely characters who in the end fall in love.
I believe that Jean's prediction is correct that the plot of "Tangled" will more or less follow the lines of two attractive people falling in love, so it will definitely be interesting to see what Disney does to attract a greater male audience. With "The Princess and the Frog" I think it's safe to say that the main point that Disney stressed over and over again was that the film was a return to the traditional hand-drawn animated princess story. It seems as though the Disney standard is such a norm, maybe it's even a cliche, that sometimes it feels like we can predict nearly everything that the copany will do, especially with regards to how it promotes and attempts to ensure the success of its films. I'm certainly intrigued to see what happens now.
I wonder if there are any mysterious pregnancies in this version...
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