Is it laziness or political correctness that’s made the beautiful princesses vanish?
Bookworm on Mar 16 2009 at 10:50 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
When I was a little girl, growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s, I loved fairy tale books. I especially loved the illustrated ones, with the painstakingly limned pictures of beautiful fairy princesses. Indeed, I still own my favorite (which has been reissued), The Golden Book of Fairy Tales (Golden Classics)
Although the Segur illustrations are the best, they certainly weren’t unique. In all the books I loved as a child, the princesses were drawn with such love. I would gaze at them, mesmerized. I wasn’t at all disheartened by them either. I had no aspirations to be a beautiful princess myself. I simply enjoyed looking at the pictures, much as one is dazzled by a beautiful landscape or a lovely painting.
What I noticed when my children were little, and what I still see now whenever I happen to be in a toy store that sells fairy or princess products (books or toys), is that this exquisite sensibility seems to be a thing of the past. I’m sure that, were I to dig, I still find examples of beautifully princesses or fairies, but what sits front and center in the toy shelves tends to be cartoonish beauties. The characters are caricatures, not loving portraits of imaginary perfection.
To give just one example, think of the difference between Disney’s Cinderella, a perfect model of cartoon pulchritude and the more recent beauties (Ariel, Pocahontas, Jasmine), all of whom are still attractive, but each of whom has impossibly exaggerated, overblown, angular (or overly round), out-of-proportion features that bear no relationship to a real human.
Every time I see these books or toys or movies, I wonder why the downgrade in princess quality? Is it laziness? Or is it something a little deeper, namely the fact that, in this PC age, conscientious publishers don’t want to hurt girls’ self-image by creating impossible standards of beauty? And if the last is true, what a foolish thing, considering that movies, TVs and magazines all work together to convince girls that “ordinary” girls can be impossibly thin and perfect. While I knew I’d never be Cinderella (she wasn’t real after all), legions of American girls are doing horrible things to themselves (starvation, slut clothes, surgery), to try to look like a model or movie star — and nothing you can do will convince these girls that their icons are no more “real” than Cinderella was.
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6 Responses to “Is it laziness or political correctness that’s made the beautiful princesses vanish?”
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Oh Heavens! You simply must see the movie “Charmed.”
Have a little sympathy for Disney’s delima. Now a days if you don’t teach your children to be “Charm Proof” you’re likely to be seen as an abusive parent.
My favorite illustrations were in the Oz books. I still love John R Neill’s conception of Dorothy and Glinda and Ozma and the Shaggy Man and Tik-Tok and Cowardly Lion. I thought it would be great to be Ozma because of her magic picture and the wishing belt she captured from the Nome King, and Glinda had that cool book that recorded everything that happened, but that’s as far as the fantasy went.
My Grimm’s fairy tales were not illustrated, at least not attractively, so they were no temptations. I used to draw princess dresses but my oldest sister would always point out the historical inaccuracies and that took the fun out of it.
Between TV and movies and computer games, kids don’t seem to have to use their imagination for much of anything, which is just sad, and doubtless explains some of their slavish imitation of movie stars and singers.
I also loved the Adrienne Segur illustrated Fairy Tale Book, I was so glad when it was reprinted a few years back. In the meantime, I’d bought the original used – and didn’t let the small, careless hands of the local child touch it – she got the reprint.
It wasn’t just for the pictures, although they were a large part of it; it’s also one of the few collections that has the complete Sleeping Beauty. You know, where she has two kids and her mother in law tries to eat them? As well as that, some of the other stories I’ve never seen elsewhere.
For lovely princesses – and artwork in general – Look for Kinuko Craft illustrated books, or Jan Brett. I love Brett’s Beauty and the Beast, and Craft has done several fairy tales with princesses, including a gorgeous Cinderella, and the Twelve Dancing Princesses.
http://www.kycraft.com/book_detail_pages/cinderelladetail.html
http://www.janbrett.com/bookstores/beauty_and_the_beast_book.htm
Book, have you seen “Enchanted”? Sure, the cartoon Giselle is as waifish and cartoonish as Ariel and Jasmine, but she turns into Amy Adams
Aesthetics have changed, Book. Most things aren’t handrawn anymore. The technical capacity isn’t so much the direct cause of this as it is an indirect cause.
Now that artwork requires collaboration (the sketch artists make the concept art work by hand, then color it, and then the graphics designers put it into computer format and then it gets retouched by director and so forth), due to recent changes, this has had the indirect effect of reducing the singular individual creativity of a single artist. No more do we see art produced purely from one person, other than the Leftist hacks.
What we now see is a collaborative work and while that produces unique creations, those creations are not uniquely the product of one person’s mind. Thus there is certain lack of brilliance and certainly it will conform more to an industry standard rather than a personal standard.
As a concrete example, you can look at Japanese mangas where things are still done, by hand, by one author. In the anime production show, the artwork is reproduced by others, hand drawn and computer generated, but the mangas are still written and drawn by one person. In America, that didn’t seem to be the case. Individuals wrote books by themselves and drew paintings by themselves, but not both by the same person.
What i have observed is that individual creations of artwork, like Day by Day, have a particular aesthetic quality that is the product of the mind’s eye of the author him or herself. This cannot be reproduced by collaborative graphic artists, unless they are working from the author’s own templates and examples.
Naruto and Bleach are two popular examples in Japan, right now, of that which I am describing. There is no one industry standard for how anime characters should look in Japan. That depends solely on the author and whether there is an audience for his work in the commercial world (think DBZ Dragon Ball Z). However, I seem to recall that Disney and Walt Disney all had cartoon character creations that moved the same and looked the same, from a purely aesthetic (meaning color, form, symmetry, soul, etc) perspective.
Why the uniformity, one may ask? I do not, personally, believe it can be attributed to political correctness, for American cartoons were never really vital centers for Leftist indoctrination infiltration. Most of such things went into academia and Hollywood instead. I believe, rather, that most of it is due to the fact that you cannot make it on your own as a successful artist alone. You can do so as an actor, alone, by making your own brand, but an artist? It doesn’t pay well and I don’t believe it ever paid well in America. Aside from certain favorites of the rich, that is. But that is not commercial success. A person that can’t make it alone would naturally aggregate into a group and since groups have standards, that person will eventually find himself conforming to the standards of the group, whether in terms of corporate practice, aesthetics, or quality of work expected.
Prohibition destroyed much of the self run breweries in America. As was true of guns, if you outlaw guns or liquor, only outlaws will have guns or liquor: at least they will be the only ones able to sell em at least. This is relevant since when those breweries went bye bye, the individual quality of American beer went down. It left only a few “brands”, so to speak, and they didn’t really cater to the tastes of the public. Even decades after Prohibition was lifted, we still suffer from inferior quality and diversity in terms of beer compared to other nations. Again, conformity. It is not that individuals cannot brew better beer, people in America brew their own beer as a hobby for example, but because the big beer companies are conglomerates and conglomerates tend to have one stable recipe/equation which they aren’t going to change. This is the same in the art world. If individuals could make it big on their own by selling their particular idiosyncratic brands, things would be different, but that is not the case. The market is there, of course, but certain essential components aren’t. Tradition, for example. Industries love tradition.
OOps,
I meant the film “Enchanted,” not “Charmed”. But I meant what I said about being charm-proof.
Personally I was practically posessed by the illustrations in books. There was a book about Greek Myths which I must have read 5,000 times– before I could read that is.