Messed Up Origins Of New Disney Princesses

Disney makes being a princess look exciting and glamorous but the origin stories behind Disney's most recent Royals aren't nearly so much fun welcome to the Binger Disney may have started with a mouse but it's animated movies are built on a legacy of princesses starting with 2009's The Princess and the Frog Disney's made a concerted effort to make their princesses more independent but that doesn't mean the origins behind their stories aren't any less messed up in this video we're exploring the folklore fairy tales and myths that Disney's most recent crop of Princess movies are based on these movies may seem like kids stuff but their original stories aren't so innocent The Princess and the Frog was heralded as a return to form for Disney it was the first hand-drawn animated film the company had produced since 2004 in the first Princess film since 1998's Mulan in addition the company adapted the movie from a well known Grimm's fairy tale we all know the one about the Princess and the Frog where a prince is cruelly turned into a frog and only true love's kiss can break the spell so the Prince hops through life searching for a woman who could see past his slimy green exterior when he finally does The Woman kisses his froggy form and the prince transforms back into a human then the two live happily ever after that all may sound familiar but Grimm's version does not go exactly like that the Grimm's tale is called the Frog king it centers on a princess and a frog but unlike Disney's Tiana the tales protagonist is already a princess when the story starts she's the King's youngest daughter and the thing she enjoys the most is playing with a golden ball one day the princess is playing with her ball by well and it bounces inside heartbroken the princess cries inconsolably until frog comes along he offers to retrieve her plaything from the deep well as long as she agrees to be his constant companion the princess thinks that the Frog is gross but she agrees figuring that there's no way the Frog can hold her to her promise the Frog retrieves the ball and as soon as it's in her hands the princess runs off without him by dinnertime though the Frog has reached the castle and demands the princess make good on her promise the princess doesn't want to but when the King finds out what happened he insists that she follow through so the princess is forced to share her meal with the Frog then even worse she's forced to take him to her bedroom so he can share her bed once she's ushered him to her room she tries to ignore him again but he insists she lifts him into bed with her the princess finally has enough so she picks the Frog up and throws him against the wall yet after he hits the wall and falls to the ground he transforms into a handsome prince looking at his human form the princess decides she likes him after all she agrees to be his companion and the two get married Disney's Princess and the Frog and the fairy tale most of us learned in grade school feature 100 percent less violence between the title couple at some point in the story's history the princess stopped throwing the Frog prints at the wall and started kissing him instead also Disney's twist on the story has Tiana turned into a frog too so The Princess and the Frog is a very loose adaptation of the Grimm's tale a year after the Princess and the Frog Disney released 2010's tangled this was the film where Disney's princesses got completely computer-animated and they haven't looked back yet tangled origin story continued the tradition of looking to fairy tales from the past for story inspiration like The Princess and the Frog tangle is loosely based on a Grimm's fairy tale this time the team at Disney adapted Rapunzel for their movie in the movie Rapunzel is a princess who's kidnapped by Mother Gothel when she's a baby in the Grimm's tale Rapunzel came from much more humble beginnings her parents were commoners who happened to live next door to a sorceress one day before Rapunzel was born her mother got a great craving for the Rapunzel lettuce growing in the sorceress his garden the woman insisted that she die she didn't get some so her husband broke into the garden and stole the leaves Gothel catches him though and to make amends for his treachery she insists that the couple give her their child when she's born so the couple have no choice but to hand off their daughter to Gothel and never see her again Gothel names the baby Rapunzel after the plant all the fuss was about in the fairy tale it's unclear exactly why Gothel would want the child or why she locks her up in a tower disney fixes that oversight by giving Rapunzel's hair magical properties that keep Gothel young another place where the fairy tale departs from the movie is with the male protagonist the man who discovers Rapunzel in her tower entangled is Flynn Rider abandoned with a heart of gold in the grim story the man who finds her is a prince he falls in love with her after hearing her sing while he happens to be passing by the prince calls up to her and Rapunzel pulls him up with her hair Rapunzel hasn't seen a guy before so at first sight she's scared the Prince is nice to her though so she quickly agrees to marry him the problem is they don't know how to get Rapunzel out of the tower so they keep seeing each other in secret until Rapunzel inadvertently mentions him to Gothel Gothel is furious at Rapunzel's betrayal she cuts off the girl's hair and takes her to a desolate place where Rapunzel gives birth to twins Gothel then uses Rapunzel's chopped-off hair to lure the prince in once she has him in the tower she tells him he'll never find Rapunzel in his horror he falls off the building on the way down thorns scratch out his eyes and he goes blind the prince wanders for years in devastation eventually though he somehow manages to find Rapunzel and their children Rapunzel's so happy to see the prince that she cries some of her tears drop into his eyes which magically healed them after all that Rapunzel and the nameless prince live happily ever after in comparison everything that tangled Rapunzel goes through doesn't seem so bad brave has the distinction