Unreality Companion: The 10 Best Animated Princesses

In which I expand on the content from my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

In honor of yesterday's release of Cinderella, this week's Unreality article was a rundown of the five best and most memorable live-action princesses.  Thanks to the twitter-fueled inspiration from Lindsay Ellis (aka, The Nostalgia Chick), it turned into something more than an unthinking Cinderella fluff piece.  And for that, I am incredibly grateful.

I naturally felt that an appropriate companion piece for a list of live-action princesses was a list of animated ones.  What I found most surprising about the final product, however, was how few Disney princesses there were.  Now don't get me wrong, half of the entries on this list are Disney-related (more, depending on if you count movies that they distributed), but going into this I expected only one - maybe two - non-Disney inclusions to make the list because of how ubiquitous their branding of strong female characters of royal birth are.

Now, there are some obvious omissions that I want to address before we get into this.  Frozen's Elsa is not included.  Why?  Because for the vast majority of the story she is Queen Elsa, and we're looking for women who are not yet a chief autocrat (at least for most of their screen time).  Also not included are Mulan and Esmerelda: who, while admirable enough, are not nobility.  Giselle is also absent despite her high ranking on the live-action list.  This is a judgment call: half because she is only animated for a small stretch at the outset and half because I wanted to acknowledge as many different women as possible between these two lists.

10) Rapanzel from Tangled - Rapunzel is one of the Giselle's of this list.  She's the wide-eyed, naive, happy-go-lucky girl who finally got to sneak out of the house with that neighborhood tough that her parents don't approve of.  If that was all that there was to her character, though, she wouldn't have made it onto this list over so many deserving heroines.  She earned her spot on this list.

It's not so much about what she starts her journey off as, but what she ends up becoming by the end.  And by the end, she is a confident, adventurous and thoroughly capable woman who is willing to sacrifice everything for what she knows in her heart is right.  It makes for an interesting parallel to a good number of real world women, when you stop and think about it.

9) Kaguya from The Tale of the Princess Kaguya - One of the things that I mentioned on the live-action list was that the women on the list had agency within their own story: they had the power to choose who they would become, what they would do and how they would act within the context of their narratives.  Why then, does Kaguya, who is defined entirely by her lack of control with what happens around her, make the list over so many others?

Although Kaguya herself is born into a social position that affords her no control over what happens to her - whether or not she moves with her parents to the capital, learns the skills of a noble lady, changes her appearance to suit her new social standing or ultimately leaves her parents for the Moon - she does what she can with the small degree of control that she does have.  She breaks the rules on the Moon to be reborn as a human on Earth.  When forced to choose one of four men to marry, she gives each of them an impossible task that she knows will leave her unwed.  When they arrive with forgeries of their supposed conquests, she has the foresight and nerve to disprove them in front of everybody.  When she becomes the unwanted target of the Emperor's advances, she coldly rebuffs them despite the deadly consequences of doing so.  And although she is forced to forget all of her earthly adventures and return to the moon, it is only when she calls the moonfolk down that they ever interfere with her terrestrial life.

8) Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time - While I cannot say to be an especially big fan of the show, I have seen enough of it to know that I am a fan of Princess Bubblegum.  Any more conventional of a show would have had her be nothing more than a romantic end-game for Finn: a seemingly unobtainable prize who would doubtless succumb to him given enough seasons to mull the opportunity over.  Thankfully for us - and for her - Adventure Time is anything but conventional.

Although perhaps due to being a closet lesbian (no, seriously, that's a thing), Bubblegum rebuffs the advances of every suitor that comes to call on her, choosing to devote herself to her subjects and her kingdom instead of a lover.  More than just generically intelligent, she is a scientist with an avid thirst for knowledge, making her into a more narrowly focused version of Belle.  And while most of the women on this list are resistant to blatant sexualization, the animation style of Adventure Time, and Bubblegum's practical lab coats, actively work against taking her in as an engendered object: forcing audiences to see her as a person before anything else.

7) Ariel from The Little Mermaid - Although I didn't want to believe it when I first heard the argument, it's true.  Ariel has no narrative arc in the film she acts as the title character in.  She is the same person at the beginning of the film as she is at the end; it's her father that grows and develops as a character.

That being said, however, this list is not exclusive to dynamic characters.  If you were a strong, well-developed character at the beginning of the story, why must you change by the end?  Although her entire character smacks of a privileged young girl wanting to "slum it" with the humans, whose youthful impulses cause her to make some really,  really stupid decisions, she is never the less a bold character who's willing to disobey her father and give up everything she has in order to live the life that she so desperately wants.  She's not stupid; she knows the gravity of what she'll sacrifice for legs and a vagina, but she goes through with it anyway, because that's the choice that she has made for herself.

