I am an avid Disney fan. Like, an “I’ve seen almost every single movie in theaters and get annoyed that there are so many children” fan. Because I’m such a fan, I watch these interviews with cast members before movies to see what I should be looking for. Over winter break I saw it the movie Frozen II, and one thing people were raving about is the emotional range of the main male lead, Christoph. The cast was so excited to tell people that Christoph really showed his emotions in this movie, something rare for male Disney characters. Because of all the hype, I was fully prepared to see crying or an emotional monologue, but what I got was three minutes of an 80s style power ballad about getting left behind. And I think the saddest part is that it was actually way more emotion than a male lead has shown on screen in a Disney movie. Now, I am particularly talking about “princess movies” here as there are other male Disney characters who show emotions in movies like Big Hero 6 and Wreck-It Ralph. But if anything, that shows me more about our society. To be the prince in a movie, the one doing the rescuing and heroics, you can’t be hindered by something like emotions. 

Early princess movies don’t even attempt to make their male protagonist deep. The movies aren’t really about them, and they’re more of a pretty face who saves the day than an actual character. In earlier movies, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, female characters spoke like 50-70% of the time. In these movies, male characters were just an accessory to the princess; they didn’t need to be deep, just handsome. But later movies are different. In the 90s, Disney started making more well-rounded characters for their movies to match the changing movie climate. In later movies, dialogue went up, but the increase was not proportional. Female characters get just 32% of the lines in The Little Mermaid, and in Mulan, considering she was in an all-male army, female speaking time was only 23%. With all these male characters getting all these lines, you would think that they would also have developed full personalities. And an important part of one’s personality is their ability to show emotion. Except that wasn’t the case for these princes. 

One scene that always bothered me was in Mulan II. While you may be thinking, “There was a Mulan II?” I pre-warned you that I’ve seen way too many Disney movies. In this particular movie, there was a scene where they are discussing their success from the first movie, and while praising them, it is said that Mulan is great because she is strong and gentle, but Shang, her “prince” is only described as strong. This is right after the first movie where Shang came across a pass filled with dead soldiers, one of whom was his father, and was given 30 seconds to grieve. Even calling it grieving may be a stretch. Watch the video for yourself here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEQNUIBDcIA. The 90s ushered in a new type of princess, the hero of her own story, but the princes stayed exactly the same, emotionally closed-off and macho. 

That brings us to today. Princes of the 2000s are less traditionally masculine, with princes like Naveen from The Princess and the Frog being the clueless one who needed to be provided for or Flynn Rider from Tangled complaining throughout the entire movie about how bad he looked on his wanted posters. However, they are still making progress in the emotions department. Christoph’s song, Lost in the Woods, from Frozen II is the first time a prince sang an entire song about how he was feeling. It’s just hard to think of this as real progress when one of Anna’s songs, The Next Right Thing, is a song about co-dependency so overflowing with emotion that Kristen Bell, who voices Anna, said she cried multiple times singing it. I’m not saying that I don’t appreciate what the writers were trying to do by making Christoph go on his “emotional” journey to discover he couldn’t always be Anna’s knight in shining armor, but young boys deserve better.

Young kids love Disney movies, especially ages 4-7. This is such an important age for media exposure as this is one of their main sources of mirroring. And not just little girls; 87% of little boys surveyed by the Washington Post declared they had seen Disney Princess media recently. Considering how many young boys are watching these movies, mirroring the characters in it, it is the responsibility of Disney writers to show them healthy masculinity. This means they should know that a prince can cry and still get the girl. While singing about your feelings is a step in the right direction, I can’t help but wish the masculinity presented in Disney media was a little less frozen.