Tangled: Woman and Rapunzel Essay
For many years women have watched or read a fairytale at some point in their childhood. Author Marcia Lieberman discusses the negative qualities about these fairytales in her essay “Some Day My Prince Will Come”. She shows how girls want to be like these princesses by wanting to be pretty and seeing ugly as intolerable or evil.
In the new Disney film Tangled, although they did improve, they still possess many negative qualities that older fairytales have. Princess Rapunzel was taken from the king and queens castle by mother Gothel. Rapunzel possessed the power, in her long blonde hair, to keep mother Gothel young.She is kept away from the world in a tall tower hidden away. Every year on her birthday, Rapunzel sees magical lights floating in the air.
On her 18th birthday she decides she wants to go see the lights. A young thief named Flynn Rider enters into her life when he decides to hide from guards in her tower. He promises to take her to the lights. They set out on their journey and on the way Flynn and Rapunzel start having feelings for each other.
Despite the progression Tangled did make, it still maintains many negative gender role examples such as being beautiful, women being passive, and the need to get married and become wealthy.Tangled demonstrates to its young viewers that one of the most important things in life is to be beautiful. One example of this is Rapunzel herself; she is a young, attractive blond girl with huge sparkling green eyes. Besides her physical beauty she also possesses inner beauty such as her love and kindness for everything and everybody. In the movie everybody loves her and she loves them back. As in the older fairytales, the leading female character is Beautiful, young, and kind. Lieberman quotes in her essay “…focus on beauty as a girls most valuable asset” (Lieberman Paragraph 2).
This quote says that due to fairytales, young girls have reason to believe that if they are beautiful, a young prince will sweep them off their feet without them having to do anything. In Tangled as in most fairytales, the main women character has passive and shy characteristics. Rapunzel appears helpless and in need of a strong man, like Flynn, to get her to where she needs to go. In Marcia Lieberman’s essay she states that the nice, young girl never runs away, but sticks around no matter how badly they are treated. This sends a message to young viewers that doing something on your own isn’t necessary.It sends a message to them that passive women end up with everything they could ever ask for just like Rapunzel did. In the end of many fairytales, the beautiful young woman always gets married and obtains wealth.
Rapunzel, in the end of Tangled, gained everything. She married a young handsome man and inherited her mother and father’s wealth and kingdom. Lieberman states in her essay, that marriage and wealth are one of the most important things in a fairytales ending. This leads girls to believe that once they get married they will be waited on hand and foot for the rest of their lives.The reality is that this most likely won’t be true for most women. In conclusion, even though Tangled does improve a lot from the older fairytales, it still shows negative gender role examples.
Young girls automatically see the young beautiful girl and assume she is the good one. Anybody in the movie that isn’t beautiful is thought to be the evil or bad character. Young viewers also witness the beautiful one being very passive and shy around others. Young viewers witness that even though these characters are shy, they end up with everything like wealth and marriage.Disney needs to start improving their movies and making more of them like Shrek. In Shrek the beautiful princess named Fiona is cursed with a spell turning her into an ogre at sunset. She needs to marry a human prince to break the dreadful curse.
Shrek, another ogre, was chosen by Lord Farquaad to embark on this journey in order to save his swamp. They go on a journey together to bring her to her prince but instead of falling for him and breaking the spell, she falls for Shrek and remains an ogre forever. If Disney makes more movies like these then younger viewers may have a better chance of living happily ever after.
