Gender Roles in Disney Animation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Gender Roles in Disney energy - Essay ExampleHowever, follies of young women can come with great consequences that friend build character enduringness and self-confidence in the long run. This is a message that the company clearly supported through their promotional material and marketing campaign for the movie. From Disneys first full length animated features Snow White and the seven Dwarfs to their succeeding films, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Mulan, all of these films share something in common with The Little Mermaid. It is a coterminous marketing strategy that ties in closely with the production values promoted by the movie. This campaign has made Disney seem, in the public eye a company that sees gender causes as a commercial issue more than anything else. This, perhaps, has something to do with the unparalleled success of Disney in both the animated film and merchandising sales arena. It was in 2001 when Disney created the Princess line that aggressively targeted and marketed products to smallish girls and young women. The line was composed of the aforementioned eight traditional Disney Princess films separately turning in a huge profit and marketing franchise for each as well. entirely eight movies are proven to have a strong influence on children in footing of developing concepts of social behavior and norms (Graves 724-5). However, it is The Little Mermaid in particular that struck a chord with the little girls looking for a strong feminine image model that they could identify within our contemporary society. The accredited Little Mermaid story by Hans Christen Andersen had its main character Ariel suffer a tragic mass as chose to love a man she could never have. In the original, Ariel died carrying an unrequited love to her watery tomb with her. As with other fairy accounts of its era, the original meant to serve as a warning to young women. It was meant to help control rather than empower them. Disney never believed that fairy tales should have tragic endings which is why their retelling of the fairy tale is a far cry from its original. In the Disney version, we see a playful and oftentimes strong-willed blossom young lady in Ariel, the little mermaid. She falls in love with a prince whom she saved from drowning. The innocent fact that Ariel interacted with human beings and even worse, fell in love with one, was in direct defiance of the command of King Triton, her father.