Reimagining Disney Princesses with racial diversity: From Tumblr to D-Tech

A couple of weeks ago, a young woman named Lauren reimagined the white Disney Princess characters as women of color, posting recolored images of them on her Tumblr blog. Her inspired designs quickly made their way around the blogosphere. Responses ranged from supportive (“I love this!“) to perplexed (“This was done because…?“; “But why?“); from grateful to critical (including requests for more inclusivity); and, sadly, from defensive to exclusionary (people of color “should come up with their own princesses and heroes“) and clearly racist.

I wrote a little about the Disney Princess franchise and race earlier this year, when I noticed that in the Disney Store’s 2012 redesign of their Disney Princess dolls, Disney westernized Mulan’s dress and lightened Pocahontas’s skin. So when the Huffington Post Live asked me to be their expert guest on a segment called “Black and Brown Princesses” about the reimagined Disney Princess characters from Lauren’s Tumblr, I was happy to oblige.

Although I have my criticisms of the Disney Princess franchise in general, I do think it’s important for young girls to see characters on screen and elsewhere in popular culture that look like them. I’ve been doing academic research on the Disney Princess phenomenon for a while now, and I’ve heard about the heartbreaks caused by Disney’s predominant whiteness: The little black girl who came home from first grade from first grade in tears because her classmates said she couldn’t be a princess. Their reason? She wasn’t white. (This was pre-Tiana.) The little Latina girl who would brush and brush her tightly curled hair, completely frustrated that she couldn’t smooth it out so that she would look more like a princess. (New princess Merida is the only one without silky smooth straight hair.)

While conducting field research for my book, Growing Up With Girl Power, I also saw firsthand how important diversity in dolls and other products is to pre-adolescent African-American girls. For example, as I mentioned previously, the racial diversity of Bratz dolls was really important to the African-American girls in my study. For them, the diversity was often much more important than the dolls’ skimpy fashions, which have resulted in a lot of negative publicity for the brand. The girls also cared tremendously about whether popular characters like Dora the Explorer and those from The Proud Family were represented on toys and other products with the same skin tone as they had on television. (I remember that a beach towel depicting Dora with the wrong skin tone had been a serious affront.)

As these girls and I talked and talked about how few characters looked like them, I found myself remembering being a young girl and wanting nothing more than a doll that had brown hair and brown eyes, like me. Unfortunately, in the late 1970s/early 1980s, these were almost impossible to find, as my mother can attest: she had to hunt high and low to find a single brown-haired doll whose eyes were brown, not blue. When I shared this memory with the girls, they were surprised. “How rude!” one said.

That’s one of the brilliant things about the “My American Girl” dolls. Although they are prohibitively expensive for most families (sigh), girls can customize the dolls to have whatever skin tones and hair colors they’d like–just like Lauren did with the Disney Princess images on her Tumblr blog. Of course, there’s little diversity in actual facial features, which is an ongoing problem in the doll business: even when racially and ethnically diverse dolls are available, their facial characteristics typically reflect white beauty norms. In the essay “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandizing of Difference,” scholar Ann duCille famously criticized such dolls for being merely “dye-dipped”–brown versions of their white counterparts.

In this context, a new experiment from Disney is fascinating. As of this week, children ages 3 to 12 who are visiting Walt Disney World’s Downtown Disney Marketplace* may order custom-modeled 7″ Disney Princess figurines made to look like them. Just like them. As in, modeled after images taken via 3D scans of the children’s own faces.

The price is about the same as an American Girl Doll, but thanks to the 3D technology, these new “D-Tech Me” princess figurines won’t just have the children’s eye and hair color; they’ll also have their noses, cheekbones, lips.

The service is being offered for a limited time–”at least through Thanksgiving,” according to one Disney rep (see comment #12 here), but not much longer. The characters available are Ariel, Aurora, Belle, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, and Tiana. (Sorry, Mulan, Pocahontas, Jasmine, and Merida!) The sample images are diverse: Ariel, Rapunzel, and Snow White all have darker skin and dark brown to black hair, Aurora is a redhead, and Tiana is a fair-skinned blonde.

I have to agree with The Business Insider that the samples images Disney has shared so far look pretty creepy–a little too “uncanny valley” for my taste. And I’m not sure why three of the four characters of color from the Disney Princess franchise are being excluded as choices in the first place; it seems a little insensitive to me. (Anyone have thoughts on that?) But I don’t agree with Marketplace that the figurines are a sign of the apocalypse.

Although the Disney Princess franchise teems with stereotypes about girlhood, femininity, physical appearance, and race (and although I strongly dislike that the girls’ heads will be as large or larger than their waists on these figurines) the reality is this: Little girls are growing up in a princess-obsessed girls’ culture, and feeling excluded hurts.