6) Merida from Brave - If you paid attention to the live-action list, I bemoaned on a number of occasions the obnoxious trend of female characters overcompensating for the historic weakness of their characters.  Every would-be heroine has to be a muscle-bound warrior (who will invariably know Kung Fu, for whatever reason) regardless of the context of their story and character.  The Book of Life's Maria was doing so well until she busted out the ninja moves.

Merida's tomboyish demeanor, however, makes sense within her narrative.  Her prowess at archery feels natural to her character.  She's not some ass-kicking super-heroine, but a very realistic character with a particular set of skills often relegated to the male sphere.  And despite the best efforts of the movie's marketing to suggest otherwise, she is not defined by her archery.  Rather, it's one of many aspects to her character that make her more than a feminist statement.

5) San from Princess Mononoke - Similar to Merida, San's skill in combat makes sense with her character.  Raised by a gigantic Wolf god in the wilderness as part of her litter, it only makes sense that this half-feral girl turned into an exceptionally strong fighter: fast, lithe and thoroughly deadly.

She is as much a child of two worlds as Spock was: an ugly yet beautiful amalgamation of human civility and canine ferocity - belonging nowhere, and fully aware of that fact.  She's more than capable of leading raids against heavily armed human convoys and villages with nothing more than her siblings and a knife to protect her, while also willing to engage in reasoned diplomacy with the Gods of the Forest.  And although she is saved by Ashitaka from Okkoto's blind fury, she gives and good as she takes, and ultimately chooses to return to the forest despite her human heritage and feelings.

4) Relena Peacecraft from Gundam Wing - It would be easy to dismiss Relena as one of the many obvious romantic pairings of the male protagonists, but that would force you to ignore huge swaths of the show in which she plays an integral part.  And yes, although she is officially raised to the role of Queen Relena, she spends most of her time in the series outside of her predestined matriarchal role.

Relena is more than just a romantic certainty for the show's least humane character.  She is herself an intelligent, diplomatic and strong willed girl who picks up the pieces of her life following her father's assassination and becomes one of the most influential characters on the show.  Her steely glare belies the presuppositions concerning her sex, and her steadfast marshaling for peace ultimately leads to the rehabilitation of Heero and the political resolution of the series.

3) Anna from Frozen - Anna is this list's second Giselle, although not quite for the same reason as Rapunzel.  While it's true that both are a certain combination of naive, optimistic and spunky, Anna possesses these qualities more as a desperate foil to her icy sister than anything else.  And, like Giselle, she is the instrument of the film's meta-fictive subtext: bringing to light all of the inherent head-scratching decisions of the princesses of decades past.

But while previous generations of princesses happily succumbed to conventions of their narratives, Anna does not.  She doesn't end up marrying the prince that she was instantly willing to engage to (albeit because he was a murderous villain who was trying to kill her for her throne) and appears to be taking her second romance with Kristoff at a far more reasonable pace.  Despite only rarely leaving the palace grounds (and never since her parents' deaths), she instantly stepped up to the plate to head into the frozen wilderness to search for her sister when the kingdom needed her to.  And in the ensuring adventure with Kristoff and Olaf, she proved capable of handling herself against wolves, ice monsters and even her super-powered sister.

2) Tiana from The Princess and the Frog - This working class princess is so close to being my favorite that it actually hurts.  Although not as thoroughly educated as my number one choice, she is the most dedicated and hardest working of all the ladies on this list: to a fault, even.

Raised in what soon became a single-parent household, in a setting that was viciously cruel to her race, she stubbornly worked toward her dream of opening her own restaurant.  She saved every last scrap of change from multiple jobs over what was evidently a long number of years, formulated a sound business plan and even scouted potential locations for where to erect her restaurant.  What she lacks for in class and education she more than makes up for in gumption and tenacity.

1) Belle from Beauty and the Beast - When it comes to animated princesses - Disney or otherwise - was there ever any doubt that Belle would top the list?  An independent girl trapped in a traditional French village, she is scorned for her avid fascination with literature and for not taking more interest in pursuits more "suitable" for her sex (ie, Gaston).  She proves to be more than capable of helping her father in his workshop, tactfully rebuffs Gaston's approaches and is instantly willing to run off into the woods when she suspects that her father is in danger.

Like many of the women on this list, she is readily willing to sacrifice everything that she holds dear - her freedom, her family and the life she knew before - for what she knows in her heart is right.  She verbally holds her own with the Beast, even with the very real possibility that she's risking physical abuse by doing so, but it not so stubborn that she refuses to see the goodness in him when he allows it to come out.

So what is your favorite Princess from movies or tv (animated or otherwise)?

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