Daughters inspire independent Disney princesses

New Disney films feature princesses who are no longer obsessed with finding that one true love.

Angelina Jolie in a scene from the film, Maleficent. Frank Connor/ Disney / AP Photo

A Disney princess no longer needs a prince to experience true love. Sisterhood saves the day in Frozen. Motherly love breaks an evil spell in Maleficent. And a little girl's love of her own life is the focus of Pixar's next film, Inside Out.

Where romance was once the goal of the Disney princess (think Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty), the focus is moving toward independent female protagonists defined by more than how they relate to men. Filmmakers, inspired by their daughters, hope the shift might change some real-life perspectives, too.

"All these Disney heroines, the princesses, they're a product of their time," says Linda Woolverton, who wrote Maleficent. "The princesses that were created in the 1940s and 50s, they were the best of what a woman should be then: You're the good girl. You took abuse … and through it all, you sang and were nice. But we're not like that anymore."

Woolverton reflects this change in her work, which includes screenplays for Beauty and the Beast and Alice in Wonderland. She thought of her love for her daughter when writing the twist on true-love's kiss in Maleficent, she says.

“It’s different than any kind of romantic love,” she said, “and it would be more powerful in breaking a spell than any other kind of love.”

Don Hahn, an executive producer of Maleficent, said it would be "totally inappropriate" to have a modern Sleeping Beauty rescued by Prince Charming.

“We can’t put a movie on the screen where the protagonist is asleep through half the movie and only wakes up when a man wakes her up and tells her: ‘OK, you can start your life now,’” he says. “I don’t want to tell my daughter that story.”

Cinderella, meanwhile, is getting a facelift from Disney, with an updated, live-action version due in 2015. The following year, the studio is releasing the animated Moana, centring on a female island adventurer. Pixar's Inside Out is set for release next summer. The writer-director Pete Docter said his daughter inspired the Pixar movie, which tells the story of an adolescent girl growing up. The tale has nothing to do with her finding romance, he says.

“That’s not part of my daughter’s story,” he says. “This story is about getting older.”

Hahn acknowledged some concern among producers about how Disney traditionalists might view these evolved princesses.

“We thought the purists, the Disney fans, what are they going to think? Because you’ve got to have your prince and all that,” he says. “But the idea is: yeah, you can have your prince, but that’s a component of your life.”

The feminism pioneer Gloria Steinem said such independent female characters can make a difference in real life. “If we can see it, we can be it,” she said. “If we don’t see it, we don’t know we can.”

It has paid off at the box office. Frozen has brought in more than US$1.2 billion (Dh4.4bn) globally, making it the fifth highest-grossing movie ever, according to the box-office tracking organisation Rentrak.

Maleficent was likewise a huge hit over the summer, with $750 million in worldwide ticket sales.

Lee hopes seeing independent girls on screen, valued for strength and with goals beyond romance, will help real-life girls avoid the pressure of trying to meet an idealised female image.

“The more we create real characters that are flawed and messy, we can just get on with living,” she says.

Hahn believes seeing independent female characters benefits both girls and boys – “that you don’t have to be a man to be an engineer or a scientist and you don’t have to be a woman to be a great cook or raise ­children”.