By letting any girl see herself as a princess–well, at least any 3- to 12-year-old girl whose parents can bring her to Disney World and afford to pay $99.95 plus shipping and handling for a figurine–Disney has taken another small step in the right direction. I’ll be curious to see whether the experiment catches on.

*Some reports have stated this service is available at Disneyland, but a Disney rep on the Disney Parks web site has clarified that the D-Tech Princesses are only going to be available in Walt Disney World in the Downtown Disney Marketplace.

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Lifestyle branding and the Disney Princess megabrand

Did you know that Behr produces a line of Disney Princess interior paints? Here are some photos I took of Behr’s Disney Princess – Disney Color catalog.

Introducing the Disney Princess bathroom:

Princess bathroom: “Relax in rooms as pretty as a princess. Surround yourself in a setting as cheerful as her smile.” Note: phrases in bold are the paint color names.

Disney Princess bathroom

And, of course, the Disney Princess bedroom:

“In Sleeping Beauty’s room, everything is enchanted. What better place to dream?” Note: phrases in bold are paint color names.

Sleeping Beauty’s Room. Features Disney Princess paints, pieces from the Disney Princess Furniture Collection, Disney Princess bedding, and many other Disney Princess products.

While there seems to be a Disney Princess version of nearly everything, the idea of Disney Princess interior paints may come as a surprise. What’s going on here?

Brands, Megabrands, and Lifestyle Brands: How Disney Princess Works

My students and I recently screened the Media Education Foundation documentary No Logo, based on Naomi Klein’s book of the same name. In the video, Klein explains why consumers and critics wind up protesting certain brands.

Klein explains that the insidiousness of brand marketing is at the root of most protesters’ concerns. Brands are no longer seeking popularity; instead, Klein says, they “want to be everywhere and be everything.” In so doing, a brand becomes a megabrand.

Because of this outlook, Klein says megabrands (and megabrand wannabes) regularly ask questions like, ”If it’s a line of clothing, can it be a house paint?”

The answer, of course, is yes. Megabrand Ralph Lauren makes clothes…and home goods…and, yes, house paints. Even though Ralph Lauren paint looks just like other paints that cost significantly less, the Ralph Lauren brand has enough perceived prestige to make it appealing to brand-conscious consumers.

In this way, megabrands–by being everywhere and being everything–become something even bigger: they transform into lifestyle brands.

Lifestyle brands are brands that permeate every aspect of a consumer’s lifestyle such that the brand identity is intertwined with the consumer’s personal identity. Virgin is the quintessential lifestyle brand, as one glance at its subsidiaries list–which includes everything from music to travel to wine–illustrates. A consumer with a strong preference for a megabrand’s products and services may think, “This is my brand,” or “This brand is part of me.”

Disney Princess as lifestyle brand

Like Disney as a whole, the Disney Princess brand has been following the megabrand playbook for years. The result is that in the past decade, Disney Princess has become a lifestyle brand, completely intertwined with little girls’ identities. Disney Princess is not just about the movies and the toys; it’s about food, clothing, and home goods, too. At this point, there are Disney Princess products available for just about every aspect of life, from diapers to wedding dresses.

If Disney wants its princesses to be everything and be everywhere, then of course your home’s walls are in its sights. As a special bonus, the Disney Princess paint catalog is a vehicle for the cross-promotion of other products, like Disney Princess bedding and furniture collection–a nice example of what marketers call “synergy“:

When synergy happens, one plus one no longer equals two. It can equal three, four, five or more. Synergy in marketing is when two marketing initiatives create a response greater than the sum of the combined response the two would have elicited alone. (source)

Synergy is basically the holy grail of integrated marketing campaigns–and Disney Princess is absolutely synergistic. As a collective, it’s worth much more than the sum of its parts.

Interested in more details from the Disney Princess paint line? Here’s a slide show of photos I took at my local Home Depot.

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Related post: Disney Princess flowers: Coming soon to a garden near you

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Can a Princess Dare to Dream of More?

“When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.” – Pinocchio, 1940

For over 70 years, making dreams come true has been a major theme of Disney. Lately, princesses have been at the center of that theme–and with princesses so wildly popular, it’s assumed that all little girls share princess dreams.

For example, in the “Dream-Along With Mickey” stage show at the Magic Kingdom, Mickey and Minnie ask the audience, “What are your dreams?” A recording that sounds like a live audience member shouts, “I want to be a beautiful princess!” to which Minnie responds, “Did you say be a princess? Me too!”

But being a “beautiful princess” is a shallow and uncreative goal, however special it may feel. When the “Disney on Ice: Dare to Dream” show comes to town, Tiana, Cinderella, and Rapunzel are all framed as being “daring” by following dreams that are ultimately uniform–marrying a prince, becoming a princess, and living happily ever after.

