Disenchanting the Enchantment
Feminist Fairy-Tale Retellings in Enchanted (2007) and Disenchanted (2022)
Keywords:
Retelling, Fairy tale, Disney, FeminismAbstract
Despite Disney's reputation for being the most patriarchal of all tale-tellers, the company recently began to revise the rigid gendered conventions of traditional fairy tales. Disney classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Cinderella (1950) have notoriously promoted female rivalry and developed gendered ideologies with the reward of passiveness and submission and the punishment of agency and independence in female characters. Nowadays, the company has challenged these conventions through new stories and the retelling of its beloved classics. In the middle of this revisionist period, Disney released Enchanted (2007) and Disenchanted (2022), which are closely related to the literary tradition and the Disney fairy tale. Influenced by Disney classics and traditional fairy tales, these films offer different commentaries on the traditional formulas on which they are based. In this article, the approach to these fairy-tale conventions will be analysed in order to distinguish if the films contribute to the recent revisionist project of the "Disney formula" or simply update their classics, which is the case of productions such as Cinderella (2015) or Alice in Wonderland (2010).
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