of being the only princess movie ever made by Pixar and its first film with a female lead character brave was an original story written by Brenda Chapman who based the story on her own mother-daughter experiences she also claimed that she was influenced by the fairy tales of Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen of course those writers had nothing to do with the Scottish setting of the story that could be why one of the reasons that brave is the princess movie that seems to have the least obvious origin story the story is set in 10th century Scotland but filmmakers actually reference a hodgepodge of time periods so while men covered themselves in body paint in the late I own a gemin didn't wear corsets until the 16th century also the 10th century may have been the last time that Scotland had bears some cultures feature bears in their folklore but as far as historians know Scotland isn't one of them if Chapman was taking her cue from the Brothers Grimm and Anderson the idea of the Queen turning into a bear may have come from them their stories feature a number of plots where a man turns into a bear if anything the most obvious story element braids creators took from folklore is the idea of the will-o-wisps in brave Queen Elinor tells Merida that and that's what happens when Mariah grows up and follows the wisps to the witch who helped her change her fate however in the folktales of the Scottish Highlands the wisps weren't so helpful they were lights that would recede from a traveller leading them to danger and destruction in comparison turning into a bear might be the safer bet Disney's frozen was a smash hit when it came out in 2013 and it's easy to understand why it's the story of two sisters whose bond helps them overcome every obstacle that stands in their way and while there are men in the movie the story focuses on the brave princesses at its centre frozen is based on the fairy tale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen but frozen's Anna and Elsa aren't a whole lot like the characters in Anderson's story on is a version of the tales protagonist Gerda however Allah is significantly older than Gerda whoo Anderson describes as a little girl also Gerda wasn't on a quest to find her sister she didn't have any siblings instead she was looking for her friend Kai plus Gerda wasn't a princess and had no money to help her on a quest while Anna has the means to enlist people to help her find Elsa in addition unlike Anna Gerda had no idea where Kai went he takes off with the evil Snow Queen after being infected by a demon mirror the mirror gets in his eye and makes everything good and beautiful appear bad and ugly to him at the same time a shard of ice grew in his heart so Chi was feeling no pain but his perception of the world was turned on its head as a result kai fought the evil Snow Queen seemed perfect and went with her willingly in frozen Disney merged the characters of Kai and the Snow Queen to create Elsa of course Elsa isn't evil like The Snow Queen she just shares some of her powers still just like Gerda eventually saved Kai from The Snow Queen Anna eventually saves Elsa from well her own self-destructive tendencies there's no Prince Hans or Kristoff an Anderson story and definitely no talking snowman named Olaf in fact most of the people who help Gert on our journey our women so even though frozen is considered an unabashedly female centric story Anderson's tail has frozen beat on that metric there is a reindeer in The Snow Queen like frozen spend though the reindeer plays a key role in the story he lets go to ride on his back most of the way to the palace of The Snow Queen the most recent Disney animated movie to feature a princess is 2016's Moana like brave Moana is an original story however the character of Maui is based on the mythology of the Pacific Islands Maui is a prominent part of the lore on islands like Hawaii Samoa Tahiti French Polynesia and New Zealand the myths differ from place to place but there are stories of Maui doing things he brags about in the movie and it turns out now he did all of that he was a trickster but he went out of his way to help humans in one of Hawaii's creation myths Maui gave humans fire and in the Polynesian mythology he used his magical fishhook to yank the Hawaiian Islands out from under the ocean a fishhook just like the one he uses in the movie now he also lassoed the Sun until it agreed to let the islands have longer summer days of course Disney's Maui isn't an exact replica of the mythological version in Moana Maui's an orphan who's raised by gods but he's usually a god or a demigod in Polynesian legend he also has four older brothers one of the biggest controversies around Milano was the way now he looked movie Maui was a Hulk of a guy with untamed shoulder-length hair however in most myths the character is a slim young man with a topknot also while Maui makes it out of Moana just fine he doesn't fare nearly as well in Polynesian legend in that mythology he meets a terrible demise according to the story Maui once again wants to help people this time by making them immortal so he turns himself into a worm and goes inside the body of the sleeping goddess of night and death when he tries to leave though the goddess wakes and bites Maui in half ending his life he hikes we're kind of glad Disney decided to leave that story out of the movie which of these origin stories behind the most recent Disney Princess movies did you find most surprising sound off in the comments and before you go don't forget to give us a like and subscribe to the bender for more awesome videos thanks for watching

Channel: TheBinger

Views: 179,327

Rating: 4.7788539 out of 5

Keywords: TheBinger, Disney Animated Movies, Disney Pixar, Disney Princesses, The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Brave, Frozen, Moana, Tiana, Elsa and Anna, Maui, Rapunzel, Pacific Islands, Polynesian mythology, The Snow Queen, The Frog King, Will-o’-the-Wisps, elsa, frozen 2, frozen 2 theories, frozen 2 trailer, disney princess theories, disney theories, pixar theories

Id: tbrZHfClcuM

Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 13 2019