Is the princess dream really daring? No. Being daring means taking risks. The princess dream presented by Disney is standardized. What’s risky about dreaming for exactly what most major marketers say girls should dream for? Nothing.

Despite these flaws, many girls find princess culture fun and enjoyable. And why wouldn’t they? Glitter and glitz are great! But girls also need dreams that are more robust and fulfilling than the mass-marketed fantasy of becoming a pretty princess–and major cultural producers like Disney and their rivals are fully capable of presenting more daring dreams to girls.

This week, The Girl’s Guide to Swagger and I are tackling this issue: We’re writing about how princesses–and the girls who love them–deserve to dream of more.  We are calling on major producers, such as Disney and Dreamworks, to add more dimensionality to popular culture princesses. We want princess characters who dream of something more than beauty and romance. For example: Why not send a cartoon princess to college?

Disney has taken steps in the right direction in recent years. In The Princess and the Frog (2009), Tiana’s primary dream was to own her own restaurant–a healthy dream of entrepreneurship and a career that she ultimately achieves (while becoming a princess along the way). A couple of years beforehand, Disney also released a little-known direct-to-DVD video, Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams (2007), in which Aurora and Jasmine tackle important royal responsibilities in their kingdoms. In Jasmine’s case, she has grown tired of spending time in the boring activities expected of a pretty princess, such as ribbon-cutting ceremonies and posing for portraits. She sings about how she could do so much more:

As the story unfolds, Jasmine works as an educator and takes pride in her various accomplishments.

Follow Your Dreams was supposed to be the first in a series of empowering direct-to-DVD princess tales, but Disney never released additional discs; Wikipedia cites poor sales of Follow Your Dreams as the reason. But five years later, the Follow Your Dreams DVD has an average rating of 4 stars on Amazon, with more than half of all raters giving it 5 stars. Comments note that the DVD has an “empowering message,” praising Jasmine for being “almost like a modern day politician.”

We are asking for more films in this vein, whether released straight to DVD or produced for the silver screen–and whether produced by Disney or a competitor.

"Ioni is graduating from the first year of school," a photo by Dimitris Papazimouris. (Used under a Creative Commons license.)

As a “dream,” being a princess can be about more than appearance and romance; it can be about the power to change the world for the better. And how better to do so than with a college education?

Today is International Women’s Day. Let’s ask Disney, Dreamworks, and others to give our girls princesses who dare to dream of more–starting with higher education. Join us by signing the petition at http://www.change.org/petitions/disney-and-dreamworks-send-a-princess-to-college. You can also post requests on Disney’s facebook page and Dreamworks’ facebook and Twitter accounts.

New at the Disney Store: Princess Dolls with Extra Sparkles! (and extra problems)

On a recent visit to my local Disney Store, I learned that Disney had just released a new line-up of Disney Princess dolls at the holidays. The new line-up was on the shelves–and so were some of their older counterparts.*

All of the dolls had new face molds (with larger eyes) and new dresses (which were sparklier than ever). Here’s what I saw:

The old Belle doll (left) has sparkling swirls on her gown's skirt, while the new Belle's dress is 100% sparkles. She also looks kind of worried. What's wrong, Belle?

The old Jasmine doll (left) has sparkly swirls on her pants, while the new doll's outfit is sparkly all over. Great news: She isn't wearing eyeshadow! She looks a little angry, though. What's wrong, Jasmine?

Our local store only had the newer Mulan doll in stock. It made me a little sad: Disney seems to want to “girl up” its tomboy. (Maybe that’s why the new Belle doll looks worried!) Check out Mulan’s tulle:

Hey, Mulan! Where'd you get that enormously poofy pink gown??

They didn’t have last year’s doll in stock (a sign that customers who like Mulan want a dress that’s true to the character?), so I found these online:

The old Mulan doll has swirly sparkles, like all of the older models; hers are just around her waist.

Watch out, Mulan--you're being swallowed by a rampaging ball gown. Run!!!

Did they put Pocahontas in a ball gown, too?

No ballgown here--but perplexingly, her feet are shaped for high heels. Old Pocahontas doll (left): sparkly necklace. New Pocahontas (right): sparkly necklace AND sparkly waistband! Good point: Her face mold seems truer to her on-screen counterpart. Big problem: The newer doll has noticeably lighter skin.

Disney lightened their Native American character’s skin? Hey, I bet that’s why Jasmine looks angry.

Not cool, Disney. Not cool at all.

In short, the new dolls have some good points (e.g., less makeup, a wider range of facial expressions) and some that cause concern (e.g., Mulan’s westernized dress and Pocahontas’s lightened skin).

Parents and Disney fans: What do you think of the new dolls?

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*Note: My local Disney store did not have the older models of several dolls, including Rapunzel and Tiana (which have been selling very well). Has anyone seen the other dolls side by side? What did Disney do well? What could they do better next time?