Do we need another blonde Disney heroine?

We have a pretty disproportionate number of blonde, blue-eyed princesses for our kids to enjoy, and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with blonde, blue-eyed princesses, there’s something wrong with not having a diverse bunch of characters to enjoy. It would be really nice to have a fairytale told from the perspective of another culture than the typical European version; in fact, so many different cultures have similar stories, so it wouldn’t even have to be adapted very much.

Other than HBO’s Happily Ever After series, however, we don’t have much diversity when it comes to children’s entertainment. Take Disney’s new movie Frozen. It’s really based on The Snow Queen, which means that Disney’s altering a traditional tale’s name because it’s female again, just like they did with Rapunzel/Tangled. They can alter that, but they can’t alter the look of the protagonist—who actually looks just like Rapunzel did, by the way.

Some people are taking to Tumblr, creating their own versions of this new character. I think Disney should hire these folks because they’ve got some great ideas about diversifying this movie. And where did all of the fun animal tales go, by the way? We have cars, planes and lots of people—but Disney doesn’t do many animal movies (like the Shrek, Madagascar, Ice Age and similar franchises). I wonder why this is, especially when we used to have such classics like The Aristocats, The Rescuers and The Lion King? My daughter loves animal characters best, so I’m all in favor of one of these, too. It feels like Disney’s got one type of character on the brain (with the exception of a few specific movies), and they really need to get with the times